Her mission, if she chooses to accept, is to penetrate the small town of Manorola, spend all day in the water and sun, read as many books as possible, get a tan, and become a much happier, more relaxed version of her former self. She has four days to complete her mission at which point she will return to Florence, with the intention of spending much, much more time in Cinque Terre.

This message will self-destruct in five... four... three...

My cousin Jessica came to visit for the day. Of course, on the day she and her friends come to town, all Florence museums call a mandatory staff meeting and close all exhibits for the morning. We walked up to the Piazzale Michelangelo instead, had coffee and pastries at my local cafe and ate gelato in a famous gelataria... all before the Academia opened and she could meet David.

In my yellow dress ready to walk to the Lady Macbeth opera...Russian.


So I think there should be a rule. Don't open your opera with along aria about being bored. It's rather... boring.

As I tend to do, I left at intermission. Three and a half hours of some woman being bored in Russian was too MONUMENTAL of a work for me. My yellow dress and I went and had a drink at a nearby hotel instead.

missing my camera cord but news none-the-less

When you receive an email with the title "HCM ilmoittautuminen" I do believe that can be loosely translated as "you have just signed up for the August 16 Helsinki marathon, so we advise you to take up running again".


Oh yes, first thing... tomorrow.

More photos from the gallery opening

1. Follie! Follie! (folly!, crazyness!,
what a terrible idea!)




















2. the moment before the Sempre libera
section begins

21 grams... at least

I had Kelly and five other friends over for dinner two nights ago, and, like the wonderful woman she is, Kelly brought her USB drive filled with pictures of my performance last week. I'm singing E' Strano! E Strano! from La Traviata. I love singing that aria maybe even more than Caro Nome because it's filled with changing emotions: breathlessness, mocking, worry, self pity, love, and so it gives lots of opportunities to be the acting lover that I am. Plus, I find I can get deep into the role much more easily than many of the other arias I sing. A little bit of tragedy always helps me along I guess.






I love this photo because it looks like the camera caught the song leaving my mouth. It reminds me of the experiment Dr. Duncan Macdougall did in 1907 when he weighed patients during the hours of their deaths to calculate the weight of their departing souls. Apparently our souls weigh about 21 grams. So what about a song? Sometimes I feel like they weigh a lot, maybe that's why when I finally let them out in a performance of rehearsal I feel such a high, and why when I'm sick and can't song I feel heavy and lethargic and generally icky.