Culture...check

Last night I went to some opera/dinner concert thing at the royal Banqueting Hall (yes, I realize that I can't really be cultured if I call it a "thing" but I don't know what else to call it). I went with some co-workers, it seemed like an appropriately "london-y" thing to do. I think I was expecting a large room with big round tables with a sit-down dinner and some string quartet in the background. Not quite. It was a very intimate concert of 300 cultured people (me being the youngest in the room by generations, well besides my coworkers) with three opera singers in coat-tails, followed by a buffet dinner, church-social style, downstairs in the "fellowship hall". There was a bass, with a slicked back pony tail who fit his part as the phantom in Music of the Night very well. A precious spanish tenor. And a counter-tenor (whatever that is), who I lovingly refered to as Falsetto Fanny the rest of the night. Falsetto Fanny was a 60ish, gray haired man of moderate stature with ants in his pants. About 6 ft, bit of a belly...so you'd be as surprised as I was when you heard the sounds that came out of his mouth. I'd call him more of a soprano, and not the gun-toting, brass-knuckle wearing, guido type. Poor thing had a bit of a lisp too...I felt bad for the front row. But I wasn't sure whether it was the shower of spit that was probably flying out of his mouth from his lisp or his sweeping hand gestures throughout his performance that might hit them the hardest. Either way, I did enjoy myself even though I only knew two songs. Music of the night and Ave Maria...which they sang twice with different arrangments, so technically I knew three.

Well at least I have checked off my culture box for the month, next month, Hadrian's Wall exhibit at the British Museum.