Vox Dance Theatre

Kathleen is a friend I met through work. She is a rep for a furniture company. Last summer, I was telling her about dance camp and found out she used to be a dancer! Apparently, my chats with her about how much I love dance inspired her to start doing it again, and I got the chance to see her perform today. The company she dances with performed at Brand Library in Glendale. I wasn't sure how dance would work in a library but they have a small art gallery the performance took place surrounded by the latest art exhibit. The piece that impacted me the most was called 'Fimmine'. It is performed to music by Philip Glass and the dancers (all women) are costumed in wedding dresses. Glass' music always makes me feel a certain sense of dread, unease, anxiety. I find it hard to listen to, however I love to watch dance done to his music, the right choreography somehow provides a place of safety for some difficult emotions. Throughout the piece I kept feeling like something terrible had happened that I wasn't aware of, or was about to happen. In the last part of the piece, the women all take off their dresses and are wearing only their underclothes (bras, petticoats, etc) and each has a red sash around their waste, which we caught glimpses of earlier. This part of the movement worked so wonderfully with the music to bring the whole piece to a dramatic conclusion. I'm so happy I played a small part in getting Kathleen back to dance. She was so expressive and daring, it's an inspiration!

Sunshine Cleaning

This is a great little movie! The plot is about 2 sisters who get into business cleaning up crime scenes. I'm a 'procedural' junkie (CSI, L&O, etc) so I find the whole idea of this line of work gross yet fascinating. There are a few gruesome images in the movie but no dead bodies (they've all been removed by the time the sisters do their work). The heart of the movie is less the crime scenes than it is the family to which the sisters belong, which includes their father and the son of one of the women, as well as their mother who is no longer with them. This is a family that's down and out but trying in their own ways to make a life and the way that they manage that makes this a rewarding movie.

Living frugal in LA

My friend Gigi was interviewed on NPR by Mandalit del Barco about living frugally after the magazine that she was working at folded. I'm one of the 'friends who invite her to the symphony'!