Opera Look-In

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OperaLookIn

Each year the Washington Opera presents “Opera Look-In,” at the Kennedy Center Opera House to educate children about opera. The program presents opera in a highly accessible manner, combining storytelling, brief scenes in costume, and selected arias (accompanied by the full Opera House Orchestra!) with behind-the-scenes explanations of the use of lighting, music, costumes, and props. School groups attend from all over the Washington, DC area, including homeschool groups—lucky us.

Last year the program revolved around the opera Carmen, and included an exhibition of costumes created by fashion design students at Duke Ellington School for the Arts. This year’s program featured Ellington School students supposedly lost in an opera house, encountering as if by accident scenes from The Barber of Seville, Madame Butterfly, Lucia di Lammermoor, The Magic Flute, and (big crowd-pleaser) Cosi Fan Tutte. It’s not easy to sketch in the dark, and by the end I gave up and settled back to enjoy the humorous last quintet.

To engage an auditorium packed with elementary school students is no easy task, and the kids were riveted. I wonder how many go home and ask their parents to rent Cosi Fan Tutte so they can see the rest of the story.

Columbus Day

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Columbus

Today, October 12th, is the REAL Columbus Day, despite its being established in 1971 to fall always on a Monday and to be celebrated festively by taking the day off from work to shop for reduced-price merchandise.

The arrival of Columbus being a difficult event to “celebrate,” given the centuries of death, destruction, and mad land-grabbing that followed the encounter with two great big plentiful American continents, we recognize the day here at home with a short Columbus bio read aloud, and a Native American blessing, followed by a consciously created Old World-New World meal. Encounters between civilizations, often marked by pain and loss, can also bear promising fruit. Not only botanically speaking, but in terms of eventual (even if it takes centuries) mutual enlightenment.

Tonight we will have sweet potatoes, black beans, and corn on the cob, followed by apple pie and ice cream.


Living History

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Accokeek

Fall is the time for farm field trips, to see the bounty of the season and learn how it was achieved. These sketches are from a trip to National Colonial Farm, an 18th century living history farm in Accokeek, Maryland, which sponsors a number of school programs for children in kindergarten through 6th grade, including homeschool groups. Our homeschoolers were a pretty savvy bunch, already intimately familiar with carding combs, rollaghs, hollowed gourd containers, dried herbs and the like, but they enjoyed the informative walking tour through the farm buildings, the wagon ride, and the opportunity to milk the cow (THAT we don’t have at home).


Stairway to heaven

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MountainChapel

After a steep uphill trudge to a mountainside shrine, the rewards are worth the trek: the celebrant’s inspiring and funny thoughts to ponder; singing together among the birds and trees, everyone speckled with sunlight filtering through the autumn leaves; and at the end a quiet, inexpressibly affecting service for healing of body, mind, and soul.

Holy Water

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ShrineMontPond

Our family is in the mountains with our church community for a couple of days of singing and dancing, meditation and prayer, and thoughtful discussion, interspersed with hay rides, hiking, and brownies. The accommodations are basic (hurray for indoor plumbing and hot running water!), and the food is definitely Lake Wobegon, but I always return with a feeling of good will toward all humankind and a renewed determination to do better at my part in it.

Here is a view of the pond, which, besides being restful for the spirit, is on Saturday afternoon the best place for children to immerse themselves in frogs and mud.

CakePolkaDotsMary

CakeSprinklesChristy

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CakeVioletsVictoria

Fungus, beech tree

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My daughter and I have walked past this beech tree fungus all summer, and we finally stopped one day with our pencils and paper and drew it. The depression in which the fungus growing (which I assume marks a fallen branch) is about ten inches high, and the fungus is surprisingly colorful. My drawing doesn’t really do it justice. My daughter’s is better—I will put that up next week.

FungusBeech