I Like Games: Skyrim

I have recently started playing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and I have found it… an INCREDIBLY engrossing game. For the first time ever since I played the Ultima games as a teenager have I felt that a team out there has put enough effort to make an actual story and world. Not just pretty mechanics and dazzling looks, but rather done its best to integrate everything into a narrative experience within the limits of our technology.

The reason I like games, you see, is because of story. The medium is different than others because it allows the player to be the protagonist, not merely a spectator. This comes with advantages and disadvantages: immersion, which can be crippled by bad storytelling or inept technology…. the wrong kind  of story (allowing the player to make choices is better than to take away the ability to choose, for example) or an inept implementation can ruin the whole package.  The reason I loved the Ultima series (up to VII… VIII and IX are the chapters I pretend never happened, thanks to EA’s intervention) was because, even with the limited technology of their time, they were able to tell compelling stories where you (the player) were part of an epic quest to become a paragon of virtue, and your subsequent adventures were spent in the pursue and preservation of those virtues (or, that is, virtues as they were understood in that world.)

To Virtue or Not To Virtue

Since the last true Ultima (Ultima VII, in my opinion), no other series has been able to fully realize the moral significance of virtue in a world—many games implement ‘moral choices’, but the choices are insultingly insane, amounting to “Do you want to give X a cookie, or punch her in the face and laugh?”

In games such as Fallout 3 or the Star Wars roleplaying games, the character choices range between the game society’s conception of virtuous good (which isn’t necessarily in harmony with the objective definition of such actions) and psychopathically evil bordering on the edge of sheer insanity. An example: In Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic dystopia, the player is in a town (Megaton) which, at its center, has an unexploded nuclear device. The player is approached by a shady character and he has the option to A) work with the shady character to detonate the bomb and killing everyone and destroying everything in it because his boss considers the town ‘a blight in the landscape’ or B) Refuse, report him to the Sheriff and then kill the man for not only clearly willingly working towards mass murder, but also for trying to kill the Sheriff as well (a tricky option, you have to be very fast to kill him before he kills the Sheriff.)

While this clearly does afford the player a choice, it is an insulting one by clearly painting an almost disfigured portrait of how good and evil come about. Most of the virtuous or good actions the player can choose are usually tied to a solid context: in helping Megaton, the player helps his own chances of survival in the Wasteland. But what does an evil character think he gains from the mass destruction of Megaton?

Game critic and creator Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw nailed the issue dead in the head when he said:

"Look, if you have two equally viable, equally difficult solutions to a problem- say, humanely suffocating your costly vegetative wife with a pillow or digging through to her femoral arteries with a cheese grater, the evil option (which, if you haven't been keeping up is the second one), is just irrational. You simply can't relate to a character whose actions don't make any ****ing sense."

What would the Vault Dweller gain in blowing up a whole town? Aside from the moral wrongness of mass homicide (which is something I don’t need to point out, do I?) even an unprincipled, evil character would have more use out of a settlement than a crater. In a post-apocalyptic dystopia, every settlement is a haven from raiders, disease, and a potential source of resources. Wiping such a place from the face of the earth isn’t merely evil- it isn’t just irrational, but ludicrous, which is why the choice feels absurd- only a character who is not only past the horizon of insanity but who is also accelerating quickly towards a whole new frontier would be capable of a choice like that—and what is the point of it?

A truly evil character would have, instead, found a way to insinuate himself into the structure of Megaton and its vital resources/administration, he would have built a cadre of people around him… and, in the end, made himself indispensable to Megaton. He would exact heavy rules and force against its inhabitants—demanding favors, tithes and similar  in exchange for the privilege of using the life-sustaining resources. Hence, a truly evil character wouldn’t wipe Megaton from the face of the earth, he would enslave it.  It is obvious that this is a more nuanced approach, and thus harder to pull off. Resorting to the caricature of madness may be more dramatic in the short-term, but it robs the storyline of the potential of having a true, wide-ranging, evil. The caricature of evil is dissociated from context, making it temporarily dramatic, but giving it little long-term relevance. In Into the Woods, a musical by Stephen Sondheim, the Witch points out (in a deleted song) “Evil, Evil? Do you know what’s evil? Nice peoples’ lies!” Sondheim is a master of delving into the consequences of performing evil deeds for good intentions, and he knows that there is nothing more chilling and more horrible than the ‘good’ actions of someone who is working towards ‘the greater good’ and sees individuals as nothing more than a means to an end.

