A Night to Remember (Or, That Awkward Moment When the Encores go for Longer than the Second Half)

So yesterday, I had some free tickets to see the Placido Domingo/Katherine Jenkins concert.

It was pleasant. It was a popera concert, and before you freak out too much, it was nothing like a concert of He-Who-Must-Not-Even-Be-Alluded-To-Let-Alone-Named (do yourself a favour and don't click the link).

There was some solid opera (for example it was 50 years to the day since Placido Domingo performed his first aria from Tosca, and then he performed it again and it was all terribly cute), and then there was some less solid opera. For example there was some West-Side Story.

But whatever works to keep the plebeians happy.

And whilst on the subject of keeping the plebeians happy, Katherine Jenkins. She had no fewer than four costume changes during the show. I cannot help but think that her gowns budget must be PHOENOMENAL.

My main beef stems from the encores. The concert had finished, and then Placido Domingo did an encore of some kind of spanish opera thingy. And then Katherine Jenkins sang Time to Say Goodbye, a song which she owns like her prison bitch, might I add. Then the orchestra played an overture. Then, since Placido Domingo was the headlining act, he sang again. But this time it was Besame Mucho - a tango standard. I was somewhat confused by that choice of closing piece.

I wasn't confused for long. Because on came Katherine Jenkins again. And she sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow. After Time to Say Goodbye, you can imagine how much of an anticlimax that was. And then of course the headlining act came back on for another song (we were back to opera by now). I though surely, we're done now.

Lol jks, we weren't. There was another duet, by which time I was expecting a nice rendition of Nessun Dorma to follow to round out the night.

There wasn't. They were actually legit done.

The encores ran for longer than the second half. Surely there's a law against that kind of thing.

Looking around the sitting room.

Speedy disclaimer - you may have to physically click on the photos in order to view them.

There's a little nook between the window and the door, next to one of the sofas. In that nook, there's a chair, and a tuba. Music books are stacked against the wall, and there's some sheet music peeking out of the top of the tuba's bell. A cat is sitting in the open tuba case, looking altogether too much at home. The sofa has its back to a curved bank of windows. Sometimes a sousaphone hides in the space between the sofas and the windows, but not today.



If you look past Sophia being a fool, you can see the chair and some of the music.

The sofa is a mahogany colour which matches the bookcases (from IKEA) housing the encyclopaedia collection. You can see them in the background if you look past Monica being an even bigger fool.



Then there are the bookcases. There are four all up, going from the windows to the miniature alcohol collection. On top of the first, is a big old boom box, as well as a box of badges.

Inside the box of badges are all kinds of cool things, like this shovel:



And all these badges from gigs and rallies my dad went to:



There's a tape collection, filled with all kinds of art rock (anyone for 'Peter and the Wolf' read by David Bowie?), the bookshelves, the atlases and history books, the 1957 Encyclopaedia Britannica and a reproduction of the 1779 original Britannica. Books of the year, Funk and Wagnalls' encyclopaedia, Encyclopaedia Judaica and more art books. A vase from the Chinese government. Various nicknacks from trips overseas.



A set of porcelain bells, also from the Chinese government, stemming from back when dad did tax law consulting work with the World Bank.



Perpendicular to the third bookcase is the other sofa. It faces the other, and between the two is a table adorned with all the books we've been given, but never really read. Here we have (l-r) Monica, Sarah, Elsa and Mersini, reading them because we were in the middle of a power outage. On the far left, you can see part of a quilt, and in the background, the dining room. Taking up the fourth bookcase are the dictionaries. From an 1800s encyclopaedic monster to the bilingual ones in various and numerous languages, as well as (my favourite) the compact Oxford English Dictionary, printed four pages per view, and sold with an accompanying magnifying glass. you can just glimpse them past Mersini.

Then there's the miniature alcohol collection. Dad would bring them back from trips overseas, and some of them are quite unique.





Leaning against the unit housing the miniatures is dad's suitcase, which has sat there for the past eleven years. It still has the dried out pens and business cards which were in it when it was first laid to rest there, once it became apparent that it wasn't going to be used any more.



There's a light above the table. I hung a disco ball from it as a joke, and it stayed as a cutesie fixture.



Next to the tuba, on the other side of the entrance from the front of the house, is the piano, and a wingbacked armchair which is the perfect size for curling up with a decent book. Against the back wall is a violin and it's accoutrements, and next to the sofa is a bassoon and its trappings.

A teddy bear sits on the bottom octave of the piano, overseeing its realm.