“Bob,” many of you ask me, “are the flowers in San Miguel really that beautiful? And are there really that many?”
I try to manage expectations.
“Yes,” I say. “There are that many flowers. And, yes, they are that beautiful.”
Hardly a Wednesday goes by that Frank Thoms and I don’t turn to each other and say, “Man, we are so lucky. We are so blessed.”
We come to that realization early and often.
We’re both volunteers at So Others May Eat, the hot lunch program in an obscure courtyard of the Parroquia de San Miguel de Arc Angel in San Miguel de Allende.
Continue reading
Monica Maeckle is a glass-half-full kind of gal.
How else to take her pronouncement about the Monarch butterfly on Tuesday night, that their ”migration is endangered, but the butterfly is not”?
It feels a little like saying “The Louvre Museum is burning to the ground, but we’ll still have great digital pictures of all the art.”
Frankly, I don’t know quite how I felt after Maeckle spoke as part of the i3 (ideas that inform & inspire) lecture series.
Continue reading
It was just one year ago that opera soprano Jacinta Barbachano performed in San Miguel de Allende as the youthful and highly desirable single Rosina in “The Barber of Saville.” One year on, she will have to age 10 years as the story resumes this weekend in “The Marriage of Figaro.”
Older but wiser, as they say.
For soprano Barbachano that may well be the key to her character, the now Countess Rosina, in the highly anticipated Pro Musica production of “The Marriage of Figaro.”
Continue reading
There is a comedy – a musical sitcom – about a powerful man who believes he has the right to do whatever he wants to women.
It’s a sequel, in fact, that gives off a sort of a bro-boy’s “Your body, my choice” vibe.
But the women in this comedy are smart and savvy, with a sort of a “Me too” vibe. They know how to stand up to power in clever ways. They know how to work the angles on the patriarchy.
And, no, it is not called “Trump’s Second Term.”
The musical is actually an opera and it was written in 1786. A huge hit in its day. Now, it is considered one of the greatest operas of all time.
Apparently, things haven’t changed all that much in the last 239 years.
The opera is Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
Continue reading
We were in Mexico City, enjoying coffee and a bite to eat at a corner restaurant just a block off the expansive Parque de Mexico, in the popular Hipódromo, Cuauhtémoc, neighborhood.
The young and athletic hostess Ayse Lang, who had seated us at the sidewalk table of Barrio Café, stopped by to see how our late-morning coffee break was going.
Continue reading
Everybody is experiencing varying degrees of winter, some harsher than others this year. In northern climes there is a touch of schadenfreude in the air as southern spots like New Orleans try to figure out how to move snow off their streets and sidewalks and in Washington DC, the presidential inauguration was moved inside because it was too cold.
Right now I’m sitting in front of a fireplace shivering but in another hour or so I’ll be down to shorts and T-shirt. That’s just the way winter goes in San Miguel de Allende. Temperatures sink and soar on a whim.
In another week we’ll begin the celebration of Candelaria, which sort of pushes Spring to the forefront. The celebration is part religious and part commercial. Candelaria marks Candlemas, the 40th day after the birth of Christ.
Continue reading
On Tuesday, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched, “the company’s 12th rideshare mission to a sun-synchronous orbit. Onboard are a variety of customer satellites, including 35 satellites integrated by Exolaunch along with 36 SuperDoves and Pelican-2 from Planet Labs PBC.”
On Wednesday, SpaceX launches its “sixth, suborbital flight test of its fully integrated Starship rocket, a combination of the Ship upper stage (S33) and the Super Heavy booster (B14). SpaceX plans to catch the Super Heavy booster using the chopsticks on the launch tower, but will make a final determination on the catch following liftoff and stage separation.”
On Thursday, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket will launch the company’s previously delayed Blue Ring spacecraft, which is capable of both hosting and deploying multiple payloads.
(Source: spaceflightnow.com See update at bottom of this page.)
Also on Tuesday, space and security expert Dr. Nancy K. Hayden discussed the future of outer space and the increasingly heavy and chaotic traffic that is shooting out of planet Earth like hair plugs out of Elon Musk’s head.
Her talk for the i3: ideas that inform and inspire‘s Conversations with Big Thinkers lecture series at La Casona Event Center was first promoted as “Space: Brave New World or Wild Wild West?” Somewhere along the line, out of respect for the growing congestion on the extraterrestrial freeways surrounding Earth, she added a third possibility — “Close Encounters” — to that title.
Continue reading
Let’s just get right to the point that is on everyone’s minds: Are we barreling headlong into the dystopian patriarchy depicted by Margaret Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale”?
Says Atwood: “I don’t think we’ll get the uniforms.”
Ba-boom.
Continue reading
A classical pianist walks into eight bars …
If you think there is a punchline, the chaconne is on you.
Actually, it was the “Chaconne in G minor” by Thomaso Antonio Vitali and the pianist was Dominic Cheli in his return performance after two years away to San Miguel de Allende on Friday night at St. Paul’s Church.
Continue reading
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 