Stacy Horn

While waiting for the Lincoln Center branch of the library to open, after walking by the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet, I took refuge in the lobby of Avery Fisher Hall. It was a little disheartening to see sign after sign for one performance after another I can’t go to! I should explore the cheap seats more thoroughly. $65 was the least expensive ballet ticket, $30 for the opera. I’ll bet there are better deals to be had.

I took a picture of the sign for the annual Messiah Sing. It’s a monster, thousands go and sing. (Also expensive.)

And by me I mean middle-aged, single, pathetic, but not completely unendearable (I just made up that word) and funny (what?). Finding a man would only be a minor side-plot, a running joke, like the conveyor belt of secretaries on Murphy Brown. I don’t mean that as a anti-man thing, but that’s what it’s like, going both ways. I think it’s a combination of we’re all the left-overs and we just don’t have the energy for dating we once had. If the sitcom were being made today I’d make finding a job the major focus. That could provide plenty of laugh-until-you-cry material.

A giant bulb decoration. It’s terrifying, right? Try batting that around, cats.

I’m researching tinnitus specialists in New York City. I started to notice a ringing in my ears over the past few months. It’s a little maddening, but I’ve been using my MBSR meditation training to make it not be the center of my attention, which helps. Any tips about treatment or doctors would be much appreciated!

Buddy has been spending more and more time hanging out with me. This makes me a little nervous, because in the months before he died, my cat Beamers increasingly spent more time laying on the desk while I worked, and this is exactly what Buddy is doing.

You don’t want to be there. See that crowd of people I’m coming up on? Once you hit that wall of people you can only inch along, it was absolutely maddening. I took these heading to our choir performance at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, which felt timeless and serene and other-worldly. I loved it in there.

Once you turn onto a side street it’s more sane. This is 46th, the church is just beyond Rosie O’Grady’s. I love the cacophony of signs.

Oh God. I started this post, but then I stopped to read this horrifying article about honor killing. I’m still traumatized by this excellent but upsetting story that Anne Garrels did for NPR in 2005. A 16 year old girl had been abducted and raped and then returned to her family. Her cousin, one of the men who killed her said, “She knew the customs, but I don’t think she expected we would kill her. She was crying. I saw in her eyes that she thought we would take her in our arms and say, `Thank God you are safe.’ But she got bullets instead.”

I’ve never recovered from that. Those words haunt me. They murder an innocent child instead of the people who kidnapped and raped her? Who is this man? I know by his words that he’s haunted too, he knows on some level he did the wrong thing. How can things like this continue?

Music is one of the things we have for solace when it all goes to hell. I’ve been putting examples I’ve found of this in my book. I saw this great tweet that someone sent to Gareth Malone, the choir conductor who does that BBC series, The Choir. The guy has a family member fighting in Afghanistan (speaking of honor killing) and he said: “Don’t cry. Sing.”

Our last performance of the season is today. I’m a little sad.

My niece, Ellie Horn, initiated a benefit to put up a sign commemorating the fact that Rachmaninoff had lived and worked on Long Island. Thank you for the beautiful shot, Kevin Krooss!