Lydia Likes It

What Makes It Great?

Ted and I first encountered Rob Kapilow's What Makes It Great?® programs through the B.U. Celebrity Series of Boston. If you love music, and if you love learning more about some of your favorite pieces of music, going to one of Rob's presentations will blow your eyes and your mind wide open. We've seen him twice, with A Far Cry, which is one of our favorite chamber music ensembles in the Boston area. The first performance we saw was Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, a piece I have loved for many years. In the 2024/2025 season, we're booked to see Rob take on Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and a medley of Simon & Garfunkel songs. "During each What Makes It Great?® program," Rob says, "we take a piece of great music, tear it apart, and put it back together again. We rewrite it, sing it, tap it, clap it: in short, we do everything in our power to get inside to see what makes it tick and what makes it great. Then on the second half of the program we hear the piece performed in its entirety—hopefully with a new pair of ears. If my art history class was about the difference between looking and seeing, What Makes It Great?® is about the difference between hearing and listening." Keep an eye out for What Makes It Great?® in your part of the world.

Civic Shout

What's better than a petition that's a bit left-leaning, brief and to-the-point, from a nonprofit partner organization you trust on an issue you care about, that comes right into your inbox and you can sign with your email address? Civic Shout, based in Delaware, sends me one or two petitions each day, on topics like protecting old-growth forests, racial justice, urging Congress not to give public land to mining companies, extending the deadline for higher education financial aid, and protecting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. For each petition, you know what organization is sponsoring it, and what the key text of the petition advocates. Sign the petitions you support, and skip the ones you don't. This is not a fundraising operation; it's strictly petitions created by some of the best known nonprofits, like Sierra Club, Save the Children, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Amnesty International and more, on issues that are near and dear to my heart. I've looked all through their site, and there doesn't seem to be a way to sign up, but if you skim through their list of most recent petitions and sign one, I think that will get you on the Civic Shout mailing list. I'm sure that's how they found me, and I'm so glad they did.

What's new in your neighborhood?

Call me old-fashioned, but I love neighborhood newsletters, the kind that come in my email inbox and keep me up-to-date on what's going on where I live. Events, arts, celebrations, sports, volunteer opportunities, new restaurants and shops opening, old favorites bidding my community farewell: it's all there. I'm very lucky to have two neighborhood newsletters land in my inbox every week: Sampan, the official communication from Chinatown in Boston, where I live now; and Fig City News, that's teaching me a lot about the community Ted and I will be moving to late in 2025 in Newton, a Boston suburb. Both newsletters are free of charge.

Zooming around the kitchen table

At the start of the pandemic, when in-person classes and meetings and work were cancelled, everything moved to something called Zoom. As I had retired a few years earlier, I didn't know what Zoom was, or how to use it, or why I should care, but it didn't take long for me to figure out that this was how we were all going to stay connected until the universe calmed down, and then everything would go back to the way it had been. Or, that's what I thought at the time. Zoom, an interactive online platform, allows for two-way participation between two people, or 50 people. You can attend a lecture, organize a neighborhood action group, meet with your entire family at the same time, or even take a class. One of my friends does Zoom art groups, where everyone is working on a fiber or art project together. My adult English students love Zoom, because they can work from home, take care of their children, and save time and money on commuting to school for classes. And I've come to love it, too. Do you Zoom?

What goes with what?

Are you hooked on Connections? After a few months of beta testing, this terrific New York Times puzzle has passed the popularity test and been granted permanent game status alongside Spelling Bee and Wordle. Each day you'll find a grid of 16 words. The aim of the puzzle is to group the words by common themes. Sometimes they're foods, or professions, or locations, or activities, or music groups, or toys, or directions. The connections are occasionally obvious, more often tricky (the puzzle creators are fond of words with several meanings), and sometimes impossible to figure out, which makes this puzzle wickedly fun. Access through your New York Times subscription, or by clicking on the image above.