Catching up

I've been bad about keeping up with lj lately, so here is a brief update.Last week, I was very busy preparing for a Cabaret I directed featuring 16 of my college voice students. It's the first time I had done anything like this, and I'm happy to say that the end result came out quite well. They sang two ensemble pieces, a few duets and trios, and several solo songs. Some of them I had done more staging with, some I merely made suggestions and the students ran with them. I wrote a minimum of dialog to connect the pieces, and we only had one walk-through with dialog and one run of the whole show with everyone together. Fortunately, they all remembered their lines, remembered most of the words to their songs (I recall a couple of performances that had some "improvised" lyrics, and what is most important, they seemed to be having a great time. The audience was quite enthusiastic, as were the other music faculty members. I'm hoping to make this a regular part of the performance schedule and put on something a little bigger next fall, maybe even with *gasp!* a budget! We'll see. This year I focused on Kurt Weill, though there were also pieces by Purcell and Beethoven as well as musical theatre selections. I'm thinking of checking out some William Bolcolm cabaret songs and maybe some Gilbert and Sullivan for next year.On the writing front, I've barely gotten anything done at all. I intended to do a re-write of my short absurd play, "The Singing Dog," and submit it to my writers' group that way. I ended up submitting it "as is" and will see what they think. It really works best read aloud complete with sound effects, which I did at one of the Bardic Circles at Mythcon last year. I think it was well received. I read the same story at the TNEO slam at Barnes and Noble last summer, but without sound effects. I didn't dare do an impression of a dog trying to sing the Queen of the Night's vengeance aria in front of a microphone inside a store.While Varda bounced back quickly from her oral surgery, she's taken a turn for the worse in the past few days. I had her blood test done again, and the numbers for her kidneys that should be low have gone up again. Stephan spoke to the vet, who said it was probably a matter of weeks. She still has a wonderful appetite and doesn't seem to be in obvious pain, but she is listless and spends most of her time lying on a heat vent in the kitchen or against the bottom of the refrigerator, where the warm air comes out. We're giving her the fluids under the skin every day now. I just want to make her as comfortable as possible. She doesn't seek out much contact with us except to ask for food. Though she's never been a very cuddly kitty and likes to jump up into your lap on her own terms, she used to like to be held on my shoulder or sit on my lap more. Now, I can't get her to purr no matter what and she doesn't want to be held. I think that having to be held and have the needle with the fluids every day has made her somewhat less trusting of anything that seems like being restrained. However, she seems to enjoy a good back rub and even flopped over on her side once or twice when I did this.At this point it's hard to say what her quality of life is. I would rather that she goes quickly than a slow decline, but I can't see withholding the one treatment that appears to be helping (the fluids) in order to have her make her exit more quickly. It's hard with pets because I can't really presume to know what she wants and can only make my best guess, and hope that I am acting on her behalf rather than simply for my own convenience. She's been a wonderful companion and it's hard to see her so droopy and listless. I feel like I'm resigned to the fact of her approaching death, but I know it will still be difficult when it actually happens. Fortunately, Athena seems well and spends part of each night curled up with me in bed. She's half deaf and arthritic, but doing pretty well for an old kitty.