Visitors from the North
You know it’s winter up north when your friends and relatives start showing up in Florida. Over the past few weeks, we’ve enjoyed getting together with a former colleague from San Francisco, entertaining two of the Chief Penguin’s former graduate students and their three almost adult children (do we feel old?), and catching up with the C.P.’s college roommate and wife from Potsdam (whose wedding we attended decades ago).
This past week we had a delightful time with my Chapel Hill sister and brother-in-law. They provided the impetus for breakfast at the beach, lunch at Thai Palace, live music (along with fresh fish) at Cortez Kitchen, dinner at our favorite new French restaurant, wandering the Sarasota Seafood Festival, and another tour around Selby Botanical Gardens. Note the emphasis on food; as Sally says, “we ate, talked, and walked,” and ate some more!
Performing Arts
At Music Monday, we were privileged to see and hear from Betsy Hudson Traba, principal flute in the Sarasota Orchestra, and Cheryl Losey Feder, harpist. Together they played several works, a couple of which had keyboard parts that had been adapted for harp. It was a treat.
Playwright Robert Schenkkan wrote two plays about Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Last year we saw the first, All the Way, and this past week we went to Asolo’s production of The Great Society. This second, equally superb play, deals with the tumultuous events (marches, riots, deaths, war in Vietnam) from 1965-68. It is both instructive and chilling to see this period from 50 years later and to be reminded of how much and how little progress has been made. Also disturbing in light of the current president. The play ends with a line from President-elect Nixon about making America great again. I wondered if it was in the original play.
We ended the week with the Sarasota Ballet. Under director Iain Webb, the company has made a specialty of presenting the works of choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton. We were pleased to see the lovely Valses nobles et sentimentales and look forward to more works by Ashton on future programs.
Footnote
The Florida Suncoast refers to the west-central coastal region from Tampa and St. Petersburg south to Bradenton and Sarasota which includes more than 20 miles of lovely sandy beaches on the Gulf of Mexico.
Note: All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved)
