Last night I watched Maytime again. My sense of it was quite different from my sense of it four years ago. First, I realized how dated some of it was. The girl's young fiance makes her choose between going to New York to study voice and try to have a career, and marrying him. That wouldn't happen today, certainly not among Millennials of a certain socioeconomic class. The girl would go to New York, launch her career, then "pair off" with someone she might want to marry with the understanding that the marriage would be a partnership in which instance by instance, they negotiated whose career was more important (that year, that month). Even after children arrived.
The first time I realized that we were into new territory in that regard was when a friend's daughter (who was born in 1970, so she's more Gen X) decided to go to graduate school in a different city from where her fiance was living, which was where, eventually, they planned to settle. That would have been unheard of in my day. If you were lucky enough to "nail" a partner that you were madly in love with, everything else just sort of fell by the wayside if necessary. I was thinking, for example, of my giving up singing at 30. I mean there were a myriad factors, most notably that I wasn't really willing to put in the work to take care of my instrument (although by the end I was singing very well from a technical standpoint). But in addition to needing to earn a living and get a college degree in my off hours (getting a degree in music never occurred to me; my one exposure to music theory bored me to tears) and the fact that "political dykes" didn't "invest themselves in a patriarchal art form like opera", there was the relationship. My partner would never have countenanced my doing anything that took me away from her for extended periods. In fact, I remember one of our ugliest quarrels (during the 20 years of our time together that I recall as "happy") took place when, while I was enrolled in college, taking a course called "Women in the Law", I got a chance to go to a conference on Women in the Law (in Detroit of all places) over a weekend. She kicked and screamed and yelled and we didn't speak to each other for the days leading up to my departure. I think the thaw broke when I got back but I never did anything similar again unless it was something required by work.
And getting back to Maytime, of course no doubt today, the older teacher/mentor's attraction to his pupil and his request that she marry him (the subject comes up when she tells him how much he has done for her and asks what she can do in return) would be loosely categorized under the heading of "sexual harrassment" (and "marry" probably wouldn't have been the word used, although it might have been; he seemed more interested in "possessing" her than in a roll in the hay).
On another subject, yesterday I went to a free conference called "Aging Artfully". It was a series of lectures and panel discussions aimed at showing seniors how engaging with the arts (as a participant, not a passive viewer or listener) can keep a person young and engaged. I didn't learn much there that would help me with my quest for venues to produce concerts in, but there was much that I identified with: the need to be seen, how being "seen" makes you an artist, the need to feel safe being "seen", the need to feel grounded, the need to feel safe but that "unfamiliar" and "unsafe" are not synonyms (a big one for me), and how listening to music can calm people with dementia.
Actually, I probably learned more techniques that I can use with my partner, many of which I already use: playing music for her on Youtube, showing her paintings and photographs on my iPad, looking through her old art books.
And they addressed ageism. One man mentioned that people (including older adults!) make stupid and disparaging jokes about "getting old" and "old people" of a sort that no one (at least no civilized person who moves in the circles we move in) would make about a racial or ethnic group.
One disappointment. I saw clips of a number of senior choruses but no performance classes (free or low fee) for seniors. That is what I would be most interested in. Coaching for solo performers ending in a concert (even just for each other and our friends).
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