True evil isn’t a cackling wizard looming from the parapet of a tower, it is the legislator who signs away the freedom of his people because he believes he knows what is best for them—something Richard Garriott showed us quite powerfully in Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, where Lord Blackthorn (in the absence of Lord British) turns Britannia into a police state under the pretense of enforcing virtue. That is the power of story when it is unfettered from clichés. And it is one thing that Skyrim is actually doing very well.

The Septim Has Two Sides

Skyrim does have its moments where the player character is stuck between a rational choice and an irrational one, but those are not the bulk of the game.  The game’s overarching plot rests on the conflict between the rebel faction and the Cyrodillian Empire, and you must make a choice between them—not because you are forced to by artifical narrative, but because a civil war is imminent and everyone will have to eventually choose whom to side with- it is inevitable, one can only plug his ears for so long to ignore the world crashing down around you. Eventually, you will have to move in a direction to avoid the incoming collapse… or remain in denial and be crushed.

Neither faction, however, is a paragon of virtue. The Cyrodillian Empire is plagued with problems- some of its officers have a fetish for carrying out sentences without a trial, they are occupiers much like the Roman Empire, and have banned the cult of a local deity. On the other hand, the banning of the cult of Talos came to be after the Empire capitulated in the war against the invading Aldmeri Dominion- a nation of elves wanting to establish superiority over humans. The ban was part of the conditions demanded by the Aldmeri, who had superiority at the time of the war.  Nevertheless, it seems that the Empire is the only thing keeping the Aldmeri nation from swarming the known world- even if they may not have the resources to win (hence the capitulation), it probably would cost the Aldmer a rather steep price to topple the Empire in a full-out conflict. The Empire may be in steep decline, but it still allows its citizens some basic freedoms (except for those stripped during the White Gold treatise) and the benefits of commerce and protection.

The Stormcloaks, the rebels, on the other hand, seem to have a rightful claim: They seek to defeat the Imperial Legion that controls most of Skyrim and end the Empire's rule over the land. Skyrim was Nord territory before the Empire arrived, and the Stormcloaks wish nothing more than to reclaim it. Their leader, however, Ulfric Stormcloak, stains much of the movement’s motives.   Ulfric, in an effort to ignite an uprising against the Empire's rule over Skyrim, assassinated the High King of Skyrim. We later learn, when speaking to his widow, that the High King respected Ulfric greatly and that if Stormcloak had asked him to do so, the King would have cast his lot in favor of the independence movement. The way it is explained, it is impossible that Ulfric did not know this—yet he resorted to brutality in order to strike controversy for his movement and cast himself in the role of the tragic outlaw and rebel hero (most likely in the hopes of attaining High Kingship if his movement won.) It is clear that Ulfric did not wish to share power, and he did not wish to see High King Torygg on the throne- but rather himself.

Further damaging Ulfric’s cause is a serious racist streak:  His  treatment of non-Nords in his Hold is appalling. The Dunmer (elves of dark-grey skin color) are  sequestered into a portion of the city called the Gray Quarter, essentially they are forced to live in the city's slums. Some of Ulfric’s own subjects even reveal that he refuses to send aid to caravans and towns that have been victims of bandit raids within his hold if the victims were non-Nords.  The Dunmer population of the city unanimously and quite vocally accept the Empire over Ulfric—and little wonder: while the Empire officials may be prejudiced, non-Imperial races have recourse to law and protection (though that it inself is also not a given 100% of the time, as seen in the introduction.)

Under Ulfric’s rule, Skyrim might turn from cultural hostility towards non-Nords and into full physical hostility. While the Stormcloaks have a claim based on invaded territory, they ultimately lose their standing due to the stance of their leader and the individual rights of its populace, Nord and otherwise. Of the two, it is the Empire that respects the most individual rights- even if it violates others. A Stormcloak Skyrim would necessarily become a land where only a Nord has rights.

