FROM SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA

At the Opera, Musical in Downtown Scottsdale

SCOTTSDALE, Oct 7, 2007 - Back in Arizona again.  And to my great surprise, I came home to colder daytime temperatures than in Connecticut during the week.  A storm front had apparently blown through the state while I was away, bringing cold Pacific air into the desert.  Low 70s in October?  A minor miracle.  I remember other times when the temperatures were still in triple digits at this time of the year.  So I have been spending as much time as possible outside.

But the evening I returned from New York, I went to an operatic concert at the beautiful, ornate Orpheum theater in downtown Phoenix.  The concert featured two great divas and one shrimp of a male singer.  So seeing him act as a supposed seducer of the one powerful and another beautiful woman was almost comical.  Still, the music was great.  And the orchestra was interesting because 50% of its members came over from Italy, while 50% were local.  And the governor of the state of Arizona, Jane Napolitano, narrated Bellini's "Norma" in the first part of the concert.

So overall, it was a good concert to set the mood and appetite for a good dinner that followed.

The next day, I took myself to a musical at a theater in downtown Scottsdale I had never heard of before - "4301."  As you can see from the sign at its door, I am evidently not the only one.  They seem to rejoice at the visitors who find them (the place is tucked in the back of the failed Galleria shopping mall, the only mall I know without the stores).  :-) The theater was cute, quite cozy actually, but the show "Diet, The Musical," was atrocious.  It was maybe a notch above a high school performance.  Not a big notch. J I left before the end of the first act, which was none too soon. 

"Oh well," I reasoned, "when you do things on a spur of the moment, you win some, you lose some."  The last time I did that with the "Over the Rhine" concert at the Rhythm Room, I had a great time.

This time, I gave myself a tour of the Fifth Avenue in downtown Scottsdale.  It doesn't look anything like the Fifth Avenue in New York, but it is a quaint western-looking street, full of shops and galleries, which I have not visited in years.  Some stores already had their Christmas theme going (can you believe it?!), while others were more topical, like this Galigin's Irish pub, that had the Halloween theme going.

I followed the sound of music to the end of the Fifth Avenue...

...where I came across some private gala event.  I talked to one of the fancily dressed young women who ran one of those restaurant/bars at the entrance.  She told me it was a "so much a plate" a.k.a. cover charge fundraiser (or what is a "thank you" party?) for the investors in the Scottsdale riverfront project.  The theme was the "Heartbeat of the Canal," she said.  "And who are the rock band?" that was truly rocking when it comes to decibels emitted from the stage, I asked.  She didn't know.  "I just run this restaurant," she said.  No matter.  Good times seem to be had by all, no matter what the band's name.

Some guests had evidently arrived by bike - Harleys, not the little pedal bikes I ride.  And used the entrance to the party to showcase them.  I could have stayed, "you look like a man with a purpose," one of the ushers told me, but I chose not to.  I went to home to catch the tail end of the Colorado-Philadelphia baseball game.  And it was a dandy.

At the Opera: Emily's Visit

SCOTTSDALE, Oct 14, 2007 - My younger daughter Emily flew in from Cincinnati on Thursday for a long weekend.  Even though she grew up in Arizona, and had lived here until she went to college at Miami University of Ohio, she has never seen my Grayhawk place, as we used to live in a different neighborhood back then.

She had also never been to an opera before.  So I got us tickets for the Friday night performance of "Lucia de Lammermoor" by Gaetano Donizetti.  That was also Emily's excuse to get a new dress, and for us to dress up.

Beauty and the Beast

Earlier that day, Emily and I went car shopping.  I have never been much into cars.  I like power and comfort and that was about it up until now.  Various Infiniti models have given me both for about 14 years now, so I never really looked much elsewhere.  Since Emily and her husband are avid car racing cars and have two motorcycles besides two cars, I thought that car shopping would be a fun way to spend an entertaining afternoon, and also give Emily a chance to be my advisor on various car models and features.  After all, she was the one who got me into Infiniti's 14 years ago even when she was just a teenager.

Earlier in the week, I also got some advice from the Bank of America vice president who is a car buff, so I had narrowed my choices of various convertibles down to Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and, of course, the new Infiniti G37S.  So around noon on Friday, Emily and I drove down Scottsdale Rd spending on average about an hour in each of the four dealerships.  It was a beautiful day, with temperatures around 92F (which is very pleasant in the dry Arizona heat), and a delightful way to spend an afternoon.

After all was said and none, Emily said nothing and neither did it.  I had successfully fended off several aggressive car sales people and their managers telling them I would not make a decision the same day.  I wanted to sleep on it and see how I feel on Saturday morning about what I saw.

And then, while Emily was out having lunch with an old girlfriend, I made a call to the first dealership we visited.  After 15 minutes, I got a call back.  I had bought my "dream car."  By the time Emily came back from her luncheon, the car was already in my garage.  And the winner was, ta-da...

