Starry Starry Night
Last night we had the pleasure of going to what is called the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park. To begin with, Ernest Rady is a self-made philanthropist who has given away billions of dollars mostly to help sick children, but also to enhance his adopted home of San Diego. The Rady Shell is a acoustical marvel and is a outdoor bandshell sitting on a spit of land adjacent to the San Diego Convention Center and jutting out into San Diego Bay where it narrows between the downtown mainland and Coronado “Island” (actually a peninsula, but who’s counting?). The facility cost over $85 million and was funded by private donations led by Rady and joined by Irwin Jacobs and his foundation (hence the moniker “at Jacobs Park”). The two men represent the best of San Diego business with Rady being a real estate developer and Jacobs being a groundbreaking technology entrepreneur who founded Qualcomm, one the principal drivers of the wireless revolution with its software and semiconductor hardware.
The facility opened last year and we had the pleasure of going to one of the early concerts, which was a Broadway review done by the San Diego Symphony. The facility impressed us and we have been waiting for another opportunity to go back. The first time we went it was summer time and given the late sundown and the Western exposure, I am not certain we got the full Rady Shell effect even though the performance and the light show on the shell itself was quite special. This time we were literally going to the shell on the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice. That meant that by the time the show was set to start at 7pm, it was pitch dark.
The occasion for the show was the San Diego Symphony playing the music of the movie Love Actually, accompanied along with the showing of the movie on three Jumbotron screens. The facility is designed with an astroturf surface and gently elevating audience area that can accommodate up to 10,000 listeners. For this performance it was set up for 3,300 which is no small number for a bandshell. For comparison, the iconic 100-year old (it was built in 1922) Hollywood Bowl set amongst the Hollywood Hills, has a capacity of 18,000. I’ve been to the Hollywood Bowl once and while that embraces the audience in a nestled manner against the hillside, the Rady Shell places the audience on the waterfront with nothing around it but the city skyline to the right and the silver sands of Coronado to the left. But mostly, what the audience sees and feels to go along with the music is the fullness of the big night sky as one can only get out on the water where the horizon stretches for miles (technically only 2.7 miles until the earth’s curvature visibly kicks in, but seemingly for 100+ miles, since there is no limit to what the human eye can see). We know that limitlessness as we look to the heavens and spot all the multi-lightyear-distant stars in the firmament.
When Kim learned of this event and mentioned it to me, I was game to go since we wanted a return visit to Rady Shell and we both love the movie, especially shown during the holiday season. The theme that love is all around you is a perfect theme in the open air of a San Diego night. The movie ends with a granularization of images of people at Heathrow Airport arriving and greeting one another in the embrace of love. As the movie pans outward from one solitary display of familial love to the next, the screen is filled with an exponentially growing array of people and acts of love to the point where it blends into the uniform blankness of the universe. That is as perfect a match for the night sky as any I could imagine. For millennia, Man has envisioned and believed that life is simply too short to be earthbound for 70-80 years, while being too magnificent to be constrained by the confines of the physical limits of the world. I imagine that there was a first man way back who looked up at the sky and thought that while he didn’t know what all was up there in the night sky, he did see that there were pin dots of light that resemble the light one imagines (or wants to imagine) in the souls of fellow man. It was not a big stretch for him to conceive of the notion of heaven and the likelihood that when life ended on earth, that light of the soul would lodge itself in the firmament along side the infinite array of other stars.
I’m sure there are religious philosophers and historians that can do a better job of delineating man’s creation of the belief of heaven and celestial bodies and the connection therewith. Since I doubt anyone really knows for certain, I’m prepared to keep my theories alive as I’m betting that I like my thinking better than what some theologian might devise. And I’m sure there are social psychologists that will tell us that the diaspora of love is well-represented in the imagery of the multitude of loving interactions that take place openly at a place like Heathrow Airport Arrivals Lounge. That is not a hard connection for someone to make as one comes through the arrival gates, regardless if that involves being met and creating ones own pinpoint of loving light. Love is simply all around, as the song reminds us.
Lucky for me, Kim gets these outing ideas well in advance. It is always useful to have someone in the family who watches the Page Six material that qualifies as the cultural events happening around us. I occasionally become aware of some future event, but Kim is usually on top of it well before me, as she was when it came to the planned holiday events at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park this year. I vaguely recall her asking me if this was an event I wanted to attend and I said yes, so she went ahead a bought six tickets. We almost never just buy two tickets to anything, which I find to be the right approach to life. Life and life events are meant to be enjoyed with others and especially something predicated on Love Actually and its sense that we are all surrounded by love, actually, would be a perfect case in point. I rarely get into the details of such events so far in advance and we just say that we will invite others to join when the event gets closer. We had tossed the notion out to a few people and I’m guessing that a Love Actually Symphonic viewing performance was not as big a must-see draw for others as it was for us. You have to love the movie, love live performances, and love a big outdoor venue…in the winter, to jump onboard.
About a week before, we got serious about filling the seats and started by reminding Mike and Melisa that they had said (quite vaguely to be honest) that they might want to go. No pressure, but we are holding your tickets. But no pressure. Did I mention that we already had tickets? I could sense more than hear Mike’s hesitation as he unknowingly mimicked Hugh Grant when he said, “Ooooo…did we say we would go?” My second tactic was to ask our recent dinner party hosts, Faraj and Yasuko if they would like to fill the other two seats. This had three objectives, first we genuinely enjoy their company (they may be the sweetest people we have ever met), secondly, we like to return hosting opportunities whenever possible, and third, I knew it would put pressure on Mike (note that I assumed Melisa was game) even though there was “no pressure” to attend. That tactic worked and we locked in our team even though neither invited couple had ever seen the movie or been to Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.
After the performance, where we had the pleasure of a lovely starry, starry night out among the San Diego Bay stars, and the pleasure of a magnificent symphonic tour de force to accompany a favorite holiday loving movie, we had the unexpected joy of seeing our efforts richly rewarded. We only heard about it, but that was good enough. While Kim and I found the restrooms after the show, Faraj went over to Mike and Melisa and gave them each a hug, saying that the movie had moved him in unexpected loving ways. What more could you ask of a starry, starry night than bringing added love to some dear new friends? Now I just have to figure out how to get my hug from Faraj.