kycoo

In March earlier this year, I met Richard White at Sac Comic-Con! He's an actor and opera singer whose main claim to fame is voicing Gaston in the animated Beauty and the Beast. BATB is one of my favorite Disney movies, and Gaston is one of my favorite Disney villains, so of course I dug out my blue dress Belle cosplay to meet him.

After the con, I looked up more information about him online and found out that he's actually quite renowned in the opera scene. And for good reason — what a voice! Unfortunately, there isn't much about him on the Internet; his Wikipedia and IMDb pages are both pretty sparse, and he doesn't have any social media (not entirely unexpected of his generation). It also doesn't help that there are probably thousands of Richard Whites in the world. So I figured I'd throw together an LJ post to gather some of the information I've found online.

Please note that this is not comprehensive, just info that I find interesting. I've also tried to include a decent number of videos where you can actually see him singing.

I guess my LJ has morphed from a drama blog to a concert blog haha. But anyhow, this past Presidents Day weekend, I went to my very first Juanes concert! No, I am not Latina nor do I speak Spanish fluently, but I took Spanish for six years in middle/high school and was fortunate to have a teacher who loved Juanes and thus passed that love onto me.

So when I found out he was touring in North America for his new album, I asked my cousin (who similarly had a Spanish teacher who was obsessed with Juanes) if she wanted to go to the Sacramento show. Turns out the venue was actually in Wheatland, a little town north of Sacramento that doesn't really have anything to its name apart from the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino where the concert took place.

We ended up with fourth row seats because when the ticket presale opened, the only section that was available for purchase was the one in front. I sort of panicked because people were starting to buy up tickets, so I just grabbed two seats that were of a reasonable price (about $200 after fees) for a reasonable distance away from the stage. Considering I paid more for nosebleed seats for JJ Lin last year, I'm calling this one a good deal.

A few weeks ago, my friend and I attended JJ Lin's "Road to JJ20" concert (it's been 20 years since his debut). She and I had gone to his L.A. concert seven years ago, and we were looking forward to attending a concert after many years of deprivation of live entertainment. Plus, we figured we'd save on airfare money since JJ was coming to our city.

What we didn't expect was that his concert tickets would explode to 3x as much as last time and that what seemed like the entire young adult Chinese population in San Jose would be fighting for tickets the second they went on sale. Last time, we bought the cheapest tickets ($68) long after they had gone on sale; there were tons of tickets left, and we were surrounded by empty seats at the concert. This time, the cheapest tickets were $188, and the entire concert was sold out on Ticketmaster in five minutes. By chance, I happened to score some $268 tickets, which ended up being around $300 after all the Ticketmaster fees. Definitely the most expensive concert tickets I've ever bought. But was it worth it?

HECK YES.

Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to catch a showing of CRAZY RICH ASIANS, and like many other viewers afterward, I went running to the Internet to read reviews, look up the cast, and – most importantly – find out what the heck was going on in that mahjong scene!?!?

There are a number of in-depth articles explaining the symbolism behind the scene (I recommend Jeff Yang’s at Vox, which was adapted from his original post at Angry Asian Man). And while the underlying symbolism is ingenious, I want to discuss another aspect of the scene that resonated with me even more.

(Spoilers below!)