Mike Welch Goes to Rome - Days 2 and 3

Is Italy one of those countries where everyone is late and nobody worries about it? I think it might be. Our bus into town was an hour late on the way into town and then a half hour late coming back.

We wandered around the Vatican, and it was OK. I am not an art kind of guy, but our tour guide, Ellen, gave us the history of Italy in a nutshell as we wandered around. I liked looking at her as much as I enjoyed the paintings. Our fearless leader, Carmella, who runs the nonprofit that sponsored the voice contest and then set up this concert tour for the winners, is forever wearing a jaunty hat, and has a way of putting her fist on her hip which is very Mussolini like. I think she is a little whacky. Hard to say why. Not Mussolini whacky, but maybe arty-whacky, like not too concerned with mundane details like getting us a hotel that isn’t out in the middle of nowhere, or making sure the bus is on time to take us back from Rome when we are standing on the street in the rain at 11 pm. We are dinner at 11 pm, after travelling back on the late bus, and paying twenty euros for a bus that was supposed to be paid for as part of the tour package.

I hung out at a sidewalk café, outside a gelateria, or ice cream shoppe, where I had a few draught Spatens, a German beer. It was good. I said slainte (Irish for salud or cheers) and the fellow at the next table pulled down his shirt to show me a tattoo on his shoulder that said the same. He ended up being from New Hampshire, and thought we had some kind of deep connection, the kind you can only have with complete strangers when you are frighteningly drunk. He started to talk about racial mixing, and I couldn’t tell if he was for or against. I was grateful when he wandered off to buttonhole another group at the next table. I wonder what kind of deep connection he felt for them.

I guess Italy is still a pretty Catholic country. I saw a number of handbills on walls protesting attempts to pass a law legalizing gay marriage. I thought Europe was supposed to be more enlightened than we are. No one has called me an ugly American yet. Tomorrow we see the Borghese gallery.

Day 3

Today we are going to take the train into town. Supposed to be 70, and it is absolutely gorgeous right now. My fellow travelers are not exactly extras from a production of the Canterbury Tales. They are opera fans the way some people are Star Trek fans. Fanatics, and able to conduct social intercourse only when they are with other fans. We went to a concert last night, and the performances induced a lot of tears among the fans. I was dry-eyed, but I was impressed with some of those impossible notes they hit.

I could appreciate the love for a discipline, an art, these young acolytes have. They were yelling and bellowing and emoting all over the place, and I could see they had put every bit of nerve and sinew they had into practicing and performing their pieces. One fellow, Galliano (does he have a brother Amaretto and a sister Anisette?) is apparently a real prodigy. The whole thing reminded me of a high school theater production, but like I said, the dedication to an art, to love something that is beautiful, unattainable, and is probably not going to love you back, is something I can appreciate. I could have cried for that, for these young and hopefuls who are willing to give, with the ascetic dedication of monks, all for art.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Yesterday I Cancelled the Dish

DirecTV, I must say before I go any further, is an excellent service. The technician who installed the dish on our roof and plugged the special recording box into the TV set was competent, speedy, and courteous. The service reps I dealt with over the phone were helpful and courteous as well. I never met with the sort of bad service people are said to encounter when dealing with Comcast. If I liked any of the TV shows that were on offer, I would probably have kept DirecTV, even after the two-year special reduced rates expired. But the fact is, there isn't anything on TV worth watching. It's not DirecTV's fault.

Three years ago, when I signed up, I figured that, by the time the two-year contract had expired, anything I wanted to sit down and watch would be available on the internet. It came to pass! Don't you love it when one of your prophesies comes true?

You're thinking, but what about Harold? Isn't he going to miss watching football? No, Harold doesn't watch football. Or anything else on TV. So it's just my thing, and here is what I like to watch:

Old movies. TCM shows them, and sometimes, on Saturday night, PBS does too. Instead I can go to Netflix.com ($8.99 a month), Amazon Prime ($99.00 yearly, or $8.25 a month), YouTube ($0), or the Lambertville Free Public Library, which has a nice collection of movies on DVD ($0). Granted, for the stuff available on the internet you have to have a modern hi-def television set with HDMI sockets, a computer with a high-speed internet connection, and a proper cord to connect the two, and for the DVDs you need a DVD player and also a connecting cord. So you'd have to figure in the cost of that.

