Various musings

I have to admit that one of my favorite award shows is the Tonys. Actually, since the only other one I watch is the Oscars, which gets progressively worse every year and for the life of me I don’t know why I bother, that does seem to be setting the bar pretty low, but I always enjoy seeing stagings of the shows which, if I had money to burn, I would go see. I can’t believe how expensive NY theater is these days, for what nine times out of ten is just a tourist attraction. I mean, how many people who own multiple versions of everything Sondheim actually go to see Wicked out of anything but morbid curiosity? Anyhow, I was poring over this year’s nominees and, with a couple of exceptions, I really don’t want to see any of these. So I probably won’t even watch the show. Then again, I’ll be in Paris that night, so I guess I’ll survive.

TOC is over and done with, meaning it’s safe to go back onto Twitter. Of course, like everyone else, I succumbed and watched my local horses do their bit in the race over the weekend. I hated to see two local boys duke it out in the run-off round. Sigh. Danny D, who I keep thinking is graduating this year, just as I kept thinking last year that he was graduating last year, apparently started debating in kindergarten, as he will be back again in ’14, the year in which, perhaps, he’ll graduate. Maybe he just keeps getting kept back. This, needless to say, jumps to the conclusion that he is real and not just an incredibly startling figment of Chetan’s imagination. Meanwhile Facebook has been filled with valedictory notices from a lot of folks, and congratulations to one and all, which is nice to see, and preferable I guess to the usual fare of non-events noted at great length for no reason. (I think I’ve said in the past that my visits to Fb are fairly rare.) It’s all over now but the shouting, in other words, as my father used to say.

On a personal note, this morning was the annual meeting with my mother’s caregivers. She’s in good shape for 88, and as it turns out, she is at the top of her peer group in terms of mental acuity, meaning that aside from normal senior absentmindedness, she is in full possession of all of her faculties. This bodes well for the coachean gene set. If I do happen to go on relatively indefinitely, I would like to think that I’ll be going on knowing, well, what’s going on, as she does. Her mother’s side of the family all lived forever, as compared to my father’s side of the family, a bunch of hotheads who all went apoplectic one time too many and hence died during heart attacks. Since I hardly ever go apoplectic, making me less of a Menick and more of a Bowen (my grandmother’s people), I can now start knocking wood and wondering if all of you young 'uns will still be supporting my social security payments thirty years from now. I certainly hope so.

This being the last day of April, I have about three months or so to pretend to do something useful with the debate break. Obviously there’s vacation in June, already mentioned. And Summer Street, which I haven’t been working on as I should. And one or two other things I may or may not do. Going by past performances, I’ll talk a good game but won’t accomplish terribly much. I have started going at things like the MHL website to get them ready for battle. To be honest, I really do need a vacation from everything, especially the DJ. Paris and London seem like the perfect antidote to sitting around reading and editing, and then reading and reading and writing and reading and reading and editing and reading and then, for a break, reading. Oh, well. They pay me handsomely for it. Why be churlish?