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I had a very tasty cranberry and currant scone, with a cup of coffee, this morning at the South End Buttery at the corner of Shawmut Avenue and Union Park Street in the South End of Boston.   Pleasant employees.  Attractive clientele.

“Could going to the gym be making you fatter?,” asks an article at dailymail.co.uk.  Maybe.  I go to the gym five or six times a week, and I am getting fatter.

I had to go to the Registry of Deeds in Dedham today, and I got home about 2:30 in the afternoon.  When I got out of the car, I happened to see an NSTAR car park a short distance away.  NSTAR is the utility that provides electricity and natural gas.  There were some NSTAR employees in the neighborhood a few weeks ago investigating a possible gas leak, and so I was curious to see where the person went.  He or she (I couldn’t tell the gender for certain because it was raining and the person was wearing a hooded rain slicker) went to the house of one of my neighbors, rang the bell, and handed an orange envelope to the woman who answered the door.  My guess is that a bill must be seriously past due.  But I never heard of such a procedure for hand-delivering an orange envelope.

Quite a few years ago my law partner and I were getting two electric bills every month.  (The electric company at that time was called Boston Edison.) One was for the suite we occupied, and so of course we paid that every month.  Another was for a nearby suite that we did not occupy, and the electric company strangely refused to believe my phone calls and letters to the effect that we did not occupy the particular space.  More than a year and a half went by until the electric company finally agreed to send out somebody to verify my assertions.  And yet in all that time there were no orange envelopes.  I wonder what one has to do to get an orange envelope.

The people who occupied the suite were a detective agency, a little bit louche in appearance.  They certainly weren’t so attractive as the detectives in 77 Sunset Strip or Surfside 6.  They didn’t even look so respectable as the detectives in Juliet of the Spirits.

According to one person who posted at boston.com, what was happening at Boston Latin School was that there were “girls who were biting each other’s necks and drawing blood in the bathrooms. As well as bringing umbrellas to school to protect themselves from the sun and cutting their wrists so that they appeared pale.”  That sounds credible.  If it is true, I don’t know why school officials would deny the existence of a problem.

There are no vampires at Boston Latin School, says a school administrator, reports the Boston Globe.  Is denial affirmation?

Calling all bibliophiles and philanthropists!  Read any good books lately?  Given to a good cause?  You can do both at an up-coming luncheon and you can donate to charity!

God’s Love We Deliver is hosting the 6th Annual Authors in Kind Literary Luncheon at the Plaza Hotel Grand Ballroom in New York on Thursday, April 23, 2009.  Come meet guest authors Wally Lamb, William D. Cohan, and Giulia Melucci and watch acclaimed legal expert Linda Fairstein as Master of Ceremonies.

Each guest will receive a complimentary signed copy of one of the author’s books, and all titles will be available for purchase and signing at 11:30am prior to the 12:00 luncheon.
For more information, please see http://www.godslovewedeliver.org/whatsnew_home.html or contact Susan Oher at (212) 294-8162 or aik@glwd.org.

God’s Love We Deliver, is an organization based in New York City, whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of people living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-altering illnesses by alleviating hunger and malnutrition.  They prepare and deliver high-quality meals to people who, because of their illness, are unable to provide or prepare meals for themselves

I just got back from a two-day trip to New York.  I went down on the train Wednesday morning and got to Pennsylvania Station around 10:30.  I walked up Seventh Avenue to Broadway to Columbus Circle and had a sandwich at Whole Foods.  I went to a noontime mass at the Paulist Fathers’ church and then I walked down Broadway to 44^th Street to the Shubert Theatre where I saw Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati, Rupert Everett as Charles, Christine Ebersole as Elvira, and Jayne Atkinson as Ruth.  The play, a comedy first performed in London in 1941, is about a novelist, Charles, who is married to his second wife, Ruth, and living in Kent.  They invite to dinner a medium, Madame Arcati, and a physician and his wife, so that Madame Arcati can conduct a séance after dinner to enable Charles to gather background material for a novel he is writing.  Madame Arcati is unaware of the motivation for the invitiation.  In any event, as a result of the séance Charles’ first wife, Elvira, returns from the after-death spirit world.   And complications ensue.  The play itself is delightful, an especially well written work for the theatre.  The focus seemed a little different this time, because Angela Lansbury was apparently considered the star.  I can’t say for a certainty but I am inclined to think that there were cuts that diminished slightly some of the other roles.  All of the actors were competent, and the play worked, but not so well as it might have.  The chemistry between Charles, Ruth, and Elvira was a little lacking.  Angela Lansbury was the only performer who made a truly stellar impression.  The play was  done better last year in Providence by the Trinity Repertory Company by actors who had more chemistry working together, made all the relationships seem believable, delivered the lines more effectively, and more fully realized the work’s comic potential.

I checked into a room at the Chelsea Lodge on West 20^th Street off Eighth Avenue, and had a meal at a place called the Eros Café at 190 Seventh Avenue.  I was curious to try it, since it is on the ground floor of the apartment building that I lived in from 1976 to 1978.  It has sort of a diner menu and says it serves breakfast all day long.  I had an omelette with French fries.  The fries were pale, and I didn’t especially like the slight taste of whatever oil they had been cooked in, and so I didn’t feel like finishing the meal.  The staff seemed friendly and attentive, but I don’t think I’ll go back.

