Daily Archives: March 23, 2015

The Miraculous Powers of Blue Lake – Just around the corner from home.

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Gorgeous locale!

Life in Russia

Blue Lake

 Blue Lake

There is an amazing place in the suburb of Kazan, which is a favorite destination for those visiting Kazan. One can swim in this lake year round, many locals visit it in winter to experience it’s healing effects. The reason for this is it’s high levels of hydrogen sulfide in ts water.

Blue-Lake-13

Those who get a chance to do this wind up smiling all day, energizing them for the entire week.  If they had suffered from headaches or other maladies they will be gone. The locals just can’t seem not survive the winter  without swimming in it’s crystal clear waters. The water is know to have miraculous powers and is world renowned . Its muds which are considered to be therapeutic are used in many health resorts throughout Tatarstan. It has even been speculated that it contains of an active radon which is beneficial in this form.
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♪”Send in the Clowns” – Audra McDonald and Will Swenson

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UPDATE: It’s back up!

Enjoy this incredible performance by Audra and Will, also another timeless beauty – Sarah Vaughan. ❤ ☼ ❤

“Send in the Clowns” is a song written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman‘s film Smiles of a Summer Night. It is aballad from Act II in which the character Desirée reflects on the ironies and disappointments of her life. Among other things, she looks back on an affair years earlier with the lawyer Fredrik. Meeting him after so long, she finds that he is now in an unconsummated marriage with a much younger woman. Desirée proposes marriage to rescue him from this situation, but he declines, citing his dedication to his bride. Reacting to his rejection, Desirée sings this song. The song is later reprised as a coda after Fredrik’s young wife runs away with his son, and Fredrik is finally free to accept Desirée’s offer.

The “clowns” in the title do not refer to circus clowns. Instead, they symbolize fools, as Sondheim explained in a 1990 interview:

I get a lot of letters over the years asking what the title means and what the song’s about; I never thought it would be in any way esoteric. I wanted to use theatrical imagery in the song, because she’s an actress, but it’s not supposed to be a circus […] [I]t’s a theater reference meaning “if the show isn’t going well, let’s send in the clowns”; in other words, “let’s do the jokes.” I always want to know, when I’m writing a song, what the end is going to be, so “Send in the Clowns” didn’t settle in until I got the notion, “Don’t bother, they’re here”, which means that “We are the fools.”[1]

In a 2008 interview, Sondheim further clarified:

As I think of it now, the song could have been called “Send in the Fools”. I knew I was writing a song in which Desirée is saying, “aren’t we foolish” or “aren’t we fools?” Well, a synonym for fools is clowns, but “Send in the Fools” doesn’t have the same ring to it.[2]