My ABT calendar with a photo of Gillian Murphy and Ethan Stiefel 

I jumped on Tonya Plank’sblog tonight, and grew a big, wide smile reading about her Ethan Stiefel sighting (readable here ).

The post brought back such memories from my first time seeing ABT live, and meeting Ethan Stiefel backstage, in addition to Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg. Such fun heavenly times!

Last year’s Arts Alive Festival, inside Space 301.

I spent this afternoon getting up to speed with the Arts agenda for October. As always, the month will bring a little of everything, and that’s just the way I like it.

Events I’m looking forward to:

Theatre USA’s production of “Butter and Egg Man” on Oct. 5.

Mobile Symphony’s “Halloween Pops” on Oct. 20.

Mobile Opera’s“La Traviata” sneak preview performance on Oct. 22.

Arts Alive street festival on Oct. 26.

Mobile Ballet’s “Gala Evening of the Stars” on Nov. 3 (not in October, but close enough)

If you’re a dance and photography fan, than you must check out Patricio Melo’s posts on The Winger. I’ve visited The Winger less and less, but I find myself returning just to see his photographs. He really ought to have an exhibit somewhere.

I had every intention of posting a link to an article about Joshua Bell, who graces the cover of a major music magazine this month. However, I had trouble finding links to the magazines website, and somehow stumbled upon his fan message boards, that I used to frequent pretty often (yeah, I was that much of a super fan).

Relevance to Mobile arts fans: Joshua Bell will be performing in Mobile in spring.

To my surprise, Josh himself posted on the boards in Aug. (which is rare) and announced the the fans on the board about the birth of his son: Josef Matricardi Bell.He writes:

I will keep the details to a minimum here, but to make a long story short, on July 31st Lisa gave birth to our baby boy. She was actually due to give birth on August 15th, but as fate would have it, he arrived two weeks early, just before I was meant to go to Cortona for some concerts. I decided that I simply had to witness my son’s first week of life, so I was sadly left with no other option than to cancel Cortona, a decision which was made a lot easier by the organizers of the festival who strongly encouraged me to fly home (I will be back at the festival next year!).

Very cool news (and Congrats to Josh!)

The more and more my floor begins to look like this, the more and more my stress level rises.

 Wednesday can be described by one word: exhausting. 5 classes with one long afternoon break, consumed with last minute attempts at homework and pre-class-presentation jitters. I was up until 10 p.m., editing the first short-fiction piece I’ve ever pumped out in years  for my Short Fiction class, which has since been fed to my classmates for next week’s  scheduled “slam fest”–or…er, critique. 

Thursday morning was marked by a wrap shirt malfunction–the tie on my cotton pink shirt was hanging out of my car door and floating along University Blvd, until a nice man yelled from his window “Your dress is dragging the street!”

After an hour of class, I returned home with an e-mail from an Editor with a long list of departments and article ideas for their next issue. I spent the afternoon making notes on it, watched Hitchcock’s “Marnie” and slept right through the time I’d allotted to catching up with sources and other editors.

This morning a gaggle of nightmares disrupted my sleep, the campus transit Jag Tran pulled away just as I was racing to catch it, my art teacher made us work in small groups (read: pain in the arse), I endured late afternoon hiatus hernia pains, and my favorite pair of H/M sunglasses purchased in New York snapped in half.

Yours truly spent today brooding about tone. This blog is turning into “Arts Gossip” and that’s definitely a path I don’t want it to take. I’m not going to lie–I’m a huge gossip. Dione and I talk about famous dancers as if they’re celebrities (our old running joke was “You could make a reality TV show out of ABT alone!”) . However, I don’t think that this should be the place for it–even if the readership jumped in the past week.

So all apologies for past posts that might of angered. I find myself getting more and more sardonic as the “Moving to New York” clock ticks away. Realizing that I’ll leave everyone behind makes me feel a little more free to be candid, and  must remind myself that the goals of this blog are news first, ideas second, gossip last.

I haven’t devoted a lot of posts to the spring departure of Mobile Opera music director Jerome Shannon, because I’m still lamenting the sad news as if I’d heard it yesterday.

An African-American vocalist-source told me last week a bit of information about Shannon’s time in Mobile that I’d never noticed: how good a job he did at bringing diverse performers to the area.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how soright they were. Looking back on all those seasons where African-American vocalists held lead roles–Chauncy Packer and Bridget Bazile come most readily to mind– in addition to Denyce Graves’ visit. For a southern town, we had a little bit of everything and according to my source, all that lovely diversity was from Shannon’s efforts. Just another reason why I’m sad to see him go.

According to one of my Mobile Symphony gossip sources, both “Disney Pops” concerts were very well attended with “tons of kids.” I’m so surprised–but then again, a lot of people do like Disney.

In my sisters ballet class, she passed around a tambourine, and asked her kid-students to pass it around, shake it and say something exciting that happened to them.

One of the little girls took the tambourine, shook it, and said “I went to the symphony.” Cute.