Well, we take off on Wednesday for a three-week trip to France. Now that the Chorale concert season is over and I’ve done the shopping for tomorrow night’s member dinner, I’m sitting down for one last post before we leave. Don’t know if I’ll get anything posted during the trip. May I encourage you, by the way, if you enjoy my posts, to forward your e-mail to someone who might also enjoy them? You can pick an individual post that you think will be particularly interesting to your forwardee. I’d like to see the blog grow.
My mind is kind of all over the place as I write this. I guess I’ll start with the Chorale. We had a wonderful set of concerts over the weekend, with good attendance both nights. This year has been a particular joy. One area of American life that troubles some social scientists is the lack of community in our ordinary lives; the classic study of this problem is the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam. I was reminded of that book as I wrote, and I realized that I’d never read it. Just put it on hold at the library. The subtitle is a little surprising, as my impression was that the American community was very much not reviving. I’ll have to report back after I have a chance to see what Putnam says. Our group is very much in thriving mode, as we continually have new members coming in to replace those who move away or leave for other reasons; the Chorale has been performing for 38 years and is bigger than ever. It’s been so interesting to me to realize how many plates these community groups have to keep twirling. We have several sources of income: our member dues, ticket sales, grants and donations. And we have a surprisingly large set of expenses: rental of the rehearsal/performance facilities, music purchases, storage facilities for said music, salaries for our conductor and associate conductor, as well as a few positions that receive vanishingly-small stipends, payments to outside groups that perform with us, purchases of supplies for our receptions and our member events, etc. The whole shootin’ match is kept going by those of us who just pitch in and volunteer because we love it.
So that’s one community group to which I belong. Another is my church, Parker Hills Bible Fellowship. The connections that flow out of that organization are wide even though the church is small. How many meals I’ve worked on in the kitchen, how many people I’ve talked to after a service, how many groups we’ve hosted in our home! Again, all because we love the church and what it stands for. No one could pay us enough to do the work we do. (So I’m signed up to make 500 mini desserts for a wedding this summer–I couldn’t be more thrilled. That’s in addition to another wedding for the daughter of a friend for which I am in charge of all the food except for the cake and punch.) I was reminded of yet another book, this one that I have indeed read, twice: The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church by a fabulous woman named Margaret Visser. The book is about a church in Rome, St. Agnes Outside the Walls. While parts of the book can get a little dry as Visser goes over every square inch of the place is exhaustive detail, what comes through most strongly is the fact that this medium-sized, not-terribly-famous Roman Catholic church is deeply embedded in the community; there’s much more going on there than the weekly Masses.
I also am usually involved in some other Bible study group; I’m signed up for Bible Study Fellowship this fall and will probably attend some study group meetings ith my mother-in-la this summer through her church. So I have several very different groups of people with whom I get together—and I’m a classic introvert! How did this happen? I guess we all do need that human connection, no matter how cantankerous we may be. Bowling leagues and bridge clubs may die out, but other activities come along to take their place. Humans just aren’t made to be solitary. (After all, didn’t God say about Adam in the Garden of Eden, “It is not good for man to be alone”?)
Well, it’s almost time for the first of the weekly updates on the royal wedding, so I’m going to turn that on here shortly. Let me just say one more thing here, though, a highly personal ranty opinion: I am not happy with the PBS dramatization of Little Women! Honestly. I think I can speak with some authority here as someone who’s read that book probably half a dozen times and cried over Beth’s death pretty much every go-through. They’ve done a great job with the costumes and the scenery, and the casting is quite good. But they have the social norms all wrong. They have Laurie Lawrence, the boy who lives next door, actually sitting up in the attic with Jo while she writes her fiction. They’re not doing anything wrong. (Laurie plays with the rat.) But this would never have happened in that society. Young men did not spend time along with young women to whom they were not married. And when there’s the picnic outing at the lake that Laurie organizes they don’t show any adult female chaperones. There is no way that this would have happened, either. I find this all very irritating. There was some talk of bringing LW into the 21st century, but if that means that they get the societal details wrong, well, better to leave it where it was! The girls are still wearing their corsets and petticoats, so why not show their other constraints? (And they get the scene where Beth goes over to the Lawrence mansion to play old Mr. Lawrence’s piano all wrong, too. Sorry to be so dogmatic! But it would have been so easy to just do it the way the book says.) I’m frankly not terribly motivated to watch the rest of the episodes.
Okay, enough of that. I really do want to write some updates from the road, but, as someone very famous says, “We’ll see what happens.”
Have a great trip!