The Dinner Party

Last week I was at a dinner party when a guest to my left suggested I update my thinking about the gender gap from a glass ceiling to a window. Something on par with the views afforded by the floor-to-ceiling sashes at Jazz at Lincoln Center, perhaps?

I promised I'd think it over and have been ever since, though I admit it has me troubled like a riddle I can't quite parse. Am I to take away from this visual analogy that rather than unsuspectingly hitting my head, in 2010 I can expect only to have to bloody my fist on the forward charge? With a well-applied heel of my hand to the frame of the window, can I nudge it upwards with a little patience and minus any permanent damage to myself or the transom? All these scenarios demonstrate some interesting parallels when it comes to interpreting the state of play out there as far as gender politics goes. Look and see what's around you, note all that has changed (Gail does the research, January cracks the jokes). Maybe question if the window is really even there at all (well, if you want to get all mystical about it, at least).

Same dinner party, but this time the guest seated on my right is explaining how lost he has felt  ever since a new music director came on board at his orchestra. The new maestro was great, he acknowledged, but he was just so...so different, you know? "As in Wife Swap different?" someone inquired. And we all paused and tilted our heads and imagined what that would look like, and how close it already was to how things run in many orchestras, what with the game of musical chairs played by new hires and guest visits and the like. Drama all around. The Reality TV part, though? Well, we all laughed nervously for a second about that, and then the guest on my right disappeared to make a few phone calls. Hmm.

Aside: Though no one smokes at dinner parties anymore, you should be able to smoke at concerts, "other than, you know, the Symphony Orchestra,"--performances which are apparently not "hardcore" enough to warrant lighting up.