Nevertheless, this choice for the player is not of the ridiculous nature of the mentioned examples- bake cookies or kick puppies.  The player is presented with two options that are close to real-world issues, and although the Empire is more rights-respecting as a government can be in the Elder Scrolls world (while the egregious violation of religious freedom is a violation, it is essentially a policy that was forced into under the duress of war, and which is enforced by the Aldmer- here it is the Empire that is being coerced) , one can see how someone with certain political ideas (collectivism, for example) would root for the Stormcloaks, a faction that promises freedom for the Nords (the clan) exclusively, and being less than friendly to the ‘outsiders.’ There’s quite a real-world and historical precedent for that kind of choice- the idea that ‘some men are more equal than others’ as an execution of policy is quite common in the more authoritarian governments.

It’s definitely a more politically nuanced choice than in the Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic games, where one’s choice ends up being tantamount to either joining the Hello Kitty Fanclub or the Puppy Kickers Incorporated. Here, it is essentially a choice of what the player’s character (which doesn’t necessarily have to exactly mirror the player’s values in the context of playing the role of a character in an alien world) values more. The consequences of choosing the Empire means supporting a compromising semi-free government that stifles freedom of expression to pacify a bigger, hostile threat. Choosing the Stormcloaks means that Skyrim attains independence from the Empire, but it also means that all the Khajiit, Argonians, Dunmer, Redguards and others within its domains will find life to be very, very difficult under the ‘Skyrim is for the Nords’ movement—and there, of course, is the possibility that the Aldmer will invade Skyrim if the Empire retreats. With those two potential scenarios, the player’s character must ask itself which of the two scenarios is more likely to lead to an end that is the closest to his own values- and whether or not he will be able to change things for the better once his preferred faction assumes power (which is outside of the scope of the game itself, but which realistically would be a consideration of the character.)

Taking out attention off the overarching plot, I want to discuss one of the minor quibbles I have. One rather contrived choice (a side-quest that was not linked to the main quest of the game) I came upon was the case of Grelod the Kind, an elderly woman who runs an orphanage. In the city of Windhelm you come across an escaped orphan who tells you how awful Grelod the Kind is to the children, and he wishes to see her dead… which he wants to do by summoning the Dark Brotherhood, a secret guild of assassins (he mistakes you for one of them, and you don’t do much to dispel his assumptions.)

If you travel to the city of Riften where the orphanage is, you will see that the city is crawling with corruption, and that the real master of the town is the Guild of Thieves, run by a woman called Maven Black-Friar. The allegedly actual ruler of the city, Jarl Laila Law-Giver, is convinced that she has things under her control. If you overhear her dialogue with her courtiers, it is made apparent that she doesn't find the Thieves Guild a problem, and her courtiers (Yes-men of the Guild) constantly assuage her concerns, telling her that nothing is wrong. Laila’s most trusted aide? Maven Black-Friar. So we are set up with a stage for disaster: The Jarl is a simple-minded idiot whose weakness enables corruption, and a spider woman runs the city. Just peachy.

When we go into the Orphanage, we find out that the complaints are not only true—they are worse. Grelod “The Kind” has a closer with child-sized manacles. She constantly beats the children and demands gratitude for the beatings, she tells them they will never be loved or adopted and that they will end up tossed into ‘the cruel world’ when they come of age—and she also actively prevents the children from getting adopted. Constance Michel is a girl who works as an assistant at the Orphanage, and is kind and loving to the children… but even she cannot counteract Grelod, the actual owner.

What is the player’s character to do? When returning to the Jarl, there is no option to talk to her about the orphanage. Presumably, because the Jarl is, again, an idiot who would most likely do nothing. Maven Black-Friar gains nothing in helping the orphanage (again, she is an evil character whose aim is to control others, much like Grelod herself,) so it is most likely that it would never be addressed. At the end of the day, the player is only left with two choices: Do something about Grelod The Kind, or walk away and leave the children doomed to a life of abject misery. Confronting Grelod simply shows the player that she is not afraid of him/her, is completely intractable to any arguments or intimidation, and the only choice if you want to help the children eventually is to kill her. Yes, kill her.

I decided to follow that choice and see what the game developers had in mind--- a bit like Raskolnikov cleaving Alyona Ivanovna’s head in twain in Crime and Punishment (in a way, Grelod is a strange mixture of C&P’s Alyona and Annie’s Miss Hannigan.) In an almost Dickensian manner, the children rejoice over the slain hag (not unlike the scene in which the  Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come,  in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, shows Scrooge his future—which includes thieves rejoicing over his death and the fact that they can sell his goods, and one of Scrooge’s debtors celebrating that he is dead) while Constance enters into a panic until you leave. Yet, no guards are ever called on you by the people of the orphanage. Allegedly because Grelod was such a horrible human being that her death was more celebrated than mourned.

