Reading: A Severed Head

Moving: walked a lot

Garden: none of that either

Watching: "Orpheus Descending." All of Kymm's stress really did pay off.

23 November 2002: Books of Wonder and Orpheus Descending

Jared recommended Artisanal, but only by happenstance did I spot it on 37th as we crossed from Park to Fifth looking for breakfast. Or brunch, since it was past noon by the we emerged. RDC shared his blintzes and we both had waffles. We watched the neighboring table have fondue, didn't smell too much Roquefort, and admired the cave in the back in which workers plied saws across great wheels of cheese.

Excuse me, I'm typing this while catching up on "Buffy." Did George Lucas and Steven Spielberg direct "Spiral"? Knights who haven't caught up with the times, like the Brothers of the Cruciform Sword, the Scooby Gang driving in what I thought was a Mystery Van but is actually an iron beast and Anya in the Denham Elliot role, whacking someone with a pan instead of a pen.

We scampered down to Books of Wonder. Along one side is a glassed bookcase full of first editions, including a complete first edition set of Pooh for five or eight thousand. I picked up Goodnight Moon, Runaway Bunny, and Each Peach Pear Plum for EHB. I cooed when I spotted a Sylvester with his Magic Pebble, but I gasped when I spotted Moomins on the top shelf. I had no idea Moomins existed in plush form.

We skulked around in midtown for a while in a deliberately touristy kind of way, finding the main library but entirely failing to find Rockefeller Plaza, had a few appetizers at Moda (proscuitto-wrapped tuna, shrimp and calamari, some gnocci) on 57th before "Orpheus Descending." Everything Kymm has been stressing about paid off. The phone, the stove, the cash register, the snakeskin jacket, and especially the paintings; the proper ladies' hats; Val and Lady and Carol and especially Jabe, whom I did really expect to keel over and die at any moment. Afterward we rode the cast's coattails for drinks and dessert with Kymm and then shocked her by walking home from Ninth and 45ish to Park and 36th.

I don't see enough plays. "Fiddler on the Roof" in third grade, put on by Saybrook high school. "Godspell," "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown," "Darn Yankees," and "Phantom Tollbooth" in middle school. "Peter and the Wolf" and "Oliver!" and some other juvenile ones at Ivoryton Playhouse. "You Can't Take It with You," "Ten Little Indians," and "Mame" by my own high school. Those might not count, except "Godspell" really does. "Uncle Vanya" by a group of town players in Old Lyme. "42nd Street" on one of my two high school trips to New York, and I didn't like Big Musical Productions any more by the time CLH took me to "Phantom of the Opera" in Boston. An unfunny staging of a restoration play as a freshling, downstairs at Jorgensen at UConn. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (it must have been abbreviated) and an Ionesco ("The Piano Lesson"?) in Moebius at UConn. "My Children, My Africa" at the drama school at UConn. "The Dresser," "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Medea," "Twelfth Night," and another Shakespeare comedy at the professional one at UConn. "Dining Room" at the Ivoryton Playhouse, I think on my own the summer of 1989. Whatever the Barrymore-as-Hamlet drama was (aha! "I Hate Hamlet!") with RDC at the Playhouse. Whatever that was in the winter of '95 in New York. "Fool for Love" at a wee theatre in Denver. "Wit" and The Tempest and "Arcadia" at the Space theatre in Denver Performing Arts Complex. Christopher Plummer as "Barrymore" in the main theatre at DPAC. Macbeth at the actual (well, close enough for me) Globe last year. Now two plays in just three days. Whoooo.

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