Friday night

When it rains, it pours. Friday mid-day I got a call from the rabbi at ToL asking if I was available to lead services that night (someone got sick, I think); I had to decline because I was -- for only the third time ever -- helping to lead Friday services at my own synagogue. Oops. :-) (I'll be at ToL in two weeks, so I didn't really miss out. I hope he was able to find someone.)

The service went ok. There were some imbalances in the distribution of parts, and the borrowed cantor (from another synagogue, and it was only her second time with us) ended up leading parts that I thought were going to be led by members of our committee. Oh well; it came off ok. I wish they had gone the extra step of letting our own members with the relevant skills fill the cantorial spots, but I guess that's touchy with some people. My part went fine, though I was confident that it would.

At the oneg the aforementioned cantor, without any provocation, complimented me on my Hebrew and then told me she was glad I was there with her during a couple of the sung parts. I'm not sure what the latter was about; she's a professional singer, so it's not that she needed my voice for support or anything. Maybe she just meant that she liked having the person singing next to her being on key. Or maybe she was just glad to have someone from the congregation (who knows the subtle musical clues) up there. Whatever; I can take a compliment without having to deconstruct it. :-)

I learned something interesting during this conversation: as part of the process for applying for admission to cantorial school, you have to correctly chant an unfamiliar Torah passage. I'm not sure how much time you get to prepare. Wow; I figured that would be a skill you'd have to demonstrate, oh, around the end of your first year, not before they even let you in the door.

(I'm not about to go to cantorial school, though I would like to learn trope. I have a book; I haven't gotten very far yet. I want to chant torah again, even if I learn the next one by rote and not because I fully understand the notation. I pinged my rabbi about this again last week; we'll see if it results in an assignment.)

I got to see Patti, one of our members who is now away at rabbinical school in Philly. They're on winter break, so she came back to Pittsburgh. I wish we'd had more time to talk. It's not clear how long she'll be in town; she's going to wing it, depending on weather.

Mishkan T'fillah (5)

This Shabbat was day 6 with Mishkan T'fillah, the new (draft) siddur. I don't have a lot of new observations this week; mostly more re-inforcement of previous observations (and one new experiment we tried).

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I hope that I'll be able to borrow a copy of this siddur while writing up my formal evaluation. It would be handy to be able to refer to specific texts, page numbers, etc. I hope they'll welcome that level of feedback.

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weekend

Last night tangerinpenguin, Steve, and Pam came over for dinner and gaming. We ended up playing Iron Dragon (after rolling a die due to indecision). Pam had not played before, but she picked it up quickly and did well. It was a fun game, and while I wasn't close to winning when Steve hit 250 points, I didn't feel like I had played a bad game.

Embla surprised me: she actually came into the dining room and accepted attention from Pam. Pam had never been to our house before and hadn't met Embla previously (I'm not sure if she's met the other two); Embla is generally very "shy" (read: reclusive) when dealing with anyone new (or a crowd of any significant size). She's been getting better, and this was another milestone. (I've had Embla for five years, and she was a two-year-old stray of uncertain background then. So she's lived most of her life with me and knows I'll take care of her, but she's still very skittish.)

Today we had lunch with ralphmelton and lorimelton. We geeked about D&D. :-)

Tonight Dani and I are going to see the Reduced Shakespeare Company in a show called "The Reducers". They're covering a large number of classic works of literature in a small amount of time. (I think the run time is a bit under 2 hours, including an intermission.) The reviews I've seen have been positive, so this should be fun. We ended up with free tickets, and they even look to be good seats! (I was trying to score free tickets for "Man of La Mancha" but missed and ended up with these instead. Which is fine.)

We saw their "Complete Works of Shakespeare in 43 Minutes", or whatever it's called, a few years ago, and that was a lot of fun except for one part that was in highly-questionable taste. But it's probably pretty hard to do a tasteful parody of Titus Andronicus, so I suppose that can be forgiven.

It looks like we're going to see LOTR on Erev Xmas.