2011 a new year

Our old year moved into the new with a soundtrack provided by TV concerts. Bette Midler, the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra and a symphony helped us ring in the new year. It was a great evening. We realized it was our twelfth New Year's Eve together. Our first was the one when 1999 went to 2000. As Mark says, our love spans the millenniums.

Mark and I are so looking forward to his retirement at the end of February. We say it'll be a lifelong weekend from then on. It's been a long time coming. Fifty years of working and saving and putting money in social security and now we will have time to enjoy it. Chicago is such an amazing city. We have so many free and affordable things to do--and so many that are a worthwhile splurge.

We had a taste of it this weekend. Friday night we saw the Mikado at the Lyric's fabulous opera house. We so enjoyed it. Even from the top of the top balcony, acoustics are great and the staging and costumes are easy to see. We thought Stephanie Blythe stole the show. It was funny and smart. We always go to the free lecture earlier. I'm new to opera, so the information is welcome. If you go to http://www.lyricopera.org/, you can hear and see parts of this wonderful production.

More enjoying Chicago on Saturday. We stopped at the Fine Wine Brokers for their Saturday wine tasting. It was so informative and we got a couple of special wines and one for the great dinner we had at Due Lire. We had a little time so we stopped at the Fiddlehead Cafe for an after-dinner drink.  Then we saw The King's Speech and really enjoyed it. As one who hates public speaking, I was on the edge of my seat through this courageous king's battle to overcome his stammer. I recommend it. And it was good to see the Davis Theater theater lobby crowded. We went to the 7:30pm showing and it was packed.

People have been getting in touch with me with their sixties stories, which I've so enjoyed. It makes me feel like I was right to want to keep the sixties alive by writing about them. The more people write their stories down or tell them, the better people will know about what happened. Not only do we all have stories of crazy adventures, we have the memories of what we believed in. As a friend of mine says, we changed the dress code and a lot more than that. Among other things, we wanted to create more tolerance for each other's differences in this land where tolerance is a cornerstone of what it stands for.

It's discouraging that these days, tolerance towards each other's differences of opinion seems to be very hard to find. I woke up this morning to the news of the horrible shootings yesterday. It seems surreal that during the same day we enjoyed so much, so many lives were shattered. No reason could ever justify this. Only a crazy person does these things. But a crazy person can get ideas from things that are said--and some violent things have been said in politics lately. In this country, where we should be able to disagree with each other without killing each other, that seems to be blurred of late, particularly in the extreme right wing and fundamentalist rhetoric. The price of intolerance is too high.