While it was decent writing, he choice was very forced. A resourceful character could have easily found a way around ejecting Grelod from her orphanage without killing her--  which could have provided for even juicier story developments if Grelod was in cahoots with the guild of thieves and Maven Black-Briar decided to go after the player for it (Grelod is obviously not a member of the guild, since Maven does nothing about her murder… but she could have been, allowing for more dramatic tension)  so I feel Bethesda missed out on a good storytelling angle where the player’s character could have exercised something more than his sword-arm. Of course, the game is incredibly detailed as it is, so they probably didn’t have the time to implement everything they wanted into every quest and story. It is amazing that they managed to put so much into it in the first place.


On a sidenote, the player does suffer the consequences of killing Grelod in an indirect way: The Dark Brotherhood sets him up in an apparent no-win scenario by kidnapping him and putting three people in front of him, tied, bound and hooded (The guild doesn't like people interfering with potential contracts, and this is a test to see if you're worth hiring as one of them, or if they should just kill you.) The guild liaison, Astrid,  watches over the scene, saying that one of the three has ‘a contract’ on their heads, and the player must figure out which and kill them. She says, “You may not leave the room until someone dies.” The shack is locked, so it looks as if you are in a conundrum from which you cannot win.

Except that a smart player who doesn’t want to join a guild of assassins can. It is true that the player can’t leave the room until someone dies. In a true reversal of every lifeboat scenario out there, the player can turn the situation on its head by killing Astrid, giving her a taste of her own medicine. Whereas the choice for a non-violent (and perhaps smarter) outcome was missing from Grelod’s scenario, here the one answer that everyone has thought of in this lifeboat scenario is actually implemented. Think about it. The scenario posed by moral relativists usually goes:
“You are trapped in a room, a man is holding you prisoner and says you may leave but only if you kill a person, or you die instead. What do you do? Do you kill, or are you killed?”
My answer always was: “I kill him” (which is a very Granny Weatherwax approach, I must admit.)  To which they always answered “You can’t!” Why? Who knows. But here you actually can. That made up, at least in part, for the narrow choices presented in the Grelod The Kind scenario.



There is, of course, an ‘evil wizard’ element (or Foozle, an ultimate evil the player must defeat) in the shape of the dragons that are ravaging the countryside (and I would say more about where the storyline goes, but it’d spoil things,) but it is not divorced from the impending civil war conflict.

While the game may have some implementation issues and some of the quests may not be as stellar, Skyrim is definitely a cut above most games out there in the plot department. Perhaps not a ‘next generation roleplaying experience’ as some buzzword-happy people like to tout, but it is definitely the first game in a long time that awards the players the nuance of choice. Although the land is not called Britannia and I am not called Avatar by its people, there is a certain cohesiveness and nuance to the game’s core that rewards my nostalgia for the days of Origin… and perhaps gives me hope for the advent of more mature storytelling in the future.

SunDog: Frozen Legacy

Let's Talk About Sundog... and it'll tell you why I wish more games (or any, really!) made today were more like SunDog. With the current level of technology we have, I don’t see why this game couldn’t blow everybody away…

But then again, maybe I’m the only gamer out there that wants a game of these proportions… do you think that's true? Well, let's look at good old Sundog and see!


The Game  Type:   
Adventure and Trading
Viewpoint:   
First-person/Third Person
Time:   
Real time
Synopsis:   
Saddled with your uncle's last contract, but also his Ship - the SunDog - you must fulfill your uncle's contract to found a new colony and help it thrive. After that, the SunDog is yours... if you can survive the ordeal!


You step into the boots of the protagonist whose uncle, the heretofore unknown Brock Dor-Ceed, had the gall to drop dead under mysterious circumstances. What is unfortunate for Brock, however, is a boon to you, since you get to fly his beauty of a ship. Unfortunately these wings come with a leash attached: as the last member of Dor-Ceed's family, it falls to you to complete his contractual deliveries to a religious colony on the planet of Jondd. You must deliver goods and services help it grow, and also bring in frozen members of the colony so that they can thaw them out. Since this is a religious colony, I guess you're transporting priestcicles?


