The biggest surprise in last Thursday’s performance of Bel Canto at Chicago’s Lyric Opera came in the second act. and it didn’t happen on stage. I wrote a post last week about preparing to see (okay, hear) my first live opera. I reread the book Bel Canto. I heard the book’s author Ann Patchett talk […]
The opera Bel Canto (based on Ann Patchett’s novel by the same name) had its world Premiere at Chicago’s Lyric Opera Monday night, and I’m going to tomorrow night’s performance. It will be the first time ever that I’ve attended an opera. When I was a kid, the only opera I knew was the Merrie […]
Realizing I wouldn’t be able to see when his schoolfriends raised their hands to ask questions, my six-year-old great nephew Ray volunteered to help me call on kids in all three of the first-grade classes we visited at his school yesterday. All of the first-graders at Westmore Elementary had read Hanni and Beth: Safe & […]
Here’s a statement you don’t hear every day from a blind blogger: I spent a morning last week at an art museum. I wasn’t the only blind person at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that day, either. Sina Bahram was there, too. I met Museum of Contemporary Art’s Chief Content Officer Susan Chun in early […]
A 79-year-old writer learned a lot about his fears when I gave “What are you afraid of?” as a writing prompt over Halloween. Loyal blog readers might remember a post I published here last year featuring excerpts from an essay Bob Eisenberg wrote then about his best job ever, when he was 11 years old, […]