Salsa on St. Clair

Last weekend my neighbourhood had the Salsa on St. Clair Festival.  It was pretty noisy, as usual.  I hoped that Maria and Sergey would come explore it with me, but Sergey squashed his finger on a subway door.  I was also hoping Debbie would come, but she'd just came back from the Rockies where she picked up Covid!

Moira is in Kingston just now, so I've been alone again.

Finally finished the history of the English Civil War.  Now I'm reading Jonathan Manthorpe's Forbidden Nation:  A History of Taiwan.

I recently had a dream where I was in a comedy and started thinking up all these funny things to happen.  If I could just get into that mindset when I'm awake I could write comedies!

Last week I saw Past Lives at the Varsity, a nice little movie about a Korean girl whose family moved to America, who makes online contact with a guy who knew her back in Korea and hasn't completely got over her.  It's the sort of movie Hollywood doesn't make...

In that Korean children's book I've been translating about Lincoln, I've got to the part where he's President!

DIE FLEDERMAUS

Last weekend I performed Die Fledermaus in the Toronto City Opera.  Tech rehearsal followed by dress rehearsal followed by three performances, all at the Fleck Dance Theatre in Harbourfront. (The dressing rooms have showers there!) I used my own black suit so they only had to give me a bow tie.  The "waiters" served us swiss rolls cut into small pieces--I now realize that's the only way to eat them!

On Wednesday I went to the Home Depot near St. Clair & Keele and brought a push mower! (We don't have a big enough lawn to justify the old power mower.) Mowing manually is a workout, but I prefer it to doing TV workouts.

That day the wildfire smoke reached Toronto again, and again I noticed the funny smell.  I also got my hair cut, and was so busy that I forgot to put out the trash bins!

We subscribed to Apple TV and just saw the documentary series Lincoln's Dilemma, about the abolition of slavery during the Civil War.

The past two Fridays I've shown Jan Troell's The Emigrants and The New Land at my historical movie watch party. (I saw it 40 years ago on PBS.) With the first one, the DVD player swallowed the disc and wouldn't play it, and I had to restart the computer, then I was slow getting into Zoom, so I was ten minutes late getting started!  But it was worth the wait.  I remembered the shipboard scene where Liv Ullmann detected lice on her body and went into hysterics, blaming a fellow passenger.

I've almost finished Diane Purkiss' long (though impressive) book about the English Civil War.  But I've run into a long chapter about the Levellers so I'll need a bit more patience...