NORMA

Yesterday afternoon I saw a screening of the Bellini opera Norma at the Bloor, the one about the Druidess who holds sway over the rebellious Gauls but's been in love with an unfaithful Roman proconsul.  It was a Royal Opera production with a 20th-century design, which I didn't care for with this sort of story.  I remember seeing a Met production of Lucia di Lamermoor set in Victorian Scotland which didn't seem right either. (But I could imagine a Lucia production set in the antebellum South, what with its notorious feuds.) The lead soprano reminded me of Melania Trump!  

My favorite part of the opera, besides the famous "Casta Diva" aria, is the Norma-Pollione duet just before the finale.  I also like the war cry chorus, which reminds me of Indian music in westerns. (I suppose that Gauls were the Indians of the Roman world!) It's very challenging music:  I read that the first production had good singers in the lead, but they just weren't in their best voice and the show flopped.

We saw another library DVD with an episode of the Overland Trekker series.  Last week it was Australia; this week it was the Silk Road in central Asia.

This afternoon was the latest Classic Book Club event:  Dicken's Christmas novellas A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and Cricket on the Hearth. (I'd finished rereading A Christmas Carol just yesterday morning.) Karen even recited part of Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales"! Recitations are a useful addition to these events.  I ordered an omelette and when they were late bringing the home fries the Victory Cafe people generously threw an a free mulligatawny soup order to make up for it.  And I don't even care for home fries!

I met a new member called Ryan, who's an archaeologist.  What an odd calling archaeology must be!  It's all about the old days, yet it's one of the most modern sciences--to the extent that you can call it a science at all.  So much of it is conjecture which can't be proved or disproved that I think of it as an art!  You dig up the bones of your ancestors, and imagine how they must have lived.  In one sense it's the world of the dead, but in another sense it's all about life!  Ryan was amused when I mentioned a quote by Agatha Christie, who married archaeologist Max Mallowan: "An archaeologist makes a perfect husband, because as his wife grows older he gets more interested in her!" A gerontologist would make a good husband too.

In these events our conversation can go all over the place!  Karen mentioned how much she liked Fritz Lang's movie M, so Ryan started talking about Lang, and I mentioned Lang's film noir Scarlet Street, and mentioned how a couple of bits near the end of the Warner Brothers cartoon One Froggy Evening were borrowed from that movie. (One with the hero sitting alone on a park bench in the winter; another with him plodding along the sidewalk, a broken man.) So we got into Warner Brothers cartoons, which Ryan and I both love.  We were also discussing the different movie versions of A Christmas Carol:  I'll have to see the George C. Scott TV movie someday!

Since the history group subject in January will be the '50s, I wanted to screen the Lana Turner movie Peyton Place.  But I couldn't find it in the video stores so I was thinking of showing Leo di Caprio in This Boy's Life instead.  But then I found out that Suspect Video has Peyton Place after all!  Suspect Video is closing at year's end, however, so I'll see if they'll sell it to me.