A standard fetch quest, you're likely to say- take X from Point A to Point B and the task is done! Well, this is true, or would be true... if there weren't a few wrenches thrown in. For starters, green as you are to this job,  you have no idea where the colony is. So, you're going to have to scourge the surface of Jondd using your little land-roving vehicle to find this colony (a task which requires you to stock with provisions, or else you will starve.) Another problem is that the SunDog is... well, I'm not going to sugar coat it: The SunDog is broken, and you are broke, too. You start the game on the deck of your new (old) ship in the Jondd capitol city of Drahew.




Sundog's revolutionary look comes from its (first time ever) scalable interface: you'll enter ships, walk or drive through cities, move through continents, and then soar through outer space. Another game, Megatraveller II (based on the highly-successful pen and paper RPG game Traveller) also used a similar interface, but SunDog pulled it off in a much cleaner style. Ironic, since Megatraveller II came after SunDog.

The Atari version, which was the one that I played (as opposed to the Apple II) used the mouse buttons for movement and navigation, as opposed to the joystick.  Walking out of the airlock or entering the land-rover vehicle takes you out into the city view, where you can roam around on foot (not recommended, as you may get mugged) or drive (recommended, it seems that muggers don't carjack in the future) to another building.


The SunDog's interiors are well-realized and realistic. Several sections of the ship serve different purposes: Storage for food, weapons and medical supplies, spare parts, and the ever-so-important Engineering section which, at the beginning of the game, shows you just how many of your precious ship parts have exploded and need to be replaced with oh-so-precious credits.  Engineering covers all of the basic ship system: warp and sublight engines, guns for fighting, shield generators, scanners and "pilotage" (navigation). You can use artificial shunts to make do at the very beginning, but it's not recommended that you stick with them for too long because: a) they have a tendency to explore rather easily and b) when using your shunts, the systems perform at sub-par efficiency.

That may not sound terribly significant to you, but when you're floating in outer space getting blasted by a pirate while looking at how slowly your cannon/laser gauge is replenishing for your next shot... and how low your shields are? It will eventually become terribly significant. Shunts love exploding during combat, so even if you manage to run away, you will find yourself right where you started. This is where your mother probably would come up and say something along the lines of "he who puts off work ends up working twice as long" or something like that.




SunDog, technically speaking,  was essentially an adventure game with 12 separate missions. You first need to locate Banville, the religious colony somewhere in the outbacks of Jondd. To that effect you withdrew some of your cash, stocked up on food at the pub (hint: do not drink too much at the pub... you might pass out and get robbed!) and then get out of dodge in your little land-roving pod- you're going on a road trip! At When you leave the city, the world becomes a topographical map, just like this:



You drive around the continents, trying to find Banville. Traveling takes a toll out of you, however... the player starts with stamina, luck, strength, the typical RPG flare statistics as well as the physical life statistics of hunger (nourish), rest, vigor and health.  While driving, your rest and hunger will go down--- go too long without rest and you will die of exhaustion. Forgot to get food? You might die of starvation.  Eventually you find Banville, and you probably spend at least ten hours cursing at the head priest for picking such a remote, god-forsaken location for a colony.

Banville is, in a way, your baby. It starts out with very small buildings with only a local eatery and an exchange house. As you bring more trade goods and colonists into the village, however, it starts to grow-- and thus begins your quest to go to other cities and planets to fetch the exotic goods required for Banville to thrive.


So you end up vising exotic locations and other solar systems... picking up replacements for your broken-down ship and (in some cases) upgrades, such as a cloaking device (how utterly Romulan) for the SunDog.

Traveling through solar systems has a distinctive Star Wars feel: Warp travel (or Hyperspace) requires you to be away from bodies with large gravitational masses, and so you had to park your ship outside of the solar system proper at a series of waypoints indicated in your astrogation map.

Once you reach a safe jump point, you bring up the War display to select a destination and charge up your warp engines-- and poof, off you went.

Of course, this could be tricky: pirates and rogues were always on the lookout for poor saps, so you could easily get ambushed while you were heading for a safe jump point, or you were charging your engines to make the warp. If you had been cheap and hadn't invested at least in replacements for the shield systems and weapons, you could be in serious trouble. Specially if the only thing holding your Warp system together was a pair of cheap shunts trying to take you to your next exotic locale. If they didn't explode.


