ticking over

The summer is speeding to its close careening uncontrollably toward its inevitable demise meandering gradually in the general direction of some kind of vaguely perceptible yet indefinable Verwandlung, the finish line demarcated in this neck o' the woods by the increasingly ironic Labor Day (the day when all Americanistan celebrates the Americanistanian Worker, and all the rights that once pertained thereto and for which a long line of her/his predecessors were jailed, shot and hanged...but more on this later).  Soon it will be time to commit those summer festival schedules to the recycling bin and realize that once again we missed way more than we caught.

Of the things we did catch, what was the best?  Acis & Galatea in Great Barrington, which...sigh.  And the RSC's The Winter's Tale, worth even the Stand and Deliver technique that Lincoln Center Festival used to rob us of all the lupins we'd got.  (Okay so I get the tax write-off (or would, if I made enough money to make it worth itemizing, you merlot-swilling bourgeois 401(c)3 pigdogs) but my friends who paid me for their tickets do not? And how is that fair, exactly?)  You see this still annoys me, so good thing the performance was as brilliant as it was.  Also it was both fun and instructive to watch my smoking friend try to find a light on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and garner such polite hostility from the crowd gathered outside the Armory.  As if, were she to succeed, she might attract the black helicopters.  (She'd probably have done better knocking on the stage door, actually.)  And no, I confess I was not all that sympathetic to her plight. Bad friend. Bad.

There may be a few things more before September rolls around, but arriving Fall schedules and rumors of Spring are a constant distraction. We are already looking at the promised Glimmerglass 2012 Armide / Lost in the Stars combo and going Hmmmm....