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Monday, May 7, 2007

The Arts, the Jazz, the Debates, the Veto

Had I done any blogging at all last week, here are some things I might have blogged about.

Had I done any blogging at all last week, here are some things I might have blogged about. Curiously, I seemed to spend much of the week choosing arts over politics. And I found myself more interested in the NBA than usual, which sometimes happens when the Jazz are in the playoffs.

Monday, American Fork: The family went to American Fork High School for the American Fork symphony's concert. This one featured youth soloists from around the valley, plus a couple of numbers by the orchestra alone. To make a longer story short, I missed most of the concert. Those of you who were there, that was my two-year-old who yelled "I need a see Mama" between the second and third numbers, just before the music started, from the hall outside, as some concertgoers opened the doors to make a late entry. He had earned his exit from the auditorium earlier by his excessive happiness, but at this point that happiness was gone. Shortly thereafter, so was he. He and I went home, got the forgotten diaper bag, watched a bit of the Jazz game, and returned in time to watch the last part of the last number from the open backstage door.

Tuesday, Washington, DC: Presented with Congress' offer to fund the troops in Iraq if the he would agree to lose the war and also provide about $25 billion in pork -- yes, I know they didn't word it that way, but they came surprisingly close -- the President vetoed HR 1591, the emergency supplemental appropriations bill. Good for him. No surprises here, unless you actually believed some of the things a lot of candidates said before and after the November 2006 election about supporting the troops and changing the pork-addicted culture of Congress. I confess a slight sense of relief connected to the fact that President Bush actually vetoed something. That doesn't happen every . . . year.

Wednesday, Washington, DC: Congress failed to override the President's veto. No surprises here. They could buy enough votes to pass the legislation, but not the two-thirds majority to override a veto.

Thursday, Pleasant Grove, not Simi Valley, California: I blew off the gathering of ten Republican presidential candidates for one of those early, relatively unimportant and uninteresting debates (in which Mitt Romney did well, reportedly, but hardly anyone cares). I went instead to see three family members perform in the Utah Children's Choir's spring concert at Pleasant Grove Junior High. The concert was superb, perhaps the best I've attended with this ensemble. Between numbers, I quietly and discretely used my cell phone's Web capability to get score updates from the Jazz-Rockets game.

Friday, American Fork, not Salt Lake City: While Sean Hannity and Rocky Anderson debated each other in Salt Lake City, I volunteered as a ticket taker for American Fork Junior High's musical, Seussical. My daughter is Who # 5 in one of the two casts, and it was opening night. The sets and costumes were very Seuss, as were some of the the hairdos, which were quite distinctive and probably painful. The songs and minimal spoken lines do a good job of incorporating various Seuss classics into a single delightful, coherent narrative. The cast and the large audience were energetic and enthusiastic, to say the least. As a whole, the production was quite satisfactory, and there were some excellent individual performances. The fact that the Cat in the Hat's distinctive hat was missing somewhere backstage for most of the evening (as I later learned) didn't diminish the Cat's antics one bit. They cast two Cats, by the way, and they're twins; the director exploited this cleverly at one or two points in the production.

Saturday, Houston: I guess I could have watched the Hannity/Anderson debate video, overly politicized fellow that I am, but instead I watched most of the Jazz game on KJZZ and was very happy with the outcome (victory in Game 7!). I'll watch the debate later and possibly report.

This concludes my crude medley of arts, national politics, and the NBA, which really only interests me during the playoffs.

Copyright 2007 by David Rodeback.
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