excellent weekend - practice vacation 1

This August, we have two tiny practice vacations in the Berkshires before going on our real vacation at the end of the month. We had our first practice this past weekend, and what a lovely time it was.

At this point, we have two favorite places to stay in the Berkshires, and given that we go about twice a year, we get to stay in each every year. This time, we stayed with Richard on his llama farm. Richard has three guest rooms and fascinating guests every time. He lives on a stunning piece of property half way up a mountain, with beautiful views to the west and the rest of the mountain (and over 100 square miles of public land) rising behind. We were privileged to go on a llama trek, this time with him. It turns out that he loves noticing animal tracks and reconstructing the story. We saw many deer tracks, some walking, some running, some raccoon, turkey, and coyote tracks. We even found some scat and Richard was able to tell us what the animal had been eating -- fruit and voles.

On Thursday night, we went to a performance at Tanglewood in the littler hall (Seiji Ozawa), which is stunning -- I often wish Mark had lived long enough to see it. One of the clever parts of its design is that the back of the hall rises to two massive doors. For concerts, the doors are open and the floor continues directly onto the lawn, which continues to rise.

We saw just about our favorite dance troupe -- Mark Morris, accompanied (in part) by two little-known but talented musicians -- Yo Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax. I'm sure they'll make it some day with a little more practice. I wanted to sit through the performance five times. It was hard to know whether to listen to the music, watch the dancers, look at the hall, try to integrate the whole experience (really hard), or just sit and let the experience come to me. In the end, I decided that if we were disappointed with every thing else this weekend, this performance would have made the trip worthwhile. Of course, that was far from the case: MMDG was only the beginning of a great time.

Friday, we headed up to the Clark Museum in the Northwest corner of the state. This is one of my favorite museums, both for its permanent collections and for its special exhibitions. They currently have an exhibit on Georgia O'Keefe and one of her mentors, Arthur Dove. The curators at this museum have a special talent for juxtaposing works so that you can compare themes, styles, ideas, which all made the exhibit even more wonderful.

Last year in New Mexico, we saw a lot of O'Keefe's works at her museum in Santa Fe. We also drove over to Abiqui to see Ghost Ranch where she did a lot of her southwest work. So it was especially interesting this year to see an exhibit mostly of east coast work with a little southwest thrown in.

We revisited an exhibit we saw last year of American landscapes in the permanent collection. Landscapes are typically not my favorite, but these are great -- powerful, evocative -- and it's a small exhibit of large works.

They've just opened a new trail through their nearly vertical meadow, so we took the long way to their two-year old conservation and exhibit building. On entry to the meadow, we were met by two stunningly beautiful horses who sniffed us all over to see if we'd brought them treats. I called them the attack horses, but really, they were very gentle and happy to be petted if not fed. The walk was complete with gorgeous views of the next mountain over, of woods and meadow flowers. The resident cows barely glanced at us and resumed their munching.

The new building, the Stone Center, could be the most awful kind of architecture in less skilled hands. Instead, it is modern and purposeful and well integrated into its surroundings. They are running a lovely exhibit on Japanese landscapes (from about 150 years ago) and modern Japanese ceramics. Later, we sat on their patio and had a light lunch just so we could watch the landscape some more.

That evening, we headed to Jacob's Pillow for a dance performance of Rennie Harris. RH is a hip-hop artist with street training who came to formal dance later in life. Last time we saw him, he was just working with men, and now women have joined his troupe. The beat rocks and so do the dancers. Amazing work.

On Saturday, we visited the Berkshire Botanical Garden, always a treat. They have a meandering path around a park with different types of gardens -- cottage, herb, rock, water, farm. It's a peaceful place.

Then we headed back to Jacob's Pillow to see a talk I'd noticed in the brochure the night before -- Rachel Maddow speaking about public policy and the arts. Doesn't that sound like the most boring topic imaginable? Of course, it wasn't. She was funny, delightful, insightful. She started by giving a history of Jacob's Pillow, complete with tiny eye wiggles and admiration. She talked about funding arts as an act of patriotism. During audience questions, someone mentioned that they'd read that RM's partner is an artist and suddenly the conversation switched from the political to the personal.

At the beginning, during the history portion, RM said that she originally thought 10 people would come and so she'd brought a picture to pass around. Given that about 1000 of us showed up (dancers, grandmothers, baby dykes, us, everyone in between), she decided that was a little impractical. We didn't get to see the picture, buy Boy Howdy (as she would say), we did get to see her.

That evening, we went back to Tanglewood to see a Prokofiev symphony (very short, very listenable) and the star attraction, Carmina Burana. Perhaps I should mention that I despise classical singing and this piece not only has three soloists but an adult chorus and a children's chorus. And we still went. And it was fantastic. I've heard recordings over the years, but to see it live was an absolute privelege.

Yesterday, we went on our llama hike, then headed back to Tanglewood for a long concert with four pieces, all by people I'm unfamiliar with. Shostakovitch was perhaps the most familiar name. Some of the descriptions (atonal, for example) made some of the pieces sound frightening, but they were all very easy and pleasant to listen to. But the star attraction was Yo Yo Ma (again) and a young conductor who got his big break last summer when James Levine fell ill at the start of the summer season. Both were excellent, and Yo Yo Ma makes nearly every piece we've heard him perform into something listenable.

Then home, and work starts up shortly. Phew. What a great time. And we get to go back soon.