These 'exotic' locales include places like Woremed, a lawless system where you can buy black-market parts for your ship. While it's a good place for starting players to get their systems replaced, it's also a hell of a  location: as its lawless state indicates, you're going to get mugged regularly (if you aren't driving), and pirates will jump you the moment you liftoff if you have anything worthwhile in your holds.
For the time, the detail is astonishing. Walking into a bar to strike a deal showed you the people moving around, the patrons, and even slot machines. To strike a deal, you simply had to sit down at a booth with a person and see what deal they had to offer, and what you could offer in return (if you weren't willing to pay credits for the 'stuff').

If, however, you wanted to state an interest, all you had to do was walk up to the bar tender and select 'info', then the bartender asks if you're buying or selling, and what exactly might that be. You tell him what you're in the market for, and then he tells you to wait at a booth.

And, wouldn't you know it? A few seconds later, the bartender would invariably send someone over to my booth, willing to negotiate!  After you've wheeled and dealed and rebuilt your SunDog so she is up to par... pirates are no longer an issue. This feels very rewarding because you have spent the first half of the game running from ambush to ambush, praying that your systems and shields will hold together just long enough for you to make that warp--- and hoping that there aren't any pirates on the other end of that jump! During the second half? The pirates are hoping and praying that anyone but you comes out of that hyperjump. Taking down the Captain Harlock wannabes that had haunted you for so long with just a few shots is terribly rewarding.

You need to make money, and the game's real stock system is a great way to go about it, as well as the trading system.Of course, transporting stock meant the risk of being intercepted by pirates... but as designer Bruce Webster wrote, some of the things they had implemented in SunDog as 'real world rules' allowed players to find... a smarter way around the obstacles:

"Perhaps my single proudest moment was when I had a SunDog player explain to me how he had figured out how to make money without risking pirates. He wouldn't buy any cargo. Instead, he would buy ship's components on worlds with high tech levels (where they were available) and sell them on worlds with low tech levels (where they weren't). He would fill up the various lockers with these parts and said he could clear CR 50,000 in a single trip.
I was delighted, because I had not consciously designed that into the game. It was a consequence of the 'real world' rules we had set up, and someone had found a way to use them that we hadn't anticipated."
- Bruce Webster

If you were the Han Solo type, you could also accept bounties and blast pirates away for a small reward... but only if you already had a generous stream of cash coming in. Even with new parts, systems tended to blow up if they took too much of a pounding, causing explosions, which in turn needed money to replace the broken components.

The game gets progressively easier on you, muggins decrease as your reputation increases, pirates become less of a threat--- but that is only to compensate for the fact that getting the last batches of the needed cargo become increasingly difficult.  The last mission requires the ship to be outfitted with a new engine enhancement which was difficult to find, and then find a city. It may be hard, but damnit, it's fun ... and the sense of accomplishment you get at endgame is great.

You may not have ever heard of SunDog... but everybody who has played it will  tell you it's one of the greatest games of the classic era. How great? It was given a PC Gamer's award as one of the best 15 games in history. The author is still getting fan e-mail about the game (27 years after its release.)

SunDog was the precedessor of the great spacefaring simulator. It was so visionary, that in its application it makes the newer science-fiction games feel restricted (SunDog was, after all, an almost open-ended galaxy where you could go anywhere, whereas most science fiction games nowadays have you on a linear track... with the exception of Mass Effect, which might as well be the partial spiritual successor to SunDog) - and this is a game that came out in 1984, Steve Jobs' year of the Mac. By modern computer gaming standards, it came out during the neolithic period.

SunDog truly was one of the greats: it sought to capture space exploration, discovery, strange new worlds and the adventures of a man or woman and his/her faithful space vessel in the face of impossible odds. And this was twenty-seven years before Commander Shepard and the Normandy! I am actually very glad that Mass Effect took up the gauntlet and gave us a world that could definitely have been SunDog's, applied to new technology. It is perfectly possible to make games like these... so, developers and writers out there... what's keeping you?

Pass-times With Good Company (12/18/2009)

 

 

Today we had an interesting day, for a Friday after finals:

We slept in ‘till late. Then we got some things together and prepared our materials (garlands, decorations, etc) and put them together, along with a big ol’ sign.

