Yesterday, the radio opera was Bizet’s “Carmen.” I doubt I have to say anything about the plot, but this is a recording from 2010 wth Robertu Alagna and Elīna Garanča, which may have been a Live in HD presentation, and if it was, I saw it on television, back in the day when it was easy to get multiple channels without cable. You may laugh at what I remember … but one of the features in the production was that as Don Josê got farther and farther from respectability, they want to show that his hair had grown. (Wigs are nothing new at the Met – many people with perfectly good hair use them, and sometimes a production will require one or more as in this production.) By the time they got to act four it was a wig at or a little below the shoulder. Between the stage business and the lighting, it made Alagna look like Alan Rickman playing Snape. (If you have read the last book and/or seen the last two movies, you know that killing the woman he loved is NOT something Snape would ever have done, no matter how jealous he was.) I know the opera well – have even played second violin in a college orchestra in the seventies (not well I’m afraid, but I worked hard.) If I hadn’t I would have been so distracted I’d have completely lost the plot. I even found an email address for the lighting designer and asked whether that was in tended (it wasn’t. And it’s impossible to predict what people will actually see in a production.) If I’m right, and that’s the same one, it was enough to make me forget Barbara Frittoli and Teddy Tahu Rhodes (there is an actual website called “Barihunks,” and he is one). On another subject, I want to mention “Americans of Conscience.” This is a good site to have in your playbook, especially if you are fit and wanting to do something but don’t know what. Even I, who have issues these days with activity, can find something in their site – in their gratitude section, I can send thank you notes to people who have displayed courage and doing the right thing. I would look at their cookies and opt out of the non-necessary ones, but then I mostly do that anyway. They use WordPress, as do we, so they may already have anything they would collect. In Friday’s email they listed five people to thank and I thanked four of them – I could not bring myself to thank Susan Collins for voting the right way on a Trump** nominee. Had her vote prevailed, I might have, but it didn’t. One other thing – After finding the Ukrainian government’s GoFundMe-like site Friday, I subscribed to it, and yesterday I got the first email from it. They are not letting any grass grow under their feet. They are making 100 Tshirts with this quote from Zelenskyy’s – whatever it’s called when someone is attacked by a mob – Friday: “I’ll wear the costume when this war is over.” And anyone who donates from the email (or possibly just at the website for a limited time) will be entered into a drawing for one.
Wonkette‘s story here is I think mixed rather than totally good. But it does have enough smiles in it that I wanted to share it.
This, also from Wonkette, I consider very good. It’s a little less new, but I hope worth waiting for. I’m not crazy about the point of law on which they based the decision, which is that in order to vacate a conviction the defendant’s constitutional rights must have been violated in some way. And this is almost certainly not the time nor the Congress to ask to pass a law that a conviction may be vacated if there is proof of actual innocence even if there wasa just a good faith mistake. But maybe that’s something to look at.
This is from USA Today, and I would not have seen it had not Faithful America referred me to it. But I’d say it’s good news as far as it goes. It would be better news if there were anyone in this Justice Department who would enforce it (or allow it to be enforced.)
