Reading in bed during the downpour.

Reliving the past on the patio at Dunn Bros.

Today is going to be mainly an errands day. Giles and I will go pick up prescription refills for his flea/tick and heartworm preventative medications. We’ll need to stop for gas first. Then we’ll get some chew sticks for him at the pet supply store.

After I drop the furry one off at home, I’ll grab groceries. I need then need to write up a quick book review. I also need to read an overdue public library book so I can finally return it. And I need to return a handful of other school library books. Later, I have a birthday party to attend at night!

Yesterday was the first fully sunny day we’ve had in a quite awhile. It’s felt like a particularly cloudy spring and early summer, and my mood has suffered greatly. One thing I’ve liked about living here in the Twin Cities is that it’s generally a sunny place, especially in thr very cold winters.

As soon as I got home, I took the Giles out with me for dinner. I had a lentil burger at a sidewalk table.

Finally a sunny day I’m the Twin Cities!

Last night before bed, I read Matthew Battles’s short story “The Dogs in the Trees,” a strange fabulist story that starts off his book The Sovereignties of Invention. The book is a slim volume, and I look forward to reading more of these intriguing little tales. I heard of Battles from his book Library: An Unquiet History, which I read during my library and information science program.

This morning, I was looking at the photos on this page: Men and dogs in WWII.

A friend pointed me to this article today: “When My Son Met His Boyfriend Darren Criss.” It captures a lot of what makes Darren Criss’s presence as Blaine Anderson on Glee so amazing to me.

When it was my turn to talk, I found my normally sure-spoken self decidedly absent. What could I say to this young man who meant so much to my kid, this young man who, by playing a television character, had helped lead my son to tell me about his orientation and, by extension, helped change the trajectory of my own life toward activism? “Thank you” felt so insufficient, but it was all I had.

Surely queer youth are growing up these days with a vastly different sense of self than those of us 2 or 3 decades older….

Also, this morning, I have “Don’t Stop Me Now” as covered by Darren Criss’s character on repeat:

This past week, I’ve had the fortune of going to two live music performances. I don’t usually make it out to live shows, in part because I’m not a fan of crowds and also because they can be expensive. At the end of last week, I had a sudden hankering for some live classical music, so I looked into the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO), a group I’ve had the pleasure of hearing a few times since I moved to the Twin Cities. Their musical season was cut short due to protracted labor contract negotiations (between the musicians and the managers), but it turned out that the last performances for this season were this past weekend. I went on Friday night to the Ordway Performing Arts Center in downtown Saint Paul and caught a wonderful performance of pieces by Berlioz, Beethoven, and others. There was a fairly full audience, too, which was a nice sight to see, but luckily the show wasn’t sold out so that I was able simply to go up to the box office for last minute tickets.

As always, I was taken by the coordination of so many instruments (even with the smaller size of the chamber orchestra in comparison to the larger symphony orchestras). I especially loved being able to see the motions that produce particular sounds, and the ability to see the musicians’ movements with their instruments is a wonderful visual complement to the music itself.

A gentlemen a few seats down from me, after one of the movements in a piece, said to his companion, “I almost clapped there.” I thought about how people tend to have this fear of classical music performances and clapping at the wrong place. I like the quieter expectations of classical music performances, though, and the fact that audience members are not supposed to scream and holler and otherwise express delight audibly except in applause after each piece.

In contrast, I also caught Darren Criss’s live show at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis last night. I’d tried a few times earlier (during a pre-sale of tickets and then for the regular sale) to buy tickets, but the show kept selling out. Then yesterday, I saw that the theater had opened up more tickets (so much for “sold out”), and I was able to buy a couple of tickets for myself and Mr. Frog.

I may be a teensy bit obsessed with Darren Criss via his character Blaine Anderson on the tv show Glee, and I was very excited to be able to see him live despite the fact that I’d have to face a crowded room of screaming fans. Mr. Frog, hermit that he is, graciously agreed to escort me, and we sticked together at the back of the venue against a wall so that we wouldn’t have to contend too much with other people. He was a useful deterrent, too, somehow keeping most people from standing too close to me. I noticed that whenever he went away briefly that people would end up standing really close to me. And after the show, when he went outside to wait for me while I was getting a tour t-shirt, a drunk guy started chatting me up (in an annoying way).

The show was very loud but fun. It was entirely different from the SPCO concert. Pop shows are all about how loud the audience can be, and the singer encourages shouting and singing along and all that. He performed mostly original songs. A few were new songs, but he also performed songs from his EP Human. I know it’s silly to conflate actor and character, but I wished he had shown a bit more of his queer-friendly side (he’s a very gay-friendly, straight actor and has spoken up often in support of gay youth and gay rights).

Here’s a recording of his first encore, an awesome rendition of “Teenage Dream” that started off as a subdued, piano-accompaniment version before unfolding into a completely rocking version:

And he ended the performance with this second encore song, “Stutter” (from the musical A Very Potter Musical that he wrote while in college… recording from an earlier performance, not in Minneapolis):

Notes for a poem. The very large man plays the cello. Even seated, he is a full head taller than his neighbor cellist. He looks up to the conductor on his dais as they make music, but when the conductor descends and walks by, the very large cellist towers above him, like the monster over Frankenstein.