This past Saturday afternoon Yvette and I went to a local ice-skating event engineered by Michael Weiss. It's the third time I've gone, Ivette went the year before I started going with her. It's described as the 7th Annual Champions Live! I did enjoy it very much. Ivette has written a beautiful full account.
This is just an addendum to that. Each year it's different mainly because it is not funded by a corporation or advertisers to the same extent as other events we've been to. It's who Michael Weiss can get to home, and it appears to be organized heavily by his family and direct associates (employees?). Last year he seemed to have not quite enough people to leave the audience with a sense of being wowed;. This year there was no intermission, perhaps because they had so many skaters, new ones, young people coming back who are still seeking scholarships, champions, skaters who are aging, comic acts (one pair, a man and woman cross-dressed, she in a male clown outfit, and he a muscled man in a dainty ballerina kind of dress), and a core of girls skating as a group. We are told that the money gathered goes for needed scholarships to enable the art to carry on with high talented performers.
As she says Yvette had gotten us better seats: we were ringside. We were not on the ice (there are chairs there and people use blankets) but just to the back of people on the ice on a row of benches. This is where teams sit when they are readying to come in and was centrally located along the vertical of the rectangle. So we were closer than we've been, and so everything pretty squarely, not from an angle.
I'm not one for watching for virtuoso feats. Rather I like a mood created, more old-fashioned kinds of music (musicals, operas, classical, pre-rock and roll), costumes and intricate expressive dancing, especially when in pairs. My favorite this time (as last year) was an English couple, Sinead and John Kerr. They are a Scottish brother and sister team:
Sinead and John Kerr in a comic moment
Sylvia