So Shelly got us tickets to go see a Puccini concert at the Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. Pretty nifty, eh? So I’m thinking it is going to be a very nice night of listening to awesome classical music at the Lincoln Center, a place I’ve wanted to catch a concert at. So we brave the ridiculous rain and drive into the city (it was RIDICULOUS rain, I must say). We get there an hour and 15 minutes early because Shelly read the times wrong – but that worked out as we would have been that close to being late if she had been right. Shelly is notoriously late in leaving the apartment because the girl takes FOREVER to get ready. Drives me crazy. And we get in to the concert and discover that it’s not a classical music concert, per se, it’s actually a version of Puccini’s opera, Tosca, but in a concert rendition. So there’s a full NY Philharmonic orchestra sitting on stage and the opera singers are in front singing their parts. It was phenomenal. I have to admit I was a little not that into it in Act I but fortunately, they had ‘subtitles’ to translate the Italian – there was an electronic board way up above the performers which the English captions so you could know what the hell was going on. But it was Act II and Act III in which the diva of the show, a Chinese soprano named Hui He, just floored the audience with her amazing voice. It brought chills to hear her sing, especially when she wanted to really belt it out. It was both mine and Shelly’s first opera and while I’d never heard any of the songs before, you really didn’t need to to be amazed by the performances.
Also, Happy Father’s Day to my Dad and to my staircase Dad, Harv. I hope that you both are enjoying the day with relaxation and good food, as I know that’s how I want to spend the day. I still haven’t really cleaned up today – and it feels great to be a slob for some reason.
In other news, installing my awesome Alpine iPod-integrated car radio has come to make my life stressful. Back in April, one of the indicator lights came on while I was driving on the Jersey turnpike. It wasn’t one that meant you needed to jump the fuck out of the car, and since I drive fairly rarely nowadays, I just didn’t feel the stress of getting it taken care of. But next weekend, I have to go ‘muster’ for the Air Force in Delaware somewhere. And that means I need to drive down there, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be stuck somewhere far from home. So I call up VW and they set me up for an appt on Monday morning, but then ask if I have an aftermarket radio installed because the particular indicator light, the Malfunction Indicator Light (MIL – figures it would be that as an acronym), requires the car to be hooked up to a computer for diagnosis. So the radio has to be removed. I have no idea where my radio stuff is – it’s in storage somewhere, but seriously, no clue where all those pieces are. So yesterday I took my car to Best Buy to get it removed temporarily so I can probably pay hundreds of dollars to get something fixed on my car. I just hope it’s hundreds and not more.