The symphony awesomeness

I got to see the Seattle Symphony perform Holst’s The Planets tonight.

omg omg omg

The tiz’s boyfriend “Awesome” (oddly close to his real name) treated the tiz and me tonight with tickets to the show. She and he and “Lurch” and “Pretty Boy Modeling School” (some of his friends along with Justin Timberlake) were in our messy basement apartment this afternoon and he asked if I wanted to go as they were looking at tickets online.

I shuffled my feet and mumbled something about not being able to afford it (because of course I wanted to go — it’s the friggin’ Planets), and he put in, “Oh I’m buying.” So of course I shouted “okay!” because I can accept gifts with grace . . .

Lurch and PBMS and I got dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory downtown near the Sculpture Park. The food was mediocre as usual, but there is a lot of it, and I like that the booths are made of the headboards of beds. Then they raced me to the opera, and I met an agitated tiz at Benaroya Hall on 3rd and University just as the bell calling us to our seats rang.

Benaroya looks like a big stereo speaker from the outside, a large curving arch of small panels of glass windows pushing out into the street. The Remembrance Garden for soldiers is below it, and while I’m not quite sure of the connection between the symphony and slain soldiers, it is quite beautiful.

I do love Seattle and the Seattle Symphony for reasons other cities may hate it; there is very little snobbery here. It’s only within the last 10 years or so with the dotcom boom that a lot of really wealthy people have made this place their home (come on, we only got an H&M a couple of months ago), and because of that you can feel as if you have a place at the symphony no matter your social standing.

In Chicago people went to the symphony in furs and heels, and while some do it here as well, others come in jeans and sneakers (or dusty combat boots, in my case) and are perfectly comfortable. The tiz look very pretty in gray slacks and some sweater-concoction, and Awesome had on dark jeans and a slim blazer and looked very dashing.

We were on the third tier, and boy that is high up. We were right in the front row and as we stepped into the tier and saw the little people way below us on the floor and nothing but a low, knee high railing between us and free-fall, plus the open ceiling high above us, vertigo stepped in. I have a good head for heights, but for a moment the whole hall began sliding to the left.

Beethoven’s First was the first piece, and then after intermission came The Planets. Mars (the Roman god of war) is of course my favorite and always will be, because it makes feel like going out and slaughtering my enemies (not contingent upon the fact that I’d have to find enemies first). I was on the edge of my seat and panting by the end. The tiz’s favorite is Jupiter (the god of joy), and I was just grinning through all of that.

But it was Saturn that actually most impressed me at this performance. I think that is because I found out that Saturn’s corresponding god is “the bringer of old age”, and this piece was sinister and relentless-sounding, the slow, steady beat inexorable.

The great thing about going to the symphony is you get to actually sit inside the music. The acoustics have of course been perfected at any decent symphony hall, and so the sound encases you from every direction. I had a marvelous time.

In other news I’m working on revising the budget for Pack Parachute for the board to approve, and thank goodness I have Julia, my financial consultant, around to help me. She’s already put together this very nice report, and I’m just working on some numbers. It makes me nervous, working on the financials, because I have no background in them, but the best way to learn is by doing . . . and finding lots and lots of smart people to help me.

Julia fell out of the sky one day via the VetWow website, and like anything that comes into the VetWow site that doesn’t directly have to do with helping a client, Susan or Laura sent her on to me. I tracked her down to LA just a couple of weeks ago, and thanks to the wonders of Skype (military folks do love their Skype) I’ve discovered that she is a goldmine (a very hardworking goldmine).

Julia’s young with short dark hair, a seven-year background in budgets and financials, and is as fiendishly devoted to Star Trek as I am (oops! that slipped out early!). We’re trying to figure out a way to remotely share Pack Parachute’s accounts, but we need a secure network to do that, and that is item #95907 in my to-do list. In the meantime, I am looking forward to meeting her in person in in July when she visits Seattle. I have specifically scheduled the first advocate training to take place that weekend.