Yesterday I went to the Met telecast of Wagner's Meistersinger. I was running late and skipped breakfast. But I got a headache and had to leave early. (In hindsight, I should have come late and only seen the second half.) The opera doesn't have much action; it's more of a debate about art set to music.
This afternoon was ROLT, focusing on children's writing as usual in December. (The event was titled I Wanna Bedtime Story.) Twenty people said they were coming, I made a reservation for eight, and five people showed up. I read a chapter from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer in which a romantic meeting with Becky Thatcher turns to heartbreak; a poem from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory about how books are better than TV; a passage from near the end of the second Harry Potter book where Harry says that he and Voldemort have a lot in common, and Dumbledore replies that we're defined not by our talents but by our choices; and a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy (about her future husband) where the parents leave their kids alone for a week and things get out of hand.
I've started watching on Youtube a PBS documentary about Napoleon from the series Empires. Fascinating stuff! He hated France in his childhood, but ended up being more French than the French! (Like some Canadians become more American than the Americans.)
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