Anitra's Dance

Video Find of the Day

Naming babies can be a nightmare for some people. When my daughter was getting ready to be born my then-wife and the mother-to-be Kate and I didn't know her gender so we worked at finding both a boy's name and a girl's name we could agree on. If Elizabeth had been born a boy civil war may have ensued. We were never able to agree on a name for a boy. We only agreed on Elizabeth because it represented a compromise between Lisa (one of my top ten choices) and Beth (one of Kate's top ten choices). We agreed to let the girl choose which way she wanted to go with it as she got older. As it happened, Kate won that one.

Anitra, my current squeeze, was similarly a naming battleground when she was getting born. Her Father of Danish ancestry wanted her to have a Danish name. Her Mother, fearing "Olga", "Oluffa", "Hellfried", or "Hildeborg", not that there's anything wrong with any of those names, convinced Dad that Henrik Ibsen was Scandinavian enough (Anitra may correct me later, but as I recall the story she told him Ibsen was Danish rather than Norwegian) and that therefore the name "Anitra" (of a character in his play Peer Gynt) was Scandinavian enough. In spite of the fact that Ibsen just made it up to sound like a plausible name for a Bedouin woman to a Norwegian audience that wouldn't know Bedouin from Urdu.

Some of my wake selections have autobiographical import. The one I posted yesterday was a weak reference to time spent in Mexico as a child. This one, #16, is a clear, unmistakable, reference to the woman of my last ten and a half years. Of course we must also credit Edvard Grieg for providing the composition, glass for providing the raw materials, Crystal Harmony for playing the glass, and vitnetonline for posting it on YouTube.

Crystal Harmony Grieg Classical Collection - Anitra's Dance