Stacy Horn

I have so much to do this week I’m freaking out a little bit … lot. I want to post about the Virtual Choir 3 premiere, the fact that Waiting For My Cats to Die just came out in an ebook edition, and other things, but I have to do my taxes, call my friend Chris, and a million other things. So, I will be back tomorrow. In the meantime, I give you pigeons.

These wonderful people had the pigeons eating out of their hands, and …

… they showed this little boy how to do it, creating a bird lover for life probably!

There’s going to be a live stream of the event from Lincoln Center starting at 6:30. I’ll be there! I was lucky and got a pass because I’ll be sneaking in a few lines about it for the end of the book.

I took this last night at Carnegie Hall. The standout pieces for me were Lux Aurumque, Five Hebrew Love Songs, and Cloudburst, which was incredible. The piece was beautiful itself, but as it builds Whitacre had various members of the choir play handbells, and then, right before the cloudburst, they all raise their arms and then they snap their fingers, clap, slap their legs, all these various things that, helped with the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, really really really sounded like rain. I see he wrote this when he was 22. Further proof that composers are not: human.

Tonight I’m going to have a perfect New York City evening! When I was young I was lucky to be introduced to the all the arts, which I ate up, except I remember having mixed feelings about museums. I was like most kids in this respect, mummies/good, everything else/eh. But my favorite was live music of any kind.

I’m meeting a friend from choir for dinner at a greek diner (first part of a perfect evening) and then we’re going to Carnegie Hall to listen to the music of Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen.

Tomorrow is the premiere of the Virtual Choir 3 and I’ve been blessed with a pass to go because I’m writing about it!! I’ll be taking tons of pictures and movies.

I took this the other day, this is Union Square. Normally this part of the Square is crawling with people on their various soap boxes (and others just relaxing while on break). Union Square has a long history of being a nexus of political expression so it was sad to see it emptied like this.

I wrote two angry posts recently, and I’ve saved both for later. I wanted to mull them over first. Sometimes it’s good to get mad. I posted the first one on Yelp and got a very gracious response, so I have to change that post to reflect that. The second I think might just be a preaching-to-the-choir kind of post, which is also okay. Sometimes you need to reach out to like-minded people. But I thought I would wait and then I ended up not posting anything for almost two days!

So here a few things I’ve been meaning to bring up:

Eldad Hagar rescued another dog! I want to marry Eldad Hagar and all the dogs he’s rescued.

Amy and Rory are leaving Dr. Who. I’ll be crying for weeks when that happens. Because I want to marry Amy and Rory.

A doctor weighs in about Virginia’s new transvaginal ultrasound law. Yes, I want to marry this doctor, too.

This next link has to do with an idea I have for a possible book (I have several ideas percolating). In my singing book I write about Mozart writing for his wife Constanze, and then I saw this video. Soprano Hila Plitmann talks about singing Goodnight Moon, written by her husband Eric Whitacre, who is also in my book. As far as wedding prospects, I happen to already be married to Eric and Hila. Okay, not really.

I’ve decided to divorce the Empire State Building, because this is the building I really want to marry. I took this on the way to the dentist, where I had my stitches removed and which hurt like hell. What painful thing is up next? Checking … oh great. I might need another bone graft.
I suspect I will want to marry all my dentists when I’m done (I have four working on my implant, the two students and their professors) but at the moment all wedding plans are off. (They’re doing a great job so far, though.)

I just saw a negative headline about a show I am coming to love, New Girl. Their ratings are going down the headline read, so I want to put in a good word for this show.

I actually almost cancelled the series and now I’m glad I didn’t. Jess/Zooey Deschanel toned down her act and added more intelligence to her character, but it’s two of the guys that I’ve come to love the most, Schmidt and Nick, and of the two, I love Schmidt the most. I don’t even know how to explain Schmidt’s appeal and if you watch one show you probably won’t get the full sense of him. Actually, his character is a perfect example of how if you watched an episode or two and said, “no thanks,” you have to come back and give it another try. He developed.

UPDATE: Brilliant explanation of why we love Schmidt here.

All the characters are developing wonderfully, and I crack up regularly during the show. Honest-to-god laughing out loud even though I’m alone. The writers are doing such a great job. So please give this show a try. And Raising Hope.

Yet another shot of the Empire State Building from my roof. I’m sorry. But if you lived here you’d find it hard to resist taking a picture of it every time you saw it, too. I’d be in worse trouble if I had a view of the Chrysler Building.