At long last, the moment you've all-- forgotten about?

I know, I know, I promised you all a song LONG ago, and all this time and I still haven't posted any... well, here I am, finally.

So, for anyone who doesn't know, several months ago, I took nominations and votes on a song to sing, and the one selected by the Followers was "The Rose of Tralee," a traditional Irish song.  (Incidentally, I have a lot of Irish in my background, so... hey, that works!)  

Note on the lyrics: Originally the song is in first-person and sung by a guy, which was a bit... awkward. So it's been tweaked, and as a result, is not entirely grammatically correct.  

I recorded the song several times and didn't realize until much later that whenever I sang words with a "P" at the beginning, I kind of... puffed... into the microphone, and Noise was a result.  But do I want to do the song over again?  Nooooo.  I don't get opportunity that often (i.e., everyone in the house has to be GONE, and it takes Time), so it is what it is.  

Also, this is NOT my best singing... I'm not sure why, as the key was plenty easy to do, but I just found singing it kind of blah or something.  I don't know.  But here it is... such as it is.

Aaaaaaand-- BONUS!-- I decided to Embrace my Inner Opera Singer and sing something from Phantom!  So here is "Think of Me," which (like "On My Own" and Les Miserables) was my introduction to Phantom of the Opera, and I heard the song before I even knew of the existence of the musical.  So it's special, from the days before I was a fan.  (NOT a phan, guys.  That's just gross.)

However, of course, this is not my best singing of this song either, and although I did sing the rest of it (including the cadenza and all that), I was so ill-satisfied with it that I just cut it out entirely. Heh heh.  Somehow, when I go to record a song, my voice is just never in the right mood.  But! If I get vocal training next year, as I am hoping to do, I can re-record this song and post it for comparison like, see how much better I've gotten!

At least, that's what I'm hoping will happen. And that for now, you won't wince as much as I'm doing.

Just promise you won't laugh.

A note on the lyrics:  It has been said that Andrew Lloyd Weber changes the lyrics to this song as frequently as he changes his socks.  What I sang here is no particular one version, but rather a mixture of different ones that I liked.  (Except I forgot and sang "once in a while" instead of "every so often", which I prefer.  Sigh... oh well.)

A note on the picture: No, I do not approve of the movie version of this musical, but... the picture is pretty.  So.  Y'know.

And, for any of you who may not have heard the whole song before... do it.

Movie Review: Love & Friendship (2016)

Hello, my lovelies!

(One would think that I'd been watching a lot of Emma Approved lately, but in fact I have not.)

I know it's been simply ages since I've posted, especially taking into consideration that I meant to post much earlier with a follow-up to all the hype about Lady Susan!  A thousand apologies.

I did get to see this movie when I said I would before.  I got to go with a couple of friends, a brother and sister who are kind of my Jane Austen proteges :P, and then again quite recently with my sister, once it came to what we like to call the "dollar theater". So, without further ado.

Because it's the thing I notice first about British drama, let's take a look at...

Recognizable Actors

Lady Susan (At Long Last!)

It is a very shaming thing for me to admit that it has taken me this long, in all my seven years of being a Janeite, to finish reading Lady Susan, the only other story besides the major six novels that Jane Austen completed during her adult life.  Such a fact is so very dreadfully mortifying.

But now I have finished it.  I still did not read the whole thing: I listened to most of it.  Which I used to think didn't exactly "count".  I have since changed my mind, having become a very busy young lady who has little time to read, and when she does have the time, has little energy for anything that requires more thinking than watching a movie or scrolling through Pinterest.  Driving to work, however, takes me 25 minutes each way, and therefore I have almost an hour of spare time right there-- but of course I can't read.  I can listen, however.  And so I have been doing.

It was hard for me to get into Lady Susan to begin with, and I think that's because I wasn't used to reading Jane Austen's epistolary style, even though it's predominantly how she wrote all of her earlier stories.  The characters and character names and complicated relations to each other can also be very confusing.  I found that listening to it (taking advantage of a free recording from Librivox) helped immensely because there was a different person to read each character.

Lady Susan is technically a "novella" and was written by Jane Austen roundabout 1795 (which means she was 19-21ish).  It was during her prolific beginnings of being an author, when she also wrote  First Impressions and Elinor and Marianne.  It's very different from her other stories, however, and more easily compared with her juvenilia.  Unlike our beloved favorites, it's not romantic comedy-- it's just comedy.

Sierra Boggess as Elinor Dashwood

Yes, you read that post title right!  My second-favorite singer has portrayed a beloved Jane Austen heroine!

Sierra Boggess

I knew that this was going on some time ago; rather than a performance it was some kind of 'read-through' of the Sense & Sensibility musical.  But I was very excited at the prospect of getting to listen to it!  I knew this website put recordings you can listen to for free, so would they offer these as well?

I kept checking back for several months, and then gradually forgot all about it.  Then the other day at work I was listening to another recording of the S&S musical on my MP3 player (yep, we're allowed to listen to music while we shelve at my library... gals, my library, and my supervisor, is the BEST) and thought to myself, Oh yeah, I haven't checked that in a while!

So I checked it.

AND THERE IT WAS. You can listen to the entire thing here.

Jan Austen, whoever she may be, is very proud.

The horror.
The atrocity.
The stupidity.
The mistake I have never before seen anyone make.
Let us hope it is a typo.

(Isn't the IMDb page lovely, though?! So refreshing after, you know, zombies and such...)

(Also, prepare yourself for many Lady Susan posts coming up.)