Monday, March 14, 2016

Flying home


     Well, the trip's over, and I'm flying home. I feel like I've been gone forever. My mind's too fuzzy to even try to write anything cogent.  But luckily I tucked away a little something, just in case.  Back to more substantial fare tomorrow.      

     So I took my 100 readers to "Romeo and Juliet" a couple weeks back. Everyone seemed to have a good time. One thing I noticed is the audience, which at the Lyric can skew toward the antediluvian, seemed considerably younger: college students. High school students, even. I assumed they were drawn by love of the romance of the familiar Shakespeare tale of romance.
    Or maybe not-so-familiar. 
    As we were leaving the lovely Civic Opera House, I overheard heard a young woman exclaim to another:
     "You didn't know they died?"

6 comments:

  1. Oh. My. That is equal parts sad and hilarious. A bit painful as well since it made me laugh while drinking coffee.

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  2. Not long ago, I gave my nephew the book Lies My Teacher Told Me and he confessed that when he was in high school he thought that the US and Britain were the only countries fighting Germany and Japan. He could never figure out who that guy was sitting with Roosevelt and Churchill.

    john

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    1. tate, totally off Neil's post, but I had a similar experience with a student doing a research paper on FDR who didn't know who won WWII. I wanted to weep.

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    2. "To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child." Cicero

      TE

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  3. It's sometimes possible to get things just a little bit wrong. Some years ago Lyric put on a nice production of Gluck's "Orfeo ed Eurodice," with American bass-baritone Richard Stillwell, a good looking fellow, in the title role. Leaving the theater I overheard a woman commenting to her companion about what a dashing figure he had cut. The other woman agreed and said he had also handled the somewhat florid music unusually well, noting that the part is usually performed by a mezzo soprano these days. A nice bit of operatic erudition had she left it at that, but she went on to say "You know, it was originally written for one of those castrated tenors."

    Neil will find more than hearth and home to welcome him, having left on the very trailing edge of winter. Looking out my upstairs window through a light rain on a coolish day an Irish countryman would term "fresh," I see all around the beginnings of what Miss Dickenson termed "this whole experiment in green."

    Tom Evans

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  4. I'm surprised younger people are unfamiliar with Romeo and Juliet. It's still part of the high school Lit curriculum, at least in my district. I have heard Common Core is squeezing out the classics though.

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