31-MAR-20 The Last Day of March

[DiveMilw]

Well, March 2020 certainly has been interesting, hasn't it? 

I think I'm glad the month is over, if only because that means we are a little bit closer to the end of social distancing.  I know I'm glad to have the forum and our occasional discussions.  

Many places have added streaming to help entertain us.  The latest email I got from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney is that they now have three webcams and some zookeeper chats.  You can find them here at Taronga TV.  What is nice about this is that Sydney is 13 hours ahead of me so I can watch their animals when it is night here.

[scenicdesign71]

I finally watched the Met's entire LePage Ring cycle online over four nights last week, along with Susan Froemke's making-of documentary, Wagner's Dream, on Sunday.

At that time it seemed as though their entire video archive had been opened up for free viewing, at least if you entered it through a certain slightly roundabout sequence of pages.  But now they've either closed the gap, or I'm just misremembering those specific steps and therefore not navigating them properly, because I can no longer seem to get past the subscription paywall.

They are, however, offering a free week to lure new VOD subscribers.  And if even that seems like too much of a commitment, they're also streaming one free opera every night (which remains viewable-on-demand until the following night), so maybe I'll tune back in and catch a few more.  It's been a very long time -- childhood, more or less -- since I really explored opera with any regularity; my total in-person trips to the Met since I moved here thirty years ago number roughly three.  (I fared only slightly better with City Opera: maybe four or five visits over the years, and at least one of those was a musical -- 110 in the Shade, which first brought Karen Ziemba to my attention as a radiant and sympathetic Lizzie -- while another was the recent Candide revival a year or two ago, whatever genre you want to call that; operetta, I guess).