ByGD
A year and a half later than expected, La Bohème will finally reappear at Seattle Opera. La Bohème was supposed to conclude the 2019/2020 opera season with a run of performances in May 2020. Well, we all know how that May turned out. Seattle Opera heroically transformed into a film company and put together a season unlike any other last year. But now they’re back on stage at McCaw Hall with the long-delayed La Bohème. I got to see it on the second weekend.
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Friday, September 24, 2021 may not go down in the history books as anything special, but it was a momentous occasion for me. It was my first night out since the pandemic started. The last time I attended a public event was Charlie Parker’s Yardbird at Seattle Opera on March 7, 2020, just days before the first lockdown. Under those circumstances, the experience itself would threaten to upstage whatever performance I went to see. Except that I saw the Singularly Cerrudo program at Pacific Northwest Ballet. And nothing upstages Cerrudo.
ByGD
After decades in Seattle, I realized I had never been to the suburban “city” of Lake Forest Park. All I knew about it was that it had the famous Third Place Books bookstore. The name references a theory that people need a place to live, a place to work, and a third place to gather and form a community. As far as I can tell, the bookstore is the only third place in that small bedroom community. So one day we drove out there, and it was everything we could have hoped for. But it was still all the way out in LFP. Later, they opened a new store in Ravenna, a neighborhood that I could walk to. (I would never walk to the bookstore, though, because books are heavy and I’d never make it home.) We were thrilled, and it has since become our favorite bookstore. This photo is our haul from our first visit to the Third Place in Ravenna.
ByGD
Just down the hill from my house, there used to be an old apartment building of the slumlord variety. When I moved into the neighborhood, at least one of the “homeless” Vietnam vets who panhandled near the Fremont Bridge actually lived in that building. Years later it caught fire and was boarded up afterwards. But people continued to live in there. It caught fire at least two more times (this photo is from the third) before the building was torn down. I never found out if anyone was hurt in any of the fires, because none of them ever made the news.
Now there are fancy three-story live-work townhouses in the space. I suppose this is where I should moralize about inequity or homelessness or urban renewal and good design. But I won’t. I’m just sharing a microhistory of a plot of land on a busy corner in Fremont.
