Hobbies & Interests
Film, music, and theatre
My hobbies and interests revolve heavily around my love of film, music, and theatre.
When I was a child living in College Park, MD, a suburb of Washington, D.C., in the forties, my parents took me to see the standard children films, especially those adapted from literature. Also, my parents had one of the first television sets in our neighborhood, and I was able to watch a number of movies shown on television. Later on, my friends and/or my parents accompanied me to a wide variety of films locally and in Washington, D.C., including some Cinerama movies.
When I dated then married my husband, Robert Roulston, another movie buff, when we were in graduate school in the 1960s, we courted by attending a number of movies in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area. We saw foreign and domestic, classic, plus contemporary films.
Since we moved to Murray State University in 1964, we have been able to keep up with our cinematic interests via travels, television, and now video. For a long time, we have visited New York City and the San Francisco Bay area each year, where we see a number of foreign and art movies, as well as some of the more popular ones we do not see in Murray and Paducah, Kentucky.
I am especially partial to the music of the later centuries--eighteenth through the twentieth, although I do listen with pleasure to music of the earlier periods. I have become increasingly fond of operas over the years and have attended performances of most of the operas of Mozart, even two productions of some of the operas. I have also seen a number of live performances of Puccini, Rossini, Strauss, and Verdi operas, plus the famed verismo operas--Caval1eria Rusticana and Pagliacci. In addition, I have gone to productions of many Wagner musical dramas. Other operas I have attended are three productions of Beethoven's Fidelio, one production each of three Benjamin Britten's operas, Billy Budd, Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw, one production of Harbison's The Great Gatsby, two productions of Janacek's Kat'a Kabanovna and one of The Makropolis Affair, one of Mousorgsky's Boris Godunov, one of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and one of a concert version of Tchaikovsky's La Pique Dame.
Foreign languages
I have studied a number of foreign languages, which I have used in my teaching, scholarship, film and musical interests, and travel.
I studied Latin in Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, MD, and have used that language as a basis for my study of other languages.
I first studied Spanish as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, then later as a directed study at Murray State University. In my studies of Hispanic cinema and many travels in Hispanic countries, mainly in Mexico and Central America, plus Madrid, Seville, Cordoba, and Costa del Sol in Spain, I have put my Spanish to good use.
I first learned to read French at the University of Maryland, then learned pronunciation and studied literature in a directed study at Murray State University and used it in my cinematic studies, travels in French-speaking cities and countries, for example, San Pierre and Michelon (France outre-mer),Antibes, Paris, and Monaco, Montreaux, Vevey, and Geneva, as well as in my scholarship, including my masters thesis, literature classes, and study of opera, including works by Berlioz, Bizet, and Massenet.
I taught myself to read German, then learned basic pronunciation, which I have employed in my travels, in my studies of German cinema, both historical and recent, travels in German-speaking cities, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, and Interlaken, especially and in study of opera, including those by Mozart, Johann and Richard Strauss, and Wagner.
I first studied Italian at Murray State University and have made good use of it in my studies of Italian cinema, my recent travels in northern Italy, especially in Florence, Rome, and Venice, as well as my study of opera, including works by Bellini, Donezetti, Handel, Leoncavello, Mascagni, Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, as well as numerous minor composers.
My Husband's and Mine's Travels
In addition to much of the United States, especially New York City and San Francisco Bay Area, we have visited Austria (Melk and Vienna), Canada (British Columbia, Montreal, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Ontario), Costa Rica (Limon, San Jose, and Tres Rios, El Salvador (Costa del Sol, San Salvador, and Santa Ana), England (Bath, Chawton, Exeter, London, Oxford, Plymouth, Rye, St. Ives, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Stratford, Torquay, Winchester), France (Antibes, Paris, and San Pierre), Germany (Berlin), Guatemala (Antigua Guatemala, Chichicastengo, Guatemala City, Lake Atitlan, Panajachel, and Tikal) Hungary (Budapest), Italy (Rome, Florence, and Venice), Mexico (Matamoros, Mexico City, and Monterrey), Monaco, and Panama (Panama Canal, Panama City, Taboga), Scotland (Edinburgh), Spain (Benalmádena on the Costa del Sol, Córdoba, Madrid, Málaga, Seville), and Switzerland (Geneva, Interlaken, Lausanne, Montreux, Vevey, and Zurich).
When we travel, we enjoy visiting, often with our camera, artistic, cinematic, literary, historical, musical, scenic, theatrical sites of interests. Moreover, we have attended concerts, plays, and operas in a number of cities, especially New York and Vienna. When we are in major cities, especially New York and San Francisco, we see a number of the art and/or foreign and films not available in our immediate area of Murray and Paducah, KY. In addition, we are gourmets with adventurous tastes and thoroughly relish dining in many varieties of restaurants, ranging from little ethnic places to haute cuisine establishments.