Cosplay – Memphis Flyer

A young Jedi, accompanied by his master, a middle-aged version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, asked the family seated in front of us for their row number. A moment or two later, the same young Jedi and his master, aka his father, settled in next to us, both smiling and satisfied to have found their place in the galaxy, or at least their reserved seats inside the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts.

Moments later, Darth Vader sat down directly behind Obi-Wan, causing a slight disturbance in the Force. The Vader look-a-like, sans that iconic black helmet, situated himself and then briefly looked at his phone. Vader’s sweaty blonde locks were partially stuck to the side of his head. Besieged by photo requests, a helmeted Lord Vader had been a good sport — even in his heavy dark getup — taking numerous pictures with fans and foes alike downstairs in the center’s lobby.

Now, I smiled and said to Vicki, “I thought we were going to the symphony, not a Star Wars convention.”

On May 4, 2024, a Star Wars convention, of sorts, took place at the Cannon Center as the Memphis Symphony Orchestra performed the music from the Star Wars movies and its current franchises. Children and adults donned masks, capes, and uniforms — with some wielding faux light sabers — to recreate their favorite Star Wars characters. May 4th has become synonymous with the famous quote, “May the force be with you,” and the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, or MSO, made the most of the day’s festivities, kicked off with dramatic narration by Jeremy Orosz of the University of Memphis, which set the mood and tone for each piece, and ending with a costume contest won by a carpeted Jabba the Hutt.

The fact that I used the somewhat cliched phrase “going to the symphony” also made me smile. May 4th was my third MSO performance this spring and the fourth by Vicki, my better half. Emily, our daughter, loves classical music and has been a regular attendee of MSO concerts and events for the past several years.

In our household, going to the symphony has now become the norm, and for me, at least, a surprisingly refreshing experience. I’m a music lover at heart who appreciates just about any form of music out there. While I have my preferences, I have always enjoyed listening to musicians talk about their music, and, especially, how they learned from musical pioneers and innovators, regardless of genre. I know enough about classical music to know the names of those famous composers of old and to occasionally recognize famous pieces, but I certainly couldn’t tell you the difference — from simply listening to their music — between Bach and Beethoven, let alone the difference between a sonata versus a concerto or a movement.

Don’t let the MSO know, but I’m a rock-and-roll guy at heart.

My first performance during this past season was in February (for Emily’s birthday) at the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center on the University of Memphis campus. The orchestra performed Claude Debussy’s La Mer, along with Stravinsky’s The Firebird. I had not attended a classical music performance in a very long time, and it was my first time in the Scheidt Center, which is a beautiful facility. Watching the orchestra members play in unison, working together to create mesmerizing tones and precise elements was mind-boggling to an amateur like me. Even from Scheidt’s upper balcony, I could sense the orchestra member’s passion and feel the devotion to their craft in every note and movement.

The MSO was quickly capturing my heart.

Next up was something a little more in my wheelhouse, songs from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon along with Gustav Holst’s The Planets. As a teenager, I wore out my LP of Dark Side of the Moon, so the orchestra’s suite dedicated to one of rock’s most legendary albums brought a flood of fond memories. Once again, I was captivated by the orchestra’s love of playing, the imagination and innovation involved in performing such well-known numbers, and the fun the MSO had in doing so.

Two months later, fun took center stage as the Memphis Symphony Orchestra closed their Star Wars tribute with a rousing rendition of composer John Williams’ epic theme music, simply called “Main Title,” complete with conductor Robert Moody employing a glowing purple light saber as a baton.

Following the crowd’s standing ovation, this 1970s rock-and-roll guy was all in — ready for the MSO’s next season … Rachmaninoff … Handel’s Messiah … MSO’s Big Band at The Grove at GPAC … Amadeus … West Side Story. And in late February of 2025, a true rock star comes to the Cannon Center: Yo-Yo Ma.

Incredible!

Yeah, I’m with the band … I mean the orchestra.

Ken Billett is a freelance writer and short-story fiction author. He and his wife, Vicki, have called Memphis home for nearly 35 years. When not listening to blues music, Ken reads spy novels and tends to his flowers.

Alan Crosthwaite | Dreamstime.com

Comic-Con

Tim Sampson, who normally writes this column on the weeks that Randy Haspel doesn’t write it, is off this week, and he asked me to write this week’s Rant for him. I am a friend of Tim’s, but you don’t know me because I live on a different planet than earth. Yes, there is life out there beyond what you might think.

I live on a peaceful planet far, far away, but we have and always have had the ability to watch you earthlings and the way you have evolved — or in many cases, have not evolved. We are confused by many of the things you do on your planet. Tim has tried to explain them to us, but he finds himself scratching his bald head much of the time when trying to tell us the reasons for many of the things that happen on your planet, in your country, and in your city where Tim lives.

First and foremost, we are astonished at earth’s obsession with war. Your planet has been at war for almost its entire existence, or at least since the creatures on your planet evolved into humans. We don’t understand why from day one you wanted to fight and kill each other, mostly in the name of religion and the various deities you worship. Look at you, United States. You were founded by some people called pilgrims, who left England to start a new country because they were religiously persecuted in their mother country. Yet from day one you have done nothing but try to force your own religious beliefs on everyone else in your country — and elsewhere. You fought the Revolutionary War to have your own country, one that allowed religious freedom, yet you based your entire government on Christianity and you are still operating the same way hundreds of years later. What’s up with that, earthling Americans?

Then, once you got your own country, you kidnapped millions of Africans and brought them there and made them into slaves, despite your devout Christianity. This makes no sense to us. And then you had to have another war to take care of that. And then you had your Spanish-American War. And then you had your World War I and World War II and Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan, which still rages on. We know you are not solely to blame for all of this and that some of your other countries do things that are not nice, but for you, is war always the answer?

Your entire planet, except for maybe Luxembourg and Finland, seems obsessed with war. This thing you have going on now with the Israelis and Palestinians is causing us much confusion. You are killing innocent people and little children in the streets as they play. Do you look in the mirrors and say to yourselves, “This makes total sense”? We wonder about you a lot.

Sometimes we just chuckle at you. For years we have observed your country’s Comic-Con festivities, with people dressed in all forms of costumes based on comic book characters and super heroes. There are many of you who do this. And now, it looks like a lot of sexual harassment at these gatherings has started taking place. We don’t really understand the idea of sexual harassment or any other kind of harassment because we don’t have that on our planet. But in your country, at a convention where men dress as female characters and women dress as male characters and women wear very little clothing for some events, the men among you have begun cat-calling at the women and taking pictures of them when they bend over. And you all drink a lot while doing this and you do it in public, year after year. We don’t understand this at all, but we find it vaguely amusing, except for the harassment part.

But we see that you also have bigger issues with which to deal. We wonder why the women in your country seem to be far and away smarter and more compassionate than the men, yet they still are not treated as equals to men, like there is something inferior about them. This makes our tentacles furrow a bit in confusion. Your country doesn’t pay them as much as men who do the same work. Your government wants to control what they do with their bodies. We feel that you have much progress to make in this area and wish that we could come to your planet and show you how to relax and allow everyone to have the same chances as everyone else.

And you build big fences at your borders — well, some of your borders. You seem to have a lot of animosity toward your Hispanic neighbors to the south of your country, but you don’t feel the same way about your Canadian neighbors to the north. Why is that the case? And you don’t want little Hispanic children to come to your country to have a better life. You’d rather they remain very poor and without access to medicine than just allow them to come to live in your country, which has a lot of space for more people.

Well, there are many other things we wonder about your country, and when Tim writes his next column maybe someone can help him explain. We leave you in peace. Don’t screw it up, any more than you already have.