MJ Beasi

Writer, Arts Educator

Dido and Aeneas: Week 4!

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Hey friends! I’m now heading into the fifth week of directing this year’s summer opera, Dido and Aeneas. If you’ve been following along, you know we’ve been keeping a video diary chronicling our process to give you a glimpse of both our hard work and the fun we have. Here’s the latest installment! This week, we celebrated one student’s legal name change, battled more hot weather (and also a storm!), started and nearly finished staging Act II, and began having some real rehearsals with our orchestra.

Tickets are on sale now for ATS Opera Workshop: Dido and Aeneas, coming to Eastworks in Easthampton, August 2-4!

Behold, the gay agenda!

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We will have our last online fundraiser for the season up in a day or so (it is pending approval by our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas), but in the meantime, you can enjoy this first entry of our Dido and Aeneas video diary, including a glimpse at our rehearsals this week, some information about the opera this year, and thoughts on the gay agenda. 🏳️‍🌈 😉

For the record, our version of Dido and Aeneas *does* have a pretty gay agenda. As per our *other* unofficial motto.

Proselytizing: In Other Lands

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Back in the day at Manga Bookshelf, I used to write what I called “Persuasion Posts” intended to convince readers why they should invest their time and money on particular series (such as Ai Yazawa’s NANA or Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish, etc.). I don’t have a platform suited to this for prose novels (and seriously, by “prose novels” I basically mean “YA fantasy” because do I actually read anything else?) so most of my proselytizing on those books has been in the form of feverish conversations with my teen students and the occasional overenthusiastic tweet. This has generally been kindly received. I’ve successfully gotten some of my teens into favorite authors. Once, Rick Riordan retweeted me. But lately these platforms have simply not been enough.

My life’s a bit too crowded these days to put in the time and effort I used to give to those old “persuasion posts” but I’d like to begin using this blog for recommendations now and then. And what better book to begin with than the latest object of my obsession, Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands. [Read more…]

Adam Rippon makes me rant. In a good way.

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(Warning, this post gets pretty ranty by the end.)

Adam Rippon Is Famous. What Now?

“I’ve done a lot as an athlete. So I don’t want to take anything away from that. But at the same time I don’t think that’s why I’m here today in this room. There are other athletes who are more decorated or more accomplished, but they’re not as funny and they’re not as cute.”

^ This.

Okay, not just that. Not by a long shot. This interview is absolutely worth reading, and it isn’t just full of stuff like that. And as irritating as it can be (to him, I’m sure) that all interviews eventually become largely about his sexuality, I’m mostly glad about that because he’s saying things that have needed to be said, loudly and in public, for a long, long time. [Read more…]