I worked at home today, and was supposed to meet Adrienne for lunch from 1-2. However, last night Robert told me that he really wanted to meet me for lunch before his flight to Atlanta at 1:20. I called Adrienne and post-poned our lunch once again. She was totally cool with it, which is no surprise.
I met Robert at the Quizno’s by the Outlet Mall, and we had a quick lunch. He was so self conscious about his acne, which was stressing him out with the timing of this trip. He is such a sweet man. We hugged good-bye, and he went to the airport, and I headed out to Capital Blvd.
I found “Peach Auto & Body” after making a u-turn on Capital Blvd. It ended up being in that weird split of Capital by the Dunkin Donuts. I got an estimate of approximately $285 to repair my bumper. Coming out of there, I turned the wrong way on a one way street, and veered to the side of the road when I saw a car coming around the curve head on to me. NOT GOOD.
Once home, I checked in with Pam, the lady who hit my car. She was real nice. She apologized for all the convenience of having to run around for the estimate and scheduling the repair. I like her sense of humor. Noting that the check probably wouldn’t come for another week or so, she said, “Just so you know Friday’s my last day. So if you need to talk to someone about this after that here is the contact…” I said, “Oh no! Really?” And she said, “Yeah, I hit two cars while driving their van and they fired me!” Then she laughed, and said, “No, just kidding.”
At about five minutes before our scheduled 3:00 meeting, Cassandra asked me if we could once again reschedule. I showed her the work I had already done, and she seemed genuinely thrilled that the work was done, and impressed with the methodology. She then said the felt bad that I had done all the work. I asked her to share it with Lila and to think about the criteria for the three levels of effectiveness that I devised, as I’m not 100% satisfied with it.
I met Mary at BTI for Turandot at 7:00. We didn’t dish too many people while waiting for it to start, but had our moments. We had alcohol to offset the sweets — she, wine & M&Ms, me, Crown & Diet and a white chocolate chunk cookie. Yum.
Mary just laughed and laughed when she saw our names in the donor list in the program. It said, “John and Mary Soto Martin.” She said that she can’t wait to show that to her mom. She said her mom is always saying, “Mary, that boy is so nice, and so handsome. Can’t you convert him?”
We did our usual scrutiny of the subtitles, and found no less than 7 typos. One was “died” for “dried,” one was “live” for “life,” “lover” for “love,” and a couple of others, the biggest being right at the climax of the opera, where the diva gets kissed for the first time in her life, and she exclaims, “What have you done?” Unfortunately, the subtitle said, “What have you didn’t?” People in the audience actually chuckled.
Also, toward the end of the first act, the subtitles just switched over to what looked like a PowerPoint screen. You could tell they were having trouble getting it back up. I was whispering to Mary, “Uh-oh, APARs are up 20%…” Then one of those Windows error boxes with the yellow triangle with the exclamation point came up, then it went blank, and then the little pointer cursor was moving around on a black background. It was all quite distracting, as the opera continued on of course, and for about 5-7 minutes the mostly English speaking audience, of course, had no idea what the beautiful sounds coming out of the singers’ mouths meant.
I started thinking, “So when they do get this thing rebooted, I hope they have someone up there who knows Italian who can figure out where they currently are and get that thing back in sync. Not that most of us would know if it was in sync or not.
The cast of this opera was huge, at one point I counted over 50 people on the stage. The caliber was quite exquisite though, and as soon as the curtain went down, the audience was on their feet.
I walked Mary to her car, because there was a questionable character who had parked in front of her. When we got to her car, she hit her fob to unlock her doors, which on her Saturn also blinks the headlights. They came on illuminating that character in front of his pissing on the side of the sidewalk into the bushes.
Once in my car, I called Joe, but got his voice mail. I told him that I was going to skip meeting them at Bogart’s and just meet them at CCs between 11:30 and 12:00. I went home with the intention of packing, but didn’t. I got to CCs at about 11:15, and it was dead in there.
Patrick stopped to say hello, but things have definitely changed with him. I don’t have munch in common with him at all, and he just doesn’t talk. Fortunately he didn’t hang around long to prolong the awkwardness of it all.
Close to midnight, Joe arrived with his entourage. I met them, but they wanted to sit right up by the stage for the drag show, and I didn’t want to. I “took a few twirls” a few times, but it pretty much was the same old, same old there. Gary was there, and getting totally wasted. I could have probably taken advantage of him, but left it alone.
I got home at about 2:00, and finally packed. Late night.