I have walked back with Chris from the Manhattan School of Music. I had some quibbles with a few directorial decisions that made no sense to me at all, but I thought it was a lovely production of one of the really great operas. The cast and orchestra were wonderful, the ensemble was really solid, and the performance got a lot of laughs because the libretto is jampacked with funny lines and funnier business, Three and a half hours of Mozart flies by because there is so much genius shooting sparks in every direction, from voice to action to orchestra, while three and a half hours of Wagner seems to me three and a half centuries, with brief moments of genius and a helluva lot of masturbation I never want to watch.
Before the opry we had a lovely dinner at Popovers; Chris had a spinach and mushroom salad and I had a delicious portion of salmon with mashed sweet potatoes and green beans. We walked up to the school, got the tickets and saw the performancw. At the first intermission we saw Ron Raines and Charlotte, my goddaughter, We also talked to Howard Kissel, whom I hadn't seen since Ron and Dona's anniversary two years ago. At the second intermission Ron told us he was leaving, since he and Charlotte had seen the performance on Wednesday night, so Chris and I moved up to his and Charlotte's front row balcony seats for the third and fourth acts. I think Charlotte left after the first act.
DR JRand, your comment about the spirit world tonight was interesting: oin the way uptown we walked past my first apartment on West 94th Street, and I was telling Chris about the terrifying ghost that haunted the place every night, and he was telling me about the ghost in his apartment that makes the sound of a broom sweeping and how it freaks him out. That's got me thinking about the dog barking above me and now I'm wondering if he might be rattled by a ghost in this building. There are at least two or three, one of them being the man who hanged himself in the apartment below mine around 1982.
