I WANNA SPEND!!!!!

Spend, spend, SPEND! That’s what I wanna do.

Actually, it’s not quite that petulantly tantrumish. I’m coming to think that all work and no play is making Funny a very dull girl. One needs to have a little bit of a life. All I do now is sit in front of the computer, clean house, do the laundry, meet students, read copy, shop for food, and tend to dogs. I’ve become so tight with my money that I don’t drive unless I absolutely have to, I rarely go anywhere outside the immediate environs of my neighborhood and job, I don’t go to movies, I hardly ever go out to eat and certainly  not during the more expensive dinner hour. If it costs anything, I don’t do it.

My life has become cramped and crabbed.

It’s not like I’m THAT broke. I do put $200 a month aside in a savings account specifically for so-called “extraordinary” expenses: costs that fall outside my routine budget. And in fact, during the winter I never spend all the money budgeted for nondiscretionary expenses, so there’s always a one or two hundred bucks left over between November and April. Why am I clinging to every little penny? What is it about gazing at a number at the bottom of a Quickbooks column that’s so mesmerizing that it keeps me from doing anything else?

Comes in today’s New York Times an ad for this fall’s Chamber Music Society season. For $200, you get six concerts featuring nationally and internationally respected groups. OMG, here’s Chanticleer (!!!) and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Octet amd the Harlem Quartet and…Midori is coming here! That’s just $33 a concert, quite a bargain for any of these groups. And their venue is in a lovely little concert hall not far from my house, not way to heck and gone out at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, where they used to play back in the day when my ex- and I had season tickets every year.

Hmmm… For $75, you can go to an extra concert at the Desert Botanical Garden, which would be lovely.

However…the DBG itself has a series called “Music in the Garden,” which features performers in many musical genres. For $65, you can get a Garden membership and admission to those concerts for $15. You also get free admission whenever you want to walk around, free admission to the flashlight tours, 20% discounts on classes and gift shop purchases, 10% off on the annual plant sale, and reciprocal admission to a whole slew of other botanical gardens around the country, including—within driving distance—the charming Tohono Chul park in Tucson and the Arboretum at Flagstaff.

So, there you go: Get a season ticket to chamber music and combine it with a single-person Desert Botanical Garden membership and be entertained for a year.

Why not?