Window Treatment

My birthday celebration continued on the following day with a sunset drive downtown for a delicious early supper at The Temple Bar, where the hot Medjool dates stuffed with goat cheese and prosciutto and drizzled with a balsamic reduction continue to be my favorite menu item and their polenta dish of the day always pleases.

We then joined other opera lovers at the Pickford Film Center's Limelight Theatre for a marvelous production of Giacomo Puccini's beloved La Boheme by the Royal Opera House, one of the Opera in Cinema offerings this season. These Royal Opera House live cinema relays bring world-class opera to 1,1000 cinemas in 29 countries, and I think whoever came up with the concept is a genius!

It was a very emotional evening for us, as we'd seen a live production by Seattle Opera some years ago, knew that the ending was not a happy one, and were deeply moved, as always, by Puccini's lyrical music. (This brief YouTube video of The Royal Opera's 2008 production of La Boheme brings you a taste of the incomparable music and the same sets we saw -- enjoy!)

On a lighter note, many thanks for your birthday wishes, and for the positive response to my username change to Connections! I'd thought about using my first name, but there was already a Blipfoto member using that -- albeit just once. "Connections" kept popping up in my mind as I pondered various possibilities, and if I had to choose one journal entry to represent what Blipfoto has meant to me, it would be the one last October that I titled Connections.

And there are more Blipfoto connections to come, in three dimensions and real time, this year!