Of secret gardens and shepherd’s pie and big relief
My brother came up last night to see The Secret Garden at Greensboro College, so I met him there and he came back and stayed with me last night. The show was really quite good, and I liked the music, even though I’d never heard most of the show before. It makes a lot of changes in the story (from what I remember of reading the book, which I need to go back and re-read now), but they’re usually for the sake of spreading out the story among the cast, it seemed. I seem to recall the book being largely about Mary and how she changed over the course of tending to the garden and helping with Coin’s recovery, whereas the musical made a much bigger deal about Archibald Craven’s loss of his wife Lily, and all the backstory on Mary’s family’s time in India was told in dream-like sequences that were quite well-done. I’ll have to keep Greensboro College in mind when thinking about arts events to try out in the future.
We slept in a little this morning (I had my big departmental seminar yesterday, so I felt justified in taking a little time off 
) and went to the Celtic Cafe for lunch – very tasy Ireland-inspired meals, complete with soda bread. He’s now off to Raleigh to see another show (which some friends of his are performing in) and I’m back at work. It was fun to spend some time together, especially since he’ll be moving in the next several months, perhaps quite far away…
Speaking of my seminar, it went really well – I didn’t get nearly as worked up about this one as I have in the past, though I still did feel like throwing up right before Dan introduced me. I was presenting a lot of new data, which is awesome, but it also meant that I’d not presented it before and the first time is always a bit rough in spots, trying to communicate what I think is important without getting bogged down in all the details. But I think it well ok, and I got some interesting ideas to think about, plus the relief of that being my last departmental talk until I defend my thesis. Yikes.
Oh, and I’m over halfway through The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl – I’ll probably finish it this weekend. It was really slow going for the first 40-50 pages, but it really picked up and now I’m quite sucked in. I’ll save any further comments for once I finish the book.
(Sorry this post is so ADD, I feel like it’s jumping everywhere – it’s kinda all-encompassing for my life in the past week or so)