Ramin Karimloo Live stream West End concert

 

During this dreadful year there have been many of the best west end shows, available on live streaming. Some of those were put out free in the early stages of the Covid lockdown. After the strictest stage ended, a small fee for tickets started and that was fair enough to try and help the theatres who had been so badly hit business wise by the pandemic.

 

Steve and I watched as many of these special offers as we could fit in. Some recordings were from The Royal Opera House and the National Theatre and we found them a great treat night during this mainly miserable time of being shut in the house. A couple of weeks ago we jumped to book for the production from the ROH of Dances at a Gathering that was on offer streamed for a whole month and the ‘Ticket’ only cost £4.00 what a bargain that was, and how delightful to see that story-less dance production in simple costumes and with equally simple scenery with only ten superb dancers. I put the word out to my friends to splash out the next-to-no-money for an evening of the prettiest dances, we loved it and so did others.

Several weeks ago, I had an email from a theatre company to say that there were to be some concerts from the London Coliseum and that they would be streamed live. The message was from: Stream.theatre. They had a series of concerts that would be on Friday evenings, there was a list and a couple of trailers. The one that caught my eye was my favourite West End and Broadway star, Ramin Karimloo who was the original Phantom on the West End in the sequel production, Love Never Dies, that Steve and I went to see soon after it opened at that time. He has played several parts in the oh so long run of Les Miserables. He went on to play the lead in a new production of Les Mis in, first Toronto and then on Broadway where it was a huge success. He put on a load of muscle at that time for the Jean Valjean character.  

Steve and I have been to see Ramin in concert, a half dozen times on various theatre tour dates. We have dragged along some of our friends who also enjoyed the concerts.  On these tours he performs with his own Broad-grass Band that is a mixture of his stage show songs and his own love of country music and some of his own compositions that he has recorded. So I quickly booked our ticket to watch the live streaming of Ramin and his band for a concert in an empty theatre! I thought it would be a strange for them, as it was for us, sitting at home comfortably whilst they performed and each song ended in complete silence instead of the rapturous applause that they are used to.

 

Disaster struck when we tried to get the show set up on our nice big TV at home. Well, disaster may be a bit of a stretch but it was a major irritation when we could not connect the TV to the computer much as we tried. God only knows what we were doing wrong, but it seemed that it could not be just that we are a pair of idiots, because we have seen so many other shows in this way.

 

So, when the concert started, we gave up fiddling and watched it on my little laptop perched on the other side of my desk so that Steve could see from his chair. For me it was doubly annoying because, neither of my spectacles were suitable; the reading glasses had me hunched up close to the screen and my distance glasses only worked when there was close up camera work. No comfort either since I sat on my office chair.

 

I had printed off the instructions but it just did not work. I have emailed them at Stream.Theatre and had a good old mutter about it. It was such a shame for us both and Steve had enjoyed the musical side so much he wanted to see it all again. Me too I can tell you.

 

The TICKET in this case was a bit more than the rest of the shows shown in this way it was £15 with £3 handling fee. I know it is still way less than a good night out in town that costs a fortune, but not as good as it should have been and that had nothing to do with Ramin Karimloo, is never less that marvellous which is why we are such keen followers. 

 

 

 

 

The Dancing Octogenarian

 

 

Yesterday I thought I would place a sort of, ‘And now for something completely different’, post on my Facebook and Instagram page.  On Facebook most of my ‘Friends’ are either involved in triathlon or some other sport or they are family, so in fact I was a bit hesitant about putting something completely different on at all. 

 

Even though I had mentioned quite often this year that I had brought in a bit of variety to me at home training sessions, that being choosing a class of You Tube put on by The New York City Ballet. Steve and I tried loads of new classes during lockdown that we had trolled the internet to find. We were after something that would be a useful extra session for keeping our bodies supple and loose in a time when we were only leaving the house at all to go running in the woods. 

 

The Littlehampton Wave brand new swimming pool was closed. The exercise time was said to be one hour a day outside the house and we were already stretching that a bit to keep one of our sports disciplines going half well. The classes we started with, were stretching groups, a bit of Yoga, and various dancing classes since I have danced most of my life for love of the art. I tried a half dozen different Hula classes for a while, which was good for my back and hips I found with arms and leg movements. 