By the time 6 O’clock came around we hopped into the car and picked our friend Rachel, a fellow opera singer, and we drove to Old Town. Asher got into his dog suit and we all headed our merry way to Downtown (Asher carried a Yamaha keyboard and stand, Rachel carried a chair, and I carried a box with the decorations, music sheets, booklight, etcetera.)

We set up shop in Old Town Square right by Santa’s shack and, with Asher at the keyboard, Rachel and I began to carol away at some old-time Christmas favorites! She with her beautiful lyric soprano voice and me with my now larger lyric tenor.

At one point a group of carolers dressed as Charles Dickens LARPers approached us and, enthused, joined us for a round of “Silent Night.” Eager to show off, they suggested (with a slight air of arrogance) that they would sing it en Allemand and would we be so kind to “Oooo” for them? Rachel and I exchanged glances and grinned with a “Sure!”- this was, of course, after she and I had already sung it in German earlier that evening (after all, we are opera singers, German is bread and butter to us) and after we had technically overpowered the pipe-thin soprano and tenor in their caroling group (they  sounded like amateur choristers, we are two fully-trained professional opera singers.) We let them have their fun, with Cheshire cat grins behind our smiles.

A good-sized crowd gathered, and several times we managed to get a good number of people there. Asher was tremendously popular with the little ones, to whom he gave away glittery treats (pinecones on a stick, sprayed with what looked like the blood of fairies, as they were so sparkly and dazzly.)

At one point I remarked to myself that we had the makings of a joke setup: An atheist, a catholic and a dog go into the park to sing carols…

 

 

Having sung our little hearts out, we headed back to the car for we were numb with cold (but warm within!) and made for a fast trip to the local Wal-Mart to stock up on drinks (Canada Dry in three flavors: Raspberry, Lemon and Mandarin Orange) for the movie-watching later in the evening. Having secured refreshments, we got back into the car and made our way…

 

 

… to the local IHOP, where we ran into our favorite waitress, Chris (She Of The Amazing Christmas Hair Ornaments, pictured above.)  There, Rachel had her first taste of the IHOP Top Sirloin Steak dinner, which is something that shouldn’t be missed for all the world.  Having eaten entirely too much (but somehow justified by the fact that we had sung for an hour plus in the cold) we decided to split one of their scrumptious Banana Cheesecakes à la mode.

We talked of many things (including dreams, Rachel sharing a personal dream of hers and me sharing an absolutely absurd dream of mine where my voice teacher & Alfredo Kraus were hosting a party with Mr. Rogers, and I was in charge of the hors d'oeuvres-- for some reason I was supposed to bring a 10 foot cake with Vivica Genaux inside, but I couldn't because Placido Dmingp stole it and wouldn't tell me where he hid it. I was too ashamed to return empty handed so I ran away into the desert)  Eventually we made our way out of there and onto the next step of the adventure.

 

 

Can you believe Rachel had never seen The Neverending Story(1984)?  No, neither can I! While it is far from a perfect adaptation and it doesn’t reach the heights the original and much neglected masterpiece by Michael Ende does, the movie is at least faithful to the spirit of the book, and anyone who has ever even remotely liked the movie should take it as a sign that the book is a must read. Of course, the casting is uneven at times- the actor that portrays Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) does his job well, but the actor that plays Bastian (Barret Oliver) is awful. His awkwardness is compensated near the end of the film when Tami Stronach makes her appearance as the Child-like Empress.

With that, our day ended at 1:29 am with Rachel loving the movie and me promising to lend her our copy of the book so that she may peruse its pages while enjoying her winter break. All in all I must say it was a very pleasant way of spending the beginning of the weekend.

 

Tomorrow Rachel and I are singing at a Christmas Soirée at the home of the McQueens, who are very supportive of the classical music scene and have a ten-foot-tall Christmas tree in their dining room! Rachel has chosen to sing Sweet Little Jesus Boy (I think that’s the accurate name of it) whilst I chose Zion Hort Die Wachter Singen from Johan Sebastian Bach’s Wachet Auf cantata. Neither of us has had a chance to rehearse with the accompanist and we will do it for  the first time tomorrow, five minutes per person, an hour before the festivities are scheduled to begin! I’ll definitely blog about the experience and hopefully take a few pictures. Until then, a good night!

A Blast From The Past

I remember when I got this: