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San Francisco for Frankenstein Ballet, 26 Feb 2017
The San Francisco Ballet presented a ballet based on Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Elizabeth and I went to see it.
Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein during the rainy summer of 1816, when she, her husband Percy and Lord Byron were staying in Geneva. They challenged each other to write a ghost story and Mary's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was the only story of the three to be completed.
The book launched more horror movies than Helen's face launched ships, as well as such send ups as Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein, the Munsters, Rocky Horror, and Young Frankenstein, so if you've ever danced the Time Warp, or know who Eye-gore is, you can thank the wet summer of 1816 and a woman with a fertile imagination.
Frankenstein was also one of the first Gothic novels, and Byron was the guy who invented the Byronic hero, eventually becoming one himself, when he went to Greece to help the Greeks fight for independence from Turkey and wound up getting sick and dying without seeing combat. Emily Bronte was probably inspired by Byron's characters in creating Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights.
Byron's daughter was Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage on his calculating machine and is credited as being the first computer programmer.
It is all enough to inspire an episode of James Burke's old show "Connections"!
We discussed some of this on the train ride to Oakland after checking out the Sacramento station which has just had a dedication after several years of restoration and looks good.
The water in the rivers is still high after the recent rains, but we had a beautiful day for our trip.
We took the train to Oakland, and the ferry across the bay to San Francisco, where we ate outside at the Ferry Building as PCCs on the Muni E and F lines passed by in a steady parade. After lunch we caught PCC 1050 in Muni green and cream to Van Ness and walked a couple of blocks to the Opera House for the show.
The ballet was stayed fairly close to Mary Shelly's story, rather than the Boris Karloff movie that took Shelly's story's name and creature and mostly invented a new story. A great tragedy, most of the main characters were dead by the time the final curtain fell.
After dinner we caught BART to east bay and Amtrak back to Sacramento from there. Elizabeth did some homework on the ride back and I snoozed.
A great day out.
.
San Francisco for Frankenstein Ballet, 26 Feb 2017
The San Francisco Ballet presented a ballet based on Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Elizabeth and I went to see it.
Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein during the rainy summer of 1816, when she, her husband Percy and Lord Byron were staying in Geneva. They challenged each other to write a ghost story and Mary's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was the only story of the three to be completed.
The book launched more horror movies than Helen's face launched ships, as well as such send ups as Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein, the Munsters, Rocky Horror, and Young Frankenstein, so if you've ever danced the Time Warp, or know who Eye-gore is, you can thank the wet summer of 1816 and a woman with a fertile imagination.
Frankenstein was also one of the first Gothic novels, and Byron was the guy who invented the Byronic hero, eventually becoming one himself, when he went to Greece to help the Greeks fight for independence from Turkey and wound up getting sick and dying without seeing combat. Emily Bronte was probably inspired by Byron's characters in creating Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights.
Byron's daughter was Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage on his calculating machine and is credited as being the first computer programmer.
It is all enough to inspire an episode of James Burke's old show "Connections"!
We discussed some of this on the train ride to Oakland after checking out the Sacramento station which has just had a dedication after several years of restoration and looks good.
The water in the rivers is still high after the recent rains, but we had a beautiful day for our trip.
We took the train to Oakland, and the ferry across the bay to San Francisco, where we ate outside at the Ferry Building as PCCs on the Muni E and F lines passed by in a steady parade. After lunch we caught PCC 1050 in Muni green and cream to Van Ness and walked a couple of blocks to the Opera House for the show.
The ballet was stayed fairly close to Mary Shelly's story, rather than the Boris Karloff movie that took Shelly's story's name and creature and mostly invented a new story. A great tragedy, most of the main characters were dead by the time the final curtain fell.
After dinner we caught BART to east bay and Amtrak back to Sacramento from there. Elizabeth did some homework on the ride back and I snoozed.
A great day out.