SIX FEET UNDER

A.J. Soprano (answering the phone): "Home of the Burger--what's your beef?"

"Your father is dead and my pot roast is ruined!"--Six Feet Under

I think I'm over the worst of my cold. Monday night I sweated a lot.  The Merry Widow song "A Highly Respectable Wife" has been going through my head, as has Don Jose and Micaela's duet in Carmen, and Danilo's song near the end of the Merry Widow second act!

We finished the fourth season of The Sopranos.  We've decided to skip the rest of the show, which I recall gets even bleaker and has less of Meadow and A.J.  After Adrianna got killed that was sort of the show's "point of no return": after that everything else seemed anticlimactic.

Last night we saw the first episode of Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, about a Los Angeles family in the funeral home business, which would start each episode with someone dying and have lots of surreal stuff like the dead speaking.  It was a brilliant balance between the real and the absurd, though I didn't like the last two seasons nearly as much. (They were bound to run out of ideas eventually...)