Wednesday night I went to Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez. It has been reported that Natalie Dessay did not want to perform the opera in the Swiss village setting called for  by the libretto of this 1831 opera.  The production by Mary Zimmerman sets the work in a present-day rehearsal studio where La Sonnambula is being rehearsed.  Kind of a tired old idea right off the bat.  You really have to be quite the pseudo-sophisticate to think that sounds better than a Swiss village.  I don’t object to a change in time and place if the whole thing is done in a way that makes sense.  Unfortunately little makes sense in this production.  The details have not been thought through, maybe because the powers that be at the Met despise the audience and think they won’t know what’s going on anyhow.  People just sit back and hear exotic sounds they don’t understand and watch people move around on stage, so they must think.  It is never quite clear to what extent the opera is being rehearsed and to what extent the characters are actually experiencing events in their own lives.  A count stops by, and arrangements are made so that he can spend the night sleeping in a bed in the rehearsal space.  Would a count, or anyone for that matter, go to New York without staying at a hotel or with friends and just show up at an opera rehearsal place to be offered a place to stay?  Would an opera singer’s adoptive mother hang out at the rehearsal space?  Some stage mother.  Would people in an opera company carry on wildly if a singer fooled around with a visitor? These people do, throwing around pieces of paper for no apparent reason.  If a singer were a sleepwalker, wouldn’t she sleepwalk at home and not at the rehearsal space?  Et cetera, et cetera.  The singing was very good, but a concert performance would have been preferable to this nonsense.

On Thursday morning I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and looked at the Bonnard exhibition and at some of the permanent collection.  The Bonnard paintings were interiors and still lifes that the artist painted between 1923 and his death early in 1947.  To me he seems like a sort of lesser Matisse, but I’m not really a student of the visual arts.  I had lunch, something similar to ravioli with wild mushroom stuffing, at the museum cafeteria.  Very pleasant.

In the afternoon I spent some time strolling around Greenwich Village, looking in a few of the shops.

For supper I had a quite tasty ham sandwich, and cheesecake for dessert,  at the new restaurant in the lobby of the remodeled Alice Tully Hall.  I enjoyed the company of a blogger and a friend of the blogger, both of whom had chicken pot pie.

I then attended a concert performance of the operetta The Firebrand of Florence, with music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and book by Edwin Justus Mayer.  In 1945 the operetta had a three-week tryout in Boston and then a run of forty-three performances on Broadway.  The story was old-fashioned, even for 1945.  The show has only one memorable melody, so it seems to me, and no memorable lyrics.  The characters are like cardboard figures, and the plot is trivial.  Still, I enjoyed the performance very much.  The performers were all competent and they made a good effort, although  I wish they hadn’t used microphones and amplified sound.   The work has some humor, though corny at times. Nathan Gunn was quite good as Benvenuto Cellini, the firebrand of Florence.  Most of the dialogue was omitted, and a narrator set the scenes instead.  The remodeling, with darker wooden paneling, has improved the appearance of the interior of Alice Tully Hall, but with the amplified sound I couldn’t form any impression about the acoustics.

Portrait of Benvenuto Cellini 1822 Giclee Print
Vasari, Giorgio
Buy at AllPosters.com

This morning I took the train back home.

I went to Providence on the train this morning.  There were still lots of empty spaces at the parking lot at the commuter rail station when I got there about 8:45 a.m.  The lot used to fill up before eight o’clock when parking cost two dollars a day, but now that the parking costs four dollars it apparently never fills up.  That’s good for me since I don’t drive there very often anyhow, and when I do I tend to be later than the rush hour.

I did some browsing at Nordstrom’s.  They had some nice shirts.  I suppose $54 isn’t much for a shirt, but I’m used to paying $35 or less, and so I don’t want to get into the bad habit of paying full price for things I don’t really need.

I had a nice lunch at Bravo Brasserie across Washington Street from the Trinity Repertory Company’s theatre.  Sesame and ginger encrusted salmon with braised bok choy and basmati rice.

Then I went across the street to see the play The Secret Rapture by the Brisith playwright David Hare.  Sad to say, the play itself wasn’t very good, though most of the actors did a good job.  The father of two sisters dies.  One sister, Marion (Phyllis Kay) is a Conservative-party member of Parliament during the Thatcher years.   Marion’s husband Tom (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) is a businessman with “Praise the Lord” religious views.  I didn’t know they had such people in England.  The other sister, Isobel (Rachael Warren), is one of three people in a commercial art studio.  Their stepmother, their father’s widow Katherine (Anne Scurria), is an alcoholic.  For not very clear reasons, Isobel has Katherine come to London to work in the commercial art studio as a salesperson.  Isobel’s love interest Irwin (Stephen Thorne) who works for her at the studio doesn’t think Katherine’s presence in the business is a good idea.  And it turns out not to be.  Marion and Tom’s business buys the commercial art studio, apparently as a subsidiary.  Isobel is bothered that Tom had spoken with Irwin and had told Irwin that his salary would be doubled after the takeover of the business.  Apparently that conversation was some big deal, I don’t know why.  The studio expands and moves to a more expensive address. Marion’s assistant Rhonda (Patricia Lynn) drops by the studio and lolls around in a dressing gown talking to Irwin before she takes a shower.  And so on.  Not very plausible.  Not very dramatic.  Isobel wants to take care of Katherine even though Katherine drinks  vodka and stabs a major client in a bar.  I guess Isobel never heard of Al-Anon.  More things happen, again not very plausible.  There is supposed to be a message that greed was bad during the Thatcher years.  The message doesn’t really come across.  They used to say if you want to send a message, call Western Union.

Isobel’s words were not intelligible about 2% of the time.  Maybe that’s not much to complain about,  but I think it is.  In the theatre an actor needs to enunciate words clearly and project them out into the audience.  The other actors’ words were intelligible 100% of the time, even when the play called for them to speak softly.

At the end there was one brief “curtain call” with polite unenthusiastic applause.