Category: music
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Hallelujah!
Happy Holidays! I hope everyone who celebrates had a wonderful Christmas. There are so many traditions associated with this time of year, and I’d love to hear some of yours. One tradition is the performance of G.F. Handel’s fabulous oratorio, Messiah. We had the pleasure of hearing a brilliant rendition last week here in Toronto.…
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And the band played on …
This piece was prompted by a question on Facebook’s Pride and Prejudice page, where someone openly doubted whether it would have been likely for Darcy’s Pemberley to be shown off to random visitors in the early 1800s (as occurs in Pride and Prejudice, of course). Well, of course it was. Visitors came then, as they…
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The Perils and Pitfalls of “Writing Like Austen” (Part One)
I’m always being asked how I can write in Austen’s style. Trouble is, I don’t know how I do it. Though I suspect it has something to do with having been a professional ghostwriter for 15 years – and learning how to inhabit celeb’s/other writers’ voices – and something to do with being a musician…
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Pride and Prejudice with “& Juliet” Style
& Juliet is a 2019 coming-of-age jukebox musical. The story focuses on a “what if” scenario [Geez! Are not all Austenesque literature also “What If” scenarios?] where Juliet does not die at the end of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In it, Juliet learns Romeo has had other relationships (both F & M), so she backs…
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The Land of the Billy Bookcase
As recently as 2010, I lived with my family in the Land of the Billy Bookcase. We had three of them in the large room that served as both the laundry room and my office. There were two installed in the family room, and there was one in our bedroom. And that was just the…