PARTNERS IN CRIME

 I've been watching Partners in Crime on Crave TV.  It's the new British series based on Agatha Christie's stories about the detective couple Tommy and Tuppence.  There was a lighthearted version in the early '80s, but this version is more about thrills.  While the earlier version was set between the wars, this one involves '50s Cold War intrigue. The supporting cast includes Alice Krige, whom I remember from Chariots of Fire, and Clarke Peters from the David Simon series The Wire and Treme.  It's handsome and taut, but I think I prefer the earlier version because it had Francesca Annis, who's major fine!

 

Sunday afternoon was Reading Out Loud.  The event's topic was American literature, and I titled it "The greatest country in the Whole Wide World!" (Some Americans will look at that title and take it seriously...) Attendance was reduced by the cold weather and the nearby Santa Claus Parade, and two people were late because there was a book release event upstairs and they thought that was our event.

 

I read Hemingway's "The Killers," the part of Tom Sawyer where Injun Joe's found dead in the cave, some Spoon River Anthology poems about soldiers, and let other people read Robert Frost's "A Servant to Servants" and Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armor." Malcolm read the opening passage of Cricket on the Hearth with the cricket and the tea kettle playing a duet, Cathryn read from her self-published novel about the Smyrna crisis after World War I, and someone whose name I sadly forgot read from Kerouac's On the Road.  I didn't get the chance to read the chapter in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie where she attends someone's birthday party.

I forgot to bring my Pierre Belvedere notebook to the memoir group, a mistake I've never made before, but someone gave me a couple of sheets to write on.  Afterward Helen was telling me about how she'd been a missionary in Pakistan.  It must be interesting to be a former missionary:  you'd see your old home in a new way!

Tonight was the last opera rehearsal before Saturday's fundraiser. (The chorus is doing the Habanera, the Vilja song and the Grisette number.) I told Beatrice about Noises Off because that sort of thing would interest her.  That glamorous Merry Widow music has been going through my head!

On Facebook I came in contact with Pena, whom I met on the New York tour.  Seems she's been reading this blog and likes it.  She and John Snow make two fans!

 

In Cricket on the Hearth I got to a part about a toymaker with a blind daughter who shelters her from knowledge of their decrepit house and harsh taskmaster.  I remember reading it in school over forty years ago!

I've started translating Walt Whitman's poem "There Was a Child Went Forth" into Portuguese.