Stacy Horn

Bunheads: Apparently this show is still in limbo, and there is no news about whether or not it’s coming back. Way to torture me, ABC Family. Well, two can play this game. Until you renew this show, I’m not speaking to you. See how long you last.

Warehouse 13: I may have already posted about this, but Warehouse 13 has been cancelled, although it will have a final season, so at least we’ll have closure. My thoughts on this: I’m going to stop falling in love with tv characters.

So You Think You Can Dance: This show has gotten even better. I love that they’ve eliminated the remaining negative bits almost entirely. I certainly don’t mind conflict, but I’m not interested in seeing bad or insane dancers and I especially don’t want to see them made fun of even if they kinda deserve it. So I love the focus on the positive in this show, and the great dancing and GOOD GOD the dancing in the auditions has been mind-blowing.

Mad Men: The other morning, out of the blue, I watched a couple of episodes of Mad Men. I haven’t been watching this show because the 1st episode gave me a PTSD attack. It was too good, essentially. It so well captured the worst of a period of time I caught the tail end of, and I guess I’m still traumatized by it. But those few episodes I watched? Oh dear. How many years has this been on?

I tweeted this picture the other day, it’s of my new kitten Bleeck who is a complete and total SLUT, as you can see.

While researching the history of music at Grace Church I came across the story of the wedding of Charles Stratton (better known as Tom Thumb) and Lavinia Warren. It was such a nice story I included a brief write-up in my book even though, technically speaking, it didn’t have anything to do with music. However, it does says something about the spirit of the place where I sing.

Some of the members of Grace Church didn’t want the wedding to take place there, and the letters to Rev. Thomas House Taylor were quite ugly. It’s like they thought the couple were somehow less than human (Stratton and Warren were little people). Barnum desperately wanted the wedding to take place in a concert hall so he could sell tickets, but the Stratton’s love was real and not for show or entertainment, and they wanted to get married in a church. Stratton’s letter to Taylor is touching, “we are as God made us … we are simply man and woman of like passions and infirmities, with you and other mortals …”.

Taylor basically told everyone to go to the devil, and Stratton and Warren were married in Grace Church on February 10, 1863. He was criticized for it afterwards. From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“We are surprised that the clergy, or representatives of so respectable a body as the Episcopal Church should, for a moment, allow themselves to be used by this Yankee showman to advertise his business; or that a Bishop should allow himself to be exhibited like the Albino, or the What is it. Should he do so, the fittest place for the exhibition would be the American Museum; and not in a house dedicated to the services of a holy religion. It is bad enough to turn the solemn rites of marriage into a public entertainment for the gaping crowd of morbid curiosity hunters, without profaning the house of God with such an exhibition.”

Taylor wrote, “if the marriage of Charles S. Stratton and Lavinia Warren is to be regarded as a pageant, then it was the most beautiful pageant it has ever been my privilege to witness.”

Don’t you just love this guy??

More bigoted letters were written by the congregation after the ceremony, but good for you Rev. Taylor and Grace Church. Stratton died 20 years later, and Lavinia remarried two years after that. But when she died she was buried next to her first husband, Charles.

I’m thinking of starting a series called: Things I Meant to Say in My Interview. I was on the radio yesterday talking about my new book about singing, and I blanked on so many things I meant to talk about. Like …

“To sing in a choir is the quickest, surest, and best way to become intimate with music, to get close to the seat of its emotional life, where its heart-throbs can be felt and heard; to ‘experience’ it … to hold communion with its gentle saints and glorious heroes …” – Henry Krehbiel, a 19th century music critic.

Singing in a choir really is the ultimate communion. You don’t just look at a work of art, or listen to it, you become it. “You get to ride on the genius of a Beethoven of a Palestrina,” Dimitra Kessenides, an alto in the Choral Society of Grace Church, once raved to me.

I came upon opera singers in the subway stop at 42nd Street while on my way to my interview on the radio show Talk of the Nation. They are from an organization called The Opera Collective. I took it as a sign.

Today is my birthday, and I’ve been given the fabulous gift of an interview on the radio show Talk of the Nation. I’m extremely nervous, I want to do a great job. I’ll be back later when I’m more relaxed and human again. Oh! If you want to listen I’ll be on at 3pm!

In the meantime I give you: cute dogs.

I’m new to Doctor Who. I stumbled upon it one sleepless night and was lucky to have the Weeping Angels episode as my introduction. I didn’t know who anyone was or the back story, but it didn’t matter, the episode was that strong. It was also a two-parter so I was essentially forced to come back for more. I got caught up via Wikipedia and a BBC America Doctor Who marathon and I’ve been watching the show religiously ever since.

You always love your first best. New versions of anything, even when they are genuinely better, take time to accept, and love. (I’ll never forget how on Echo, the online service I run, people complained about changes even when it fixed a problem.) I’ve just read that Matt Smith, who plays the doctor, is leaving the series. For those of you who are not familiar with the show, the Doctor character, who is an alien, regenerates from time to time. When this happens the part is taken over by a different actor.

Matt Smith was my first Doctor. He’s also phenomenally great in the part. He has managed to put together this complicated but irresistible mix of charms and flaws and mystery that is going to be hard to replace. You know him and you don’t, and because Matt Smith has made the character and what you do know about him so deeply lovable this creates an endless need for intimacy. I just don’t know what I’m going to do without him. Will we also lose all the characters associated with him? The most amazing and wonderful River Song? I still haven’t recovered from the loss of Amy and Rory. Please, I’m begging you, don’t take away River Song too. And what about Strax??

The only thing that gives me hope is my response to the older episodes I’ve caught with David Tennant, the actor who played Doctor Who before Matt Smith. I love Tennant’s Doctor Who as well. Not as much, but that could be because of that “first” thing I mentioned, and because I haven’t seen as many episodes with Tennant. But what are the odds that they’ll find three actors in a row as capable of taking on this part as Smith and Tennant? Maybe this is an essential element of the show, that you will never completely know or have the Doctor, and he will always invariably break your heart? Wait a minute. Oh god. What have I signed up for? I will have to go through this again and again. If I’m lucky.

Anyway, damn you Matt Smith. You better be great in a lot of movies to make up for this, young man. Jesus, I just realized that means there is only one more episode with Matt Smith. Sobbing.

A few shots on one of the piers along the Hudson. The first is of a child’s party, and the second is of sun bathers who were just to the right of the party.