Rigoletto, Orchestral Performances, and Medical School

This week has been a fun, but busy one (and it's only Thursday!) Last Thursday Katie and I discovered a new fun thing to do in New York City. Our friends, Mario and Elly (the Italians whose wedding we attended in Italy last year), took us down to Chelsea (around 8th Ave. and 23rd street) to see art gallery openings. I didn’t realize it, but this area of Manhattan has well over 100 galleries. Any given Thursday between 6-8pm several galleries will be having openings for new artists. You can tell which ones are doing this because of the small crowds of people gathered around outside. Inside the gallery (sometimes a small as a small bedroom), the gallery owners are usually pouring FREE wine and people are milling about and pondering the art. All the art is modern, but often quite striking. It is also very expensive (like $20,000 per piece). It was a lot of fun, and there was wine!

Monday through Wednesday afternoons I played with a group called the Seniors' Orchestra. I was subbing for an acquaintance of mine, and was the youngest person in the orchestra by at least 20 years. It is a group for retired union musicians, many of whom played with the New York Philharmonic. The first-chair horn player was the principal horn player of the Philharmonic some time ago. It was a good horn section and we played some hard literature (Sibelius Violin Concerto among other things), but some crowd pleasers, too (a medley from the Lerner and Loewe musical “My Fair Lady.” On Monday and Wednesday nights, I played with the Graduate Center Contemporary Ensemble—performing all new music written by my colleagues at the Grad Center. Tonight I go up to the Bronx to play Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” with the Bronx Opera Company. So, it’s been a busy playing week for me as well.

Katie, who had been waitlisted at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, just found out she was accepted. YAY KATIE!! So, this program begins May 31 and she is scrambling to fill out her paperwork and buy books. She had also been accepted at Long Island University’s Medical School, but SUNY is a public university and LIU is private, so SUNY will be much less expensive for us. The programs are comparable in terms of rigor and prestige. So now begins the long, arduous road to becoming a Physican Assistant. She will go 2 years straight (no breaks for summer), taking 1 year for “bookwork,” what is called the didactic year, and one year for hands-on work, the clinical year. She starts off this month with Anatomy (where she will work on dissecting real human cadavers….eewwwww) and Microbiology. Look for her updates in the coming year.