Bucks Playoff Game and Early Music Concerts

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Travalon and I started ours by cleaning on Friday morning, then we got on the road and drove to Milwaukee. We went to the lakeshore, since it was a beautiful day, and we checked out the stand where we thought they rented kites. In fact they only sell them, so we bought the cheapest one, a bat with evil red eyes, but there wasn’t enough wind to fly it. After our walk along the lakeshore, we went to the cathedral and explored it, then we had dinner at a Cuban restaurant, and finally we went to the Bucks playoff game. The game was very exciting – they beat the Celtics by 24 points – but the people around us were kind of obnoxious, mostly 20-something drunk white guys. Usually the crowd around us has been more mixed and more sober. This was like the F-bomb every other word, and one guy even wanted to get in a fight with me because Travalon told him to sit down! I guess he didn’t want to take on Travalon but figured he could take on a short, dowdy middle-aged woman. Whatever happened to chivalry? Fortunately he lost interest in me, and we watched the rest of the game in peace, except for screaming whenever Middleton or the Greek Freak did something amazing.

Saturday Travalon and I met Tiffy and Rich for coffee, then Tiffy and I helped her sister buy tons and tons of fruit to feed to a bunch of teenagers. We took a walk with Travalon along the jetty in Tenney Park, then he went off to do his own thing while we met Rich for dinner at Edo Japanese Restaurant. Tiffy and I went to a Wisconsin Baroque Society concert at St. Andrews, and it was wonderful. The coolest part might have been when five high schoolers who have been learning to play viols performed songs by Byrd and Gibbons with a couple of singers. They were surprisingly good, considering that they have only been studying the viol since September. I’m just excited to see a new generation getting into early music.

Yesterday after Mass, Travalon, Tiffy, and I went to the Chocolaterian for brunch, then we took a walk at Pheasant Branch. I went to a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion with a bunch of choir people, and it was so long that they had a two-hour intermission for dinner. (Hockey Girl and I tried an Indian restaurant called Mirch Masala, and I really liked it.) Although these were, for the most part, not professionals but students and community members who sing for fun, I enjoyed the performance a lot. One soprano soloist in particular was amazing: Sarah Guttenberg. So if she ever becomes famous, you read about her here first.

Famous Hat