Missy | November 17, 2007

Me, c. 2000 (I think). *

Blogversary musings.

I’m trying to remember what was going on in November of 2000. I suppose there was nothing else but the election. Have I been blogging under only one administration? That seems so unlikely. I’m sure many of you are all, “But it feels like Bush has been president FOREVER!!!” but I must say it feels like I have been blogging longer. It’s true I was boring and clueless about writing and other things up until about, gosh, what had to be at least 2004, but I could swear I had it together during the Clinton years! (And I know, technically, he was still president at the time.)

Look how far we’ve come.

I’m always confusing timelines in my head. Such as, the friendships I had in graduate school happened before I ever moved to DC and was in a relationship with that one guy, who yet never even knew me as Missy-who-is-also-blogger, and how I was in that other relationship while I was just a baby blogger (and with whom I experienced 9/11) even though it feels like that relationship happened years earlier. How did anybody meet anybody and how did we learn things? (Actually, I’d been online in some capacity since 1994.) Somewhere in there I did some theater work, and some dance performances; I took up running and then promptly abandoned it for yoga, then abandoned that; and what’s the point of all this trying-to-remember-timelines anyway?

Every now and then I spend a half hour or so reading through a piece of my life–a few months as documented here and, sadly, nowhere else. I often find myself laughing, either because I was so stupid, or because I made a clever observation, or because a post brought something enjoyable (or not-so-enjoyable) from the depths of my memory and into sharp focus. I guess that’s the reason I started blogging and the reason why I continue to do it. I don’t use it as therapy, exhibition, or to brag; or to fill a gap in social commentary or make the world a better place. I do it because I am selfish; and if I didn’t do it a lot of who I used to be would be lost forever. I guess this means that as long as I have fingers (or perhaps some sort of new-fangled voice recognition device in the event I lose my fingers and don’t want to learn to type with my toes), then I shall blog.

* This could actually be 1999, I’m afraid. I really have no way of knowing. But I very much like this photo because I am positioned between a trash can and my unattended backpack, completely blocking anything recognizable of the White House, wearing a tank top that really flatters my midsection.

Category: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Tags:

Missy | November 15, 2007

Not today.

Listen Missy facts of the day: I have never listened to Amy Winehouse and I have never watched Project Runway.

Also, today my front door was painted with an oil-based paint and now I’m breathing in so many fumes that I am seriously (not jokingly!) wondering if I am doing some brain damage by staying in my apartment. (I’m on my way to BAM, but that’s for only a 70 minute performance.) I touched the door, too, and now there’s a fingerprint sullying the whole shiny new thing. I can’t not touch wet paint. This explains my crappy-looking manicure.

Category: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Tags:

Missy | November 8, 2007

A still from Opus Jazz.

In 1958 Jerome Robbins created a dance piece, N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz, that featured seductive jazz and an interracial pas de deux. (Wait, come back! Just because I used the word ‘dance’ doesn’t mean you should stop reading.) The New York City Ballet revived it a couple of years ago. The candy-colored sweatshirts and sneakers are, I confess, what pushed me away from ever seeing it. Two NYCB dancers, however, conceived of a different interpretation of the piece, one that involved natural settings in the city after which it is named. The result is a quietly sexy sort of work; one of its movements, “Passage for Two”, will have its premiere at NYCB’s winter gala (I’m not going) and the film will be screening in full at the Guggenheim in January. Lots of info here, including a video teaser of the “Passage for Two” movement shot on the High Line and a behind-the-scenes doc. I promise you need not know a thing about dance.

[Via New York Magazine.]

Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off
Tags:

Missy | November 3, 2007

Future home of Goldman Sachs, thieving my north-facing workplace view of Manhattan. (A colleague has suggested a water balloon retaliatory measure.)

Okay, where were we? Fall has been a little exhausting. I have immersed myself in, among other things, the fall dance season. First there was Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses company that offered a broad mix of pieces across its two programs (I saw only one of them), by far the best being the company’s namesake, Morphoses, an abstract one-act for two couples set to Ligeti and featuring Wheeldon muse Wendy Whelan. The bookend phrases of the piece use all four dancers to merge minimalist floor work with an intricate, fluidly-connected pas de quatre. Ooh, it was nice.

Over the next week or so I twice saw American Ballet Theater, first at its gala opening and later to see the new Jorma Elo and Benjamin Millepied works. The gala ended up being a mild disappointment largely because I was excepting a different pas de deux (the more famous, and one of my all-time favorites) from The Leaves Are Fading, set to lush Dvor

Category: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tags: