Flying High

WINGING IT: This morning, we dropped Annabelle at The Museum of Flight for a Women Fly workshop. Lucky girl, I wish it wasn't limited to middle school students only. 

Here's what Annabelle has to say about the experience. ...

Today I visited the Museum of Flight for their annual Women Fly event. Today was middle school day, so girls from around the region in middle school were invited to participate.

In the morning, each girl was assigned 3 workshops to visit before lunch. The first one I went to was called “Exploring the Solar System” where we used magnets as a substitute for a gravity assist around a planet. The gravity assist would help a metal marble (representing a spacecraft) roll into one of 4 cups representing moons the spacecraft was supposed to visit. I did this same workshop last year, and it’s equal parts frustrating and rewarding as you attempt and eventually succeed in getting the trajectory and speed just right.

The second workshop I visited was about how Alaska Airlines uses GPS to plot flights when there’s little to no visibility. The pilots even use iPads in the cockpit so they can communicate with the satellites and show the path they’ll take.

The final workshop I visited before taking a lunch break was about how professional pilots fill out flight sheets that tell airports where and when they take off, how much fuel they have, and anything else notable such as the plane’s ID code and colors. This form is usually in case the pilot crashes, has to divert course, or doesn’t make it for some other reason. The instructor showed us how certain terms are shortened to make the chart easier to fill out and understand (such as Direct Flight being shortened to a D with an arrow through it).

The final activity for the day was the activity fair; a series of booths in the great gallery where we were allowed to learn about career opportunities for girls in STEM. While I didn’t stick around in the fair for long, I was able to grab some cool souvenirs from the stands and I was drawn as the winning ticket for a model airplane raffle! Women Fly is a fun community event and there’s a day for each age group, so if you can attend, I encourage it once the time comes next year!

Here's a video Annabelle took of a robot going through some motions. Annabelle reports it wasn't being operated via remote, it "was just there, doing its thing."


HAMMING IT UP: We are still in our obsessed-with-Hamilton phase. A couple of nights ago, we tuned into a Public Broadcasting System program about the revolutionary musical.

I'll have CJ tell you a bit about it. 

One night, while our TV was tuned to our local PBS station, we watched the documentary Hamilton's America. Hamilton's America is a documentary about the making and success of Hamilton: An American Musical, a Broadway musical written by playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton's America came out in late 2016, approximately a year after the Broadway debut of Hamilton: An American Musical.

Throughout Hamilton's America, there was footage of Lin-Manuel Miranda during the development of Hamilton: An American Musical. Prior to the Broadway debut of Hamilton, Miranda had a piano in his house, which he noted was out of tune. At the time the documentary was finished, the piano was still not properly tuned.

If you have a PBS Passport, you can watch the documentary for free at PBS' website. Otherwise, you can watch a (poor-quality) upload on Vimeo. The documentary is fascinating, and is worth a watch if you have the time.

Here's a trailer for the program: https://youtu.be/_KsTjxKi5JE


NIHONGO: We continue plugging away at learning Japanese via Mango Languages.

Every time we follow a lesson, I am so impressed with how quickly the kids pick up the new words and phrases and how well they remember what we've already learned.

Conversely, I am mortified by how poorly I am doing. I mean seriously, NOT well at all.  I can't even remember the really important stuff, like asking where the bathroom is.

Hamiltons

THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED: We have been busy, busy, busy these past few days. And a fair amount of our activity has centered around the musical "Hamilton."

We were lucky enough to score tickets to the touring production for one of its Seattle shows. 

Last Wednesday night, we made our way to downtown. We had a fun dinner at Blue C Sushi before the show. The kids love the conveyor belt delivery of food.  The wrapper on the chopsticks made me smile, and reminded me of a line from Hamilton, "Talk less, smile more."

After dinner, we walked to the theater. We were excited just to see the semi!

It would be fun to see this trailer rolling down the highway.

The show was at the Paramount, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year.

The doors opened at 6:30, and we eventually made our way to our (nosebleed) seats for the 7:30 show. Even though we were far from the stage, we were just happy to be in "The Room Where it Happens."

I'll have Annabelle tell you a bit more about the show.

Hamilton: an American Musical is a production centering around the life of Alexander Hamilton and his part in the founding of the United States. What separates Hamilton from a traditional musical, though? Almost all of the music is in Hip-Hop and other non-traditional genres for theatre, such as Jazz. The humor throughout is hilarious and perfectly timed, while there are plenty of sad moments and songs to balance it out.
The first song, “Alexander Hamilton”, briefly introduces almost every main character while detailing exactly what happened to Hamilton before he arrived in America: His father left while he was young, his mother died from a horrible sickness, and a cousin he moved in with afterward committed suicide. As he moved to America via donations from his community he began to really grow, becoming George Washington’s secretary and eventually manning his own battalion.
The songs in the musical are quite catchy and I frequently find myself singing them. With this being a musical, the lyrics are almost always about a major event or otherwise help tell the story. There’s hardly any spoken dialogue in Hamilton aside from transitions between songs. I think most of my favorite songs are included in the first act (partially due to the sheer number of them) but I do also enjoy a few songs from act two like “What’d I Miss”, “The Room Where It Happens”, and “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”.
I believe the musical is a great way to use modern media to tell the story of a remarkable founding father and the founding of the United States. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Hamilton is that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote it, composed it, and played the lead role of Alexander Hamilton himself. The play is best enjoyed live, but even just listening to the soundtrack is a great way to experience it. When we attended a performance at The Paramount Theater on March 14, the actor for King George the III provided an even wackier voice than the original cast recording and some of the other funny moments were much louder and clearer. I could tell there were people who hadn’t seen or heard Hamilton before, as there was quite a bit of laughter in the crowd at those points. I would strongly suggest at least researching the play and listening to it, if you can’t afford or acquire tickets. There’s a reason it’s somewhat kickstarted Broadway again.