I have a personal collection of old movies as well. Some of them I bought from TCM.com. So I'm well supplied with old movies.

British and Australian TV shows. The most marvelous things are available on Acorn.tv, a site on the internet, where a membership costs $4.99 a month. Very little of what they offer can be seen on American TV. Again you need a computer to watch the shows, and also a cord to connect the computer to your TV set, if you need a bigger screen.

Grand Opera. With the machine that DirecTV gave me I used to record operas whenever they aired on Channel 13. But now the Metropolitan Opera has made available a huge selection of their old and current productions to stream on the internet, many in high definition. A subscription costs $14.99 a month, cheaper if you subscribe by the year. Way cheaper than dressing up and dragging yourself to the city, especially if your spouse can take it or leave it alone. Hey, I used to go to the old Met with the cupids and everything. I get the glamour and romance of a live performance. Still, I like being able to see the singers up close.

The Good Wife. This is the last network show I was seriously addicted to. It's been such a downer lately that I can scarcely bring myself to sit through it, especially now that Kalinda has bailed. If I were writing that show she would have killed Lemond Bishop the minute he started threatening her sweetie. (Or either one of her sweeties.) I so longed to see her kick his ass. Now it's never going to happen. Still, I can see reruns of Sunday's show on Monday afternoons on CBS.com. Without waiting half an hour for the show before it to finish running. Why do they mess with the schedule like that? Football, I guess. Or they think we're going to magically fall in love with Madam Secretary just from being exposed to the last half of it while looking for The Good Wife. Sorry, guys, not happening.

News? Not really. Watching network news, or CNN, or, God forbid, Fox news, is like getting punched in the stomach over and over. The things I need to know I can find out by reading the newspaper, without having to endure the sight of full-color footage. Seventy-five cents for a daily copy of The Trenton Times, and we get funnies with our news, as well as the cryptoquote, which Harold solves in his head without using a pencil. Our subscription to the Sunday New York Times includes on-line access to the weekday papers, if there's anything in them we need to see, as well as the complete archives dating back to the beginning of the world, a great boon to those of us who write historical fiction.

When I hear rumors of stuff happening, and I do, somehow, without resorting to network news, I go on Twitter to find out the real story. You may laugh, but it actually works. Ordinary people live-tweet all sorts of things.

The service rep at DirecTV tried to talk me out of leaving, which was okay, because that's her job: "What are you going to do when it snows?" I told her I was going to read a book.

So that's my plan.  I'll let you know in a couple of months how it's working, in case you want to try it yourself.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Onward and Upward: The Gallison Exercise Program

Self-improvement! Am I still at it? You would think, considering the towering stack of to-do lists in the corner of my office (dating back to 1972), that I would have got wise to myself by now. But, no. Although I canceled my gym membership last month when I noticed how seldom I showed up, I am still at it.

Here's my latest plan. I bought an exercise bike and stuck it in my office.

Now, everybody tells me, and you're going to tell me, too, that riding on an exercise bike is so boring that I'll give it up in a week. But I tell you what. The bike is only half of the plan. The other half involves the Metropolitan Opera, which offers an online subscription service. You have to see this. For fifteen dollars a month (way cheaper than a gym membership) you can see any or all of 500 plus operas. Here's a link to their catalog of offerings.

Look at this stuff! Traviata! Contes de Hoffman (two versions)!

So the big idea is to get on the exercise bike and pedal away while I watch the world's greatest operas. So far I can do five or six minutes at a stretch, enough to see an aria and a bit of recitative, but I plan to get fitter and fitter.

Some of you will be unable to understand the attraction. Bah, you will say to yourself. Culture. Well, I don't like culture either, but grand opera isn't culture, anyway not in my book. It's drama, all wrapped up in gorgeous music, beautiful costumes and imaginative sets. The modern singers are fine actors and attractive people as well. Nowadays with the subtitles anybody can figure out what's happening onstage. Try it! You can have a week for free. Maybe you can work out while watching it.

Here's the sort of thing you can see, though this is Anna Netrebko on YouTube.

© 2015 Kate Gallison