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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
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(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, November 08, 2004

SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME

Blue State Elitist on the Loose

Last night, UD went to the Kennedy Center to watch her kid sing in the way ridiculous Carmina Burana. Kid is part of the Washington Children's Chorus, and every year her group does many CB performances around the metropolitan area, CB being a perennial crowd-pleaser, with parts for children.

The Concert Hall was sold out, and the audience rose as one at the end to give the immense production (children's and adult choruses, full orchestra, three soloists, big drums and other noisemakers) a standing ovation. (UD suspects every CB performance gets this sort of response, because the music is scientifically formulated to make you wanna shout.) A colleague of UD's from GWU's music department sang the bizarre tenor solo up in the box seats, a bright spotlight on him.

Before the performance, UD and her husband walked outside around the terrace of the Kennedy Center and waved at jets as they passed very close on their way over the Potomac River to Reagan National Airport. Washington is a visually uninspiring city, even seen from above on a clear autumn evening with all the illuminated monuments and ribbons of traffic going full blast. But it was a very pleasant moment.