I try very hard to keep up with this blog, but sometimes life gets in the way. In my case, very often it’s a wealth of cultural outings crowding out my writing time. (Not a bad problem to have, I admit!) Before the spring turns to summer, I want to note some of the rich cultural experiences I simply did not have time to blog about during the winter/spring season (which also found me busy creating my artwork for my Spring 2016 art show with the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC), opening on May 7 in Redhook.) First off were the flurries of local community chorus concerts the weekend of January 30. My chorus, the Park Slope Singers, presented the Brahms Requiem in German in concerts in both Bay Ridge and Park Slope, moving many of our attendees to tears. (Our upcoming concerts are on June 4th & 5th.) I dashed from my first concert to hear my friend sing in a rousing concert presented the same day by the Brooklyn Community Chorus. In February, there was a terrific performance by slide guitar player, Pat Wictor, at the Good Coffee House Music Series at The Old Stone House in Park Slope. For something completely different, I attended a showing of films by Ela Troyano and Uzi Parnes at John Zorn’s curated Basement Performances at The Drawing Center in SoHo a week later. I also caught the Jackson Pollack exhibit at MoMA (courtesy of my free IDNYC membership) and was very inspired by his simple, early graphic silk screen prints. The Orchestra Now (a program of Bard College) presented a terrific evening of free classical music at Brooklyn College in March. In April, I attended a fascinating exhibit of Titanic artifacts at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. We were handed a boarding pass as we entered the exhibit. It stated the true facts of a particular passenger, which we had now “become.” At the end of the exhibit, in the final room, we learned whether or not we had survived the sinking of the ship. It was a tremendously powerful experience, and an important lesson in feeling empathy — something our overly wired society doesn’t teach so well. Sadly, the entire party listed on my boarding pass perished. Luckily, my friend and her pre-teen daughter survived. We still haven’t stopped talking about how moved we were by this exhibit. It was incredibly well done, and as profoundly affecting as any cultural event I have seen to date.