Friday evening was an outing to see Christine Lavin at the Somerville Theater, organized by
ladysprite. Christine was glorious fun, starting from a delightfully rude serenade to a fresh divorcee (on the theme of, "really, we never liked him anyway"), and running through old favorites like Windchimes as well as a bunch of newer material.Unsurprisingly, we ran into several people we know (including
siderea, who I simply ran into on the street). We wound up sitting right behind goldsquare, and had dinner at the next table from John de Caversham, who was also at the concert. The treat of the night was seeing Doug White, who we see all too rarely, getting selected as Mr. Somerville, and thus leading the night's rendition of Sensitive New Age Guys.Today was Coronation; while it was a hard choice to skip Black Rose, there were many reasons for me to go as I did, and I wasn't disappointed. Brian and Anna gave as good a Coronation as I expected, full of well-considered ritual and deep feeling. Brian proves to have a fine singing voice, first singing to Anna as he crowned her, and then in a delicious duet of the two of them during the entertainment.
That entertainment was the high point of the day. It was a court experiment that we haven't seen in a long time, mixing court business in with a wide variety of amusements, including storytellers, musicians, and dancers of every sort.
ladysprite did a performance of Rostiboli with Christian, which went beautifully, impressing lots of folks. lakshmi_amman's Devadashi dance was a delight as always, and mermaidlady told a story that would have clearly been the bawdiest point of the day until emerlion decided to give her a run for her money. Not a huge amount of court business conducted, but that was okay -- it was generally one of the best courts I've been to. (Indeed, between that and Mead Hall last weekend, it's been a fine month for performance in this area.)All in all, it's been an entertaining weekend. Just the thing before a first week of the month, when our lives get overbusy again...
