Hell week

Sunday was my Reading Out Loud Meetup.  The topic was poetry, and there were a dozen people, the largest group I've ever had!  I read Sandberg's "Chicago" (in my Scots version), a children's poem "If No One Ever Marries Me," Walter Scott's "Breathes There a Man," and the poem about the Tay Bridge disaster by the World's Worst Poet William McGonagall.  Someone recited John Donne poems from memory!  If the Victory Cafe gets torn down along with Honest Ed's we'll have to find a new place, and someone suggested a room you can book at the Starbuck's near Christie & Davenport.

This is "hell week" for my opera group.  Two dress rehearsals followed by four shows, all in six days.  And I'm not completely over my cold.  I didn't have buckles for my shoes since I missed Wednesday's Elixir of Love rehearsal, so Beatrice got Gerald to give me his. (He's playing Dulcamara and his pants go down to his shoes, unlike the chorus men who are wearing knee socks.)

Monday night I wasn't up to choir practice.  Which is just as well because I had a ticket to see the cinema broadcast of the Met production of Bizet's The Pearl Fishers.  That's the opera where Jurga and Nadir were best friends until Leila came between them, but now they're best friends again, except that Jurga's become the headman of a Sri Lankan fishing village that brings in Leila as a virgin whose job is to sing calmness to the sea, while Nadir's come there in amorous pursuit of Leila, and he seduces her and there's a big storm and the village is going to execute them and Jurga's especially homicidal because of his own jealousy, but Leila gives him the pearl pendant he gave her when she hid him from a lynch mob, so Jurga sets the village on fire as a distraction so he can free the two of them in repayment of his debt, but he stays behind to take their fate onto himself.  Of course, the two highlights are in the first act:  the Jurga-Nadir duet and Nadir's aria.  It has a lot in common with Delibes' Lakme.

We need a new doorbell.  It just beeps like a truck in reverse, not nearly enough to wake you from sleep.  Monday night I forgot my house key and when I got home I rang the bell twenty times but Father was sound asleep and I had to break a window to wake him up!  Tonight he left the door unlocked for me.