"Go fight city hall!"

This is a persistent cold I've got! (I actually suffered nausea Friday night, but maybe that means I'm in the last stages.) I'm ashamed that it's been over a week since my last post.

Monday night I played hooky from choir practice to see Renee Fleming in the Met production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow at the Yonge & Eglinton.  Kelli O'Hara is really pretty, and the Met can find some great dancers whenever they're needed.

I found a video on Youtube that plays Camille Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals while showing each page of the score as it gets played.  Nifty.

Today was the latest ROLT Meetup.  It was for political writing and social comment, and titled "Go fight city hall!" I was caught by the change to Daylight Savings Time and was almost an hour late. (Even if I'd remembered the change, I have a feeling I would have been late anyway what with my slow condition.) But the others had got their own discussions going and I was barely needed!  I read George Orwell's "A Hanging" and let someone else read the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Little Match Girl."  I also brought a Montaigne essay and James Thurber's story about being called for draft examination again and again in World War I, but I didn't want to tax my voice.

I've just been reading "Such, Such Were the Days," Orwell's memoir of going to a snobbish prep school around the time that World War I broke out.  He was there on a scholarship discount in the hope that he'd win a scholarship to Eton and help put the school on the map--which he did--and they never let him forget that he was a charity case!