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About a week ago my room mate and I went to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The tickets were cheap thanks to the < 40 = $20 program. That made it an excellent opportunity to check off Symphony Hall from my list of Boston landmarks to visit. I went as much for the architecture as for the music, but I forgot my camera. I did manage to take enough shots with my phone’s camera to string together this panorama, taken from my seat before the concert.

The music that night was Mozart’s 19th, 20th, 21st and 25th symphonies. Apparently, of those, only the 25th is commonly played. The 25th was also my least favorite. Of the others, a week later they all seem to run together. They were playing the more uncommon peicies because they were in the middle of a series of concerts in which they were playing all (or most) of Mozart in chronological order. I was glad that I didn’t goto one of the later on chronological shows, which include more like the 25th (so I’m told). My most interesting thought at the concert was how much it might suck to be a room mate of one of the performers, many of whom were young looking. Then I decided that the BSO could probably afford to provide practice space.

I would go back under any of two conditions:

• I was on a date
• It was a tour of the building including history and not a concert

Well, on the Saturday after seeing The Dark Knight on my birthday I was invited to go to an all night beach party in Newburyport honoring the full moon with a fire. It was a blast. I met a bunch of new people and got to know a few kids I met on the 4th of July a bit better. One of them even managed to remember my name from then, which made me feel bad that I didn’t remember his. The weather was cloudy so there wasn’t a great view of the moon, but there were professionally done fireworks from a nearby by that we could see. As the night wore on batches of fog rolled in and out as the wind shifted. The wind off the water was quite cold, for about a minute once we could see our breath, but the wind off the land was comfortable. At one point the fog was so tick that you couldn’t see more than 15 feet it seemed. I arrived back home at around 5:30 am, by which time dawn had begun.

Lets see, what else… On Thursday of last week I went to that awards dinner for work, dateless. I wanted to take pictures of the supposedly lovely estate at which it was held, but it was raining quite a lot, as it had a tendency to do last week in Boston, so I just gave up on the idea that I’d get any nice looking pictures. The rain also turned what I was hoping would be an exploration of the land into a social event requiring copious amounts of small talk and pretending to like beer. The food, however, was quite good, so no complaints there.

On Friday of last week I went to see the Free Shakespeare on the Common production of As You Like It. I didn’t know anything about it going in, luckily they summarized the play in the program, which made it easier to follow along. It was really enjoyable, and seemed well done; the music was especially well suited. There were two lights operators, who climbed the towers to man the lights for the show. I really liked the whole idea of having them climb the towers, It seemed like they had really good seats as well (being so high), I wanted to be them. I was surprised to learn that the quote from Civilization 4 for when you discover drama, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts,” is from this play. I must say that the quote is much more enlightened sounding without the rest of the monologue that follows. The play was preceded by a picnic dinner; it was a date actually, but that’s you get to hear about it.