A Christmas Carol before Hanukkah

Diane and I went to see Silicon Valley Shakespeare’s production of A Christmas Carol at History Park San José this afternoon. The play was mostly performed outside, with the cast and audience walking from building to building as the spirits take Scrooge on his journey through old London. We did go inside for a couple of scenes; here’s Scrooge at his desk in the Bank of Italy building.

The play started and ended outside the Palace Hotel; at the beginning, we saw Marley’s coffin in the street, and at the end, Scrooge saw his own tombstone.

I guess it’s not a spoiler to tell you that there was a happy ending.

I enjoyed the production; they took full advantage of the setting, and even threw in some caroling as we walked through the streets.

We’d never really been to History Park before – I want to go back sometime when they’re open and explore more!

After the play, we came home and lit our menorah for the first night of Hanukkah, then we watched some a capella Hanukkah videos from the Maccabeats and Six13, including our favorite, Candlelight.

Chag Sameach!

Social media musings

I’ve been using Mastodon for a couple of weeks (I’m @davidsinger@sfba.social if you want to follow me there) and am beginning to feel like it’s where I want to follow “the world” on social media; it’s certainly more hospitable than Twitter these days.

I haven’t closed my Twitter account nor even stopped the automatic tweets when I post to this blog, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been an active tweeter. Twitter has been useful to communicate with companies when all else fails – but lots of companies are leaving Twitter, so that may not be true much longer.

Facebook has always been where I interact with family and friends, and that hasn’t changed much; it’s not a news source for me and never has been.

Of course, I still do a lot of blog reading (and writing), which I don’t see changing any time soon.

And speaking of learning things on Mastodon, today I found out that Tom Lehreŗ has made all of his albums available for free download on his site at tomlehrersongs.com.

The site says that it will be shut down in the not too distant future, so if you want to download anything (including sheet music and lyrics as well as the songs themselves), don’t wait! I downloaded all of his albums already.

Shabbat Shalom!