...a Mercedes-Benz SL 600 Roadster.  Here it is, still in the dealers garage, with my salesman retracting the roof before I took possession of it (left and middle).  And here is my "old" Infiniti, also at the Mercedes dealership, for a last farewell (right).

And here is the SL 600 with a top down at the dealership...

...and in my driveway.  The Motor Trends magazine compared it to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its review:

Now, why would I do a "foolish" thing like buying a "muscle" car like this?  I told Emily that it was because when I woke up on Saturday morning, I was still thinking about it.  Which is true.  And when I thought of the new Infiniti G37S, my second choice, I didn't feel anything.  Which is also true.  But there was more to it than that...

As I later analyzed my decision-making process, I realized that I did it because this amazing "beauty and the beast" was the first car ever that was "all me."  I love the arts and I cherish the sciences.  I practice both in my life.  I love a soft touch of a gentle breeze and the explosion of brute power (as in sports, for example).  Both of them are also "me."

"It's beauty and the beast on four wheels... extreme elegance and stunning power all in one," I wrote to my banker friend/car buff who had helped me with preliminary information in my "thank you" note.

The SL 600 embodies a gorgeous interior - leather, suede and wood paneling = "beauty"; and the raw power - 495hp, 5.5 liter V12 engine = "beast".  It's technology made beautiful.  This car, therefore, epitomizes a refusion of arts and sciences, a trend that I first identified for my clients back in 1994, when I said it would return man back to nature, i.e., to Da Vinci's renaissance era. 

And don't worry, the deal I made was also easy on the pocketbook.  I try not to overpay for my art purchases, so why would I do it for a car?  In the end, the dealership "made me an offer I could not refuse."  :-)

Anyway, that's probably more than you needed to know about my new acquisition... but there it is, for what it's worth.

Saguaro Lake

SCOTTSDALE, Oct 18 - I was driving home from an appointment late on Thursday when a freeway traffic jam inspired me to take some country roads.  The weather was gorgeous - upper 80s; the air clear, so rather than go on home, I decided to take the Beeline Hwy north of the city to Saguaro Lake.

The lake is only about a half hour-drive from my home in North Scottsdale, yet I have met people who have never heard of it.  On this late Thursday afternoon, it was a scene of utter serenity.  The descending sun was extending the shadows of surrounding mountains over the lake and my new "beauty and the beast" that got me here.

I only found two living creatures near the lakeside parking lot - a bored fisherman who talked the hind leg off of me (left), and a feathery fisherman who remained stony silent, focusing his gaze on the dinner (right).  This blue heron stood about three feet off the water's surface.  He would have looked even bigger on land.

Gallery Hopping

Later that evening, I was invited to an opening of a new exhibit by a Spanish painter Evaristo Alguacil at the Gasov and Garule gallery in downtown Scottsdale.

I found the show mildly interesting.  Too many ocean blues and not enough originality for my taste anyway.

Little did I know, however, that I would land smack in the middle of a "gallery walk," a sort of an open house of dozens of galleries that line the old downtown Scottsdale streets. 

Nor was it just about visual arts.  Impromptu street concerts added eclectic sounds to eclectic visual images.  And "Scottsdale's finest" rode in at the last moment to save the day, uh... the evening, and separate the paintings from the adoring fans.

"So how was it?" a friend asked me about the gallery walk the next day.

"Pretty boring overall," I said.  "I didn't particularly like any of the art, so I engaged in people watching instead," I added.

"And what did you see?"

"Well, the boring paintings and the bored patrons were similar in many respects," I said.  "Many people looked like various plastic surgeons' walking artifacts.  Bet some of their newly remodeled faces cost more than my new Benz.  And that's without mentioning the boobs or other parts of the body.  Nor were these living, breathing and moving plastic sculptures limited only to women.  You could also tell which men have had work done by their distended faces and plastic smiles, like that of wax figures."

My friend, also a doctor, but not a plastic molding kind, laughed and shook his head.  "There so much money in Scottsdale," he said.  "So many people have more than they know what to do with it."

"And the fact that they are spending it on trying to change themselves is proof of their inner unhappiness," I said.

My doctor-friend agreed.  "Money can't buy happiness," he echoed an age-old truism.

Modern Dance

The next day, I was invited by a dancer-friend, who is also a physical fitness instructor at my club, to attend a modern dance performance at the Herberger Theater in downtown Phoenix.  It was the first time I have ever been to a modern dance concert (Can you call it a concert?  Maybe a recital would be better?).  Anyway, there were no plastic faces on that stage, which vibrated with abundant energy of young bodies.

But outside the theater, there were quite a few sculptures depicting dancers in various poses.  I was struck by how many of them seemed like yoga poses.  No wonder so many yoga instructors are also either former or current dancers.

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