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Da Weekend
Sep. 21st, 2026 08:29 amSaturday we went into Manhattan for an afternoon showing of "You Had to Be There", a documentary movie about the Toronto Godspell. See, the musical "Godspell" initially opened in NYC in 1971 to rave reviews, and the producers wanted to cash in on its success while the hype was hot, so they started setting up other performing companies in other cities around the world. One of those cities was Toronto, where they held an open casting call with thousands of auditioners, from whom they selected their ten performers, mostly completely-unknown young actors. Including (after a few replacements) some names you might know: Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Paul Shaffer, Mike Myers, Dave Thomas... a large fraction of the talent that became "Saturday Night Live", "SCTV", and other comic-and-dramatic works of the past fifty years. (One name you probably don't know, Avril Chown, appeared equally talented, but her next project after "Godspell" was a comedy TV series in which she was sexually assaulted, so she left the business.) There isn't much actual footage surviving from the Toronto show, but the documentarians gathered all the surviving members of that cast, along with a lot of others influenced by them, to have them tell stories about how it all happened. Except for Avril's sobering story, it's a heartwarming celebration of friendship, art, and talent.
After the movie, we got dinner and headed uptown to an early-music concert by New York Polyphony, a male vocal quartet we've heard a number of times before. This was the 20th anniversary of their group's founding, so they put together a "best of" concert, mostly 15th and 16th century. As always, their vocal quality, intonation, and interpretation were impeccable. The concert was held in St. Mary the Virgin (aka "Smoky Mary's"), a beautiful church with weird acoustics: any sound anywhere in the nave is equally audible anywhere else in the nave, with no directionality, so if you didn't know the music was coming from those four guys standing near the front, you'd have a hard time figuring it out. And, as we've remarked before at this venue, anything fast or rhythmically intricate, anything other than strict homophony, tends to turn to mud. It was a gorgeous wash of sound, with an occasional comprehensible word.
Sunday morning around 8 AM the contractors arrived to replace the through-the-wall air conditioner that's been serving our dining and living rooms for fifteen years with one of the new "mini-splits", a heat pump that provides both heating and cooling. It is so quiet! We can actually hold a conversation or watch TV without switching the A/C to "fan-only" mode! I had persuaded the contractors to also remove the old air conditioner and fill the hole it left in the wall, but wall repair isn't their specialty, so they didn't have the equipment and materials handy to clean it up properly. So there's a rectangle of plywood on the outside, and a rectangle of sheetrock on the inside, to which we'll need to apply spackle, joint compound, more spackle, and paint. Which isn't all that difficult, and we've done it before.
After the contractors left, we went out for dinner at a Mexican place in our neighborhood, then across the street to the local indie movie theatre to watch "Coyote vs. Acme", which is silly fun (with political overtones about the evil mega-corporation experimenting on cartoon characters in an analogue of the Tuskegee experiments).
Monday. Back to work.
After the movie, we got dinner and headed uptown to an early-music concert by New York Polyphony, a male vocal quartet we've heard a number of times before. This was the 20th anniversary of their group's founding, so they put together a "best of" concert, mostly 15th and 16th century. As always, their vocal quality, intonation, and interpretation were impeccable. The concert was held in St. Mary the Virgin (aka "Smoky Mary's"), a beautiful church with weird acoustics: any sound anywhere in the nave is equally audible anywhere else in the nave, with no directionality, so if you didn't know the music was coming from those four guys standing near the front, you'd have a hard time figuring it out. And, as we've remarked before at this venue, anything fast or rhythmically intricate, anything other than strict homophony, tends to turn to mud. It was a gorgeous wash of sound, with an occasional comprehensible word.
Sunday morning around 8 AM the contractors arrived to replace the through-the-wall air conditioner that's been serving our dining and living rooms for fifteen years with one of the new "mini-splits", a heat pump that provides both heating and cooling. It is so quiet! We can actually hold a conversation or watch TV without switching the A/C to "fan-only" mode! I had persuaded the contractors to also remove the old air conditioner and fill the hole it left in the wall, but wall repair isn't their specialty, so they didn't have the equipment and materials handy to clean it up properly. So there's a rectangle of plywood on the outside, and a rectangle of sheetrock on the inside, to which we'll need to apply spackle, joint compound, more spackle, and paint. Which isn't all that difficult, and we've done it before.
After the contractors left, we went out for dinner at a Mexican place in our neighborhood, then across the street to the local indie movie theatre to watch "Coyote vs. Acme", which is silly fun (with political overtones about the evil mega-corporation experimenting on cartoon characters in an analogue of the Tuskegee experiments).
Monday. Back to work.