And, of course, CJ has a review, too. 

Since making its Broadway debut in 2015, Hamilton: An American Musical has been a commercial and critical success, having once grossed $3.3M in a single week on Broadway, and has won several awards (list courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation). Hamilton details the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, referred to in the musical's intro song as the "$10 Founding Father without a father."

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer of Hamilton, got the idea for the musical after reading the book Alexander Hamilton, by historian Ron Chernow. Hamilton, unlike most of its "peers" (as in, other Broadway and West End musicals), is largely a hip-hop musical, a prospect that seemed unlikely to be successful. For most of hip-hop's existence, the genre seemed confined to 8-tracks/cassettes and CDs rather that the stage of theatres. This, in large part, was due to the economically disadvantaged backgrounds of many rappers.

All of the characters are distinctive, even those that are played by actors with more than one character. For example, the same actor (Kyle Scatliffe, on the night I saw the play at the Paramount Theatre) plays both Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, yet the characters would be hard to confuse. Near the beginning of the second act, Jefferson is introduced with fanfare. The character of King George (played by Jon Patrick Walter in the show I saw) is also distinctive, only appearing by himself, almost never with other actors on stage. In all of King George's songs (You'll Be Back, What Comes Next?, and I Know Him), he sings about the United States becoming independent from the British Empire.

The musical's beginning has at least seven strong, memorable songs in a row. These songs, beginning with the titular "Alexander Hamilton", and ending with "You'll Be Back", make up the most well-known songs in the musical.

While the musical tells a story that ended over two centuries ago, there were still surprises to be seen. For example, the absence of Thomas Jefferson in the first act is surprising, making his appearance in the second act a welcome presence. The musical also has the potential to make theatergoers care about Aaron Burr, the man who shoots Hamilton at the end of the play. From the first song (in which Burr introduces himself as 'the damn fool who shot [Hamilton]", the audience is shown Aaron Burr's development from a rival of Hamilton to the man who would kill Hamilton in a duel several years after the revolution, in 1804.
The musical featured a diverse array of songs, from clear hip-hop (for example, the Cabinet Battle songs) to songs that I think are hard to describe (for example, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, the final song of the musical). My family and I saw the performance of the play at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Seattle. The Paramount Theatre is a very old (turning 90 this year) venue that I have visited multiple times in the past. 

Friday night, we were treated to more Hamilton fun. This time, an event at a local spot, Luther's Table. A talented group called "Rise Up" performed a number of songs from the musical.

CJ had this to say about it. ...

Recently, my family attended a production of the Broadway musical Hamilton. More recently, this past Friday, we went to a Rise Up concert at Luther's Table. Per its Facebook page, "Luther's Table is a non-profit coffee shop and community gathering space in downtown Renton." Rise Up describes itself as follows:

A tribute to the songs of "Hamilton" and its musical influences. Rise Up is an 11 piece pro ensemble featuring several top Seattle vocalists.
==
Rise Up is a non-dramatic cabaret performance of selected individual songs from “Hamilton” and other sources. 

The event at Luther's Table involved a buffet dinner at 6 P.M, prior to the show (though Rise Up did one song at that time). Among the food served were slices of pizza, as well as bread, salad, and potato chips.

Rise Up performed renditions of many of Hamilton's songs (I don't remember an exact setlist), with an intermission in between the two halves of the performance (which, if I recall correctly, represented the first and second halves of the original musical). As stated previously, not all of the songs Rise Up performed were from Hamilton, but rather, from other musicals. However, I don't think I recognized any of the non-Hamilton songs.

And here is Annabelle's take on the evening. ...

Rise Up, a Seattle-based Hamilton tribute band, recently had 2 performances at Luther's Table, a local non-profit that serves buffets and usually has live entertainment. The performance we attended on March 16th was sold out, although a few tables were reserved for walk-ins and the homeless who regularly came to Luther's Table. Rise Up had five singers and a small band on the stage, and they performed fairly accurate renditions of some of the most popular hamilton songs such as "You'll Be Back", "Guns and Ships", and "Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)". They also squeezed in a few songs from other musicals ("Song That Goes Like This" from Spamalot and "Waving Through a Window" from Dear Evan Hansen) and an original song called "Beyond the Stars". Near the end of the show, they also invited people on stage to sing a group rendition of "My Shot". The volunteers at Luther's Table provided good food throughout the show, and it was very entertaining to watch the performer's reaction to a table next to us that had a few huge musical fans. It was really enjoyable and I suggest supporting Rise Up at one of their future shows, and if you live in the Renton area, Luther's Table has weekly events like an open mic night!