 Steve just kept on trying more and more looking for something that would be ideal for me, knowing I needed more that a run every other day during the tight restrictions. We both thought that he had struck gold when he found the New York City Ballet Workout. There were two, one hour long classes and we started with the easier one. Steve was of course a complete novice as far as actually doing ballet himself although like me he is a ballet lover. He has tried very hard to get some of the movements but he now knows most of the ballet terms too, he can get through the whole session and has come on rather well. It has surprised me anyway.  

I started dancing when I was four years old. My mum went out to work JUST to pay for my dancing classes. I started with a Tap class and then after a recommendation she enrolled me at a ballet for beginner’s class too. Later at the suggestion of the tap teacher added acrobatics. My mum was always saying that it kept me off the streets, something that she was never going to allow. I loved all of them and I continued at ordinary dancing school level until I left school. I joined Worthing Musical Comedy Society. Once I was working my mother stopped paying for my lessons and so the dancing school days ended an that allowed me to still dance in the company. Two shows per year locally and a lot of fun with my new friends.

 

Later I took up ballroom dancing and paid for my own lessons. I continued with that thinking that I would like to be a teacher but that path was too expensive when most of my wages were taken for household use by my parents. I continued to dance though one way and another.

There was a very mixed response when yesterday I posted a video of me dancing along to with the Dancers on the TV screen. Most people were very kind when responding to this octogenarian practicing with the prompting of the voice over on TV. I have always enjoyed these classes enormously. Just a few responses were joking in nature with the surprise that I would show this side of my lockdown training.

 

Only one was quite rude but then this good friend is always rude to me, I think he thinks me fair game and I am happy to be the butt of anybody’s humour. His comment under the video was “Yup, She’s finally lost it”, which I thought was a little bit mean Clive Patterson-Lett, because I thought you knew the I had…..  ‘Lost it’ in many ways, a very long time ago!

 

 

 

Flu jab day!

Way back at the end of August or maybe early September, I missed noticing a text from my doctor surgery about appointments for when the Flu jabs for this year would start. I rang the surgery five or six weeks ago and on enquiring when the clinics would be, I was told that there had been two already that I had missed and they were out of vaccine and not expecting another clinic for several weeks. The receptionist asked the ages of my husband and myself and I told her that I was 81 and my husband 70. I though we would get in on the list because of our ages but she said that I should ring again in a few weeks.

 

Meanwhile I rang Boots the chemist in Chichester where we had been before in previous years to get our jabs, since the weekday slots suited us better that the surgery with Saturday morning flu jab clinics.  They were also busy and we took the first available appointments which was today at 10.45 and 11am. I did have a notification two days ago from the surgery that more vaccine was in and to ring for an appointment. We opted to stick with the weekday in Chichester this morning, where there is still no charge for older people and there was not a long germy queue either.

 

We were up at 6am this morning and after our coffee and glimpse at the news, we did one of the workout classes with the New York City Ballet. That is an hour long and surprisingly hard, having a movement warm up, then a set of floor exercises. Stretches, abs sets, legs and back sets and press-ups. After that it gets into Pliés and foot and arm work some yes, are balletic in nature. There is a second class also but only I do that one, it has little more dancing and is not suitable for Steve for a while yet if ever. He did join this morning but only gently due to his tweeky hamstring which he did have some work done on yesterday, by Feng Wang at Harmony Accu-pressure in Chichester. Behind the most efficient Feng Wang’s back, but kindly and not in any way unkindly, we do refer to any of his amazing treatments as a ‘Good Wanging’!  Steve does have some accu-puncture in his treatments but I have only had that once or twice at most. This expression is also used by my daughter who was a devotee before she introduced us to the centre.   Steve had a Good Wanging yesterday and didn’t want to undo all the good that Feng had done for his injury yesterday.  He did a little bit of gentle movement in the ballet class but avoided anything to jerky or any stretch too far.

But even so it was not a long or difficult session. After the ballet we did a short easy spinning session on our turbo trainers. Interestingly the cycling action doesn’t hurt the hamstring at all but even so it was not a long or difficult session.

 

Then we took a quick bath before dressing and leaving to go to Chichester again for the Flu Jabs. It was bucketing rain by that time, so we did park as close as possible to the main branch of Boots the Chemist in North Street just a little way north of The Cross. We parked at the back of the M&S Food store and did a little shopping, then we deposited that back in the car before walking round to Boots as it continued to pelt rain down. We were half an hour early but were taken straight in for our jabs, together. We were home and indoors by the time that should we have had to wait for out allotted time slot, we would just have come out of the jab zone. Good to get something done ahead of time.