1969-? A Taste for Opera

An interest more than a passion. Continue reading

Introduction to opera: It was a very important incident in my life, but I have only the sketchiest memories of the occasion. I am pretty sure that my viewing of the movie The Pad (and How to Use It)1 took place in the TV room in the basement of Allen Rumsey House. The movie was released to theaters on my eighteenth birthday in August of 1966. I am pretty sure that I watched it by myself on Bill Kennedy’s afternoon show. He showed only old movies, and so I am dating this entry as 1969, the year that Kennedy moved his show to channel 50, WKBD. However, it might have been a little earlier, when he was still on CKLW, the powerful station in Windsor, ON.

The movie was based on a play by Peter Shaffer called The Public Ear. In it a guy meets a woman at a symphonic concert ( Mozart’s 40th, as I recall) and invites her to his apartment for supper. I admit that I watched this movie because of the promotions that portrayed it as a sexy comedy. In reality there is no sex at all. Parts of the movie are definitely funny, but the ending is tragic.

This was as racy as it got.`

The guy (played by Brian Bedford), has mistakenly concluded that the woman (Julie Sommars) is an aficionado of “long hair” music. In his “pad”he shows her his sophisticated phonograph system and plays excerpts from Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer and the Humming Chorus from Pucini’s Madama Butterfly.

I was not familiar with either of these works. The Wagnerian selection did not do much for me (and still doesn’t), but I found the Humming Chorus really moving (and still do). The woman, on the other hand, was much more interested in the guy’s neighbor (James Farentino), who had volunteered to cook a romantic supper for them.

This viewing occasioned my purchase of a few vinyl record albums. In those days full operas came in boxed sets of three or more records, which made them pretty expensive. One-disk recordings of the highlights from operas were also available. I purchased one of those for Madama Butterfly, and I really enjoyed it. I also purchased a couple of “greatest hits” albums from famous opera singers such as Renata Tebaldi and John McCormack. I also found some collections dedicated to individual composers. The one that I liked the best contained Rossini’s overtures. I should emphasize that I bought almost all of these records after they had been heavily discounted. I seldom paid more than $2 apiece.

I also frequented the small library of recordings that was available in West Quad. I don’t remember finding anything there that I really liked, but it exposed my ears to some new composers.

I had little or no success in getting any of the other A-R residents to listen to these records. I am not sure that I even tried.

I had no phonograph when I was in training in the army. At my first permanent station, Sandia Base in Albuquerque, I was occasionally able to assemble and conduct a small group of air musicians to accompany my recording of the overture from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. That was fun. In my final assignment at Seneca Army Depot I finally found a kindred spirit. That experience has been recorded here.


Live performances: Operas have always been expensive. For the first half of my working career my wife Sue and I could seldom afford to purchase opera tickets. After the company became more successful my attitude changed.

The first opera that I ever attended was Verdi’s Aida. In 1981 the Connecticut Opera Company (CO) staged an elaborate production at the home of the Hartford Whalers. I have written about this experience here.

I did not attend another opera until more than a decade later when we went to the Bushnell in Hartford to see a production by the same company of Bizet’s Carmen. Denise Bessette accompanied us. I was interested in the music, Sue wanted a night out, and Denise was hoping to be able to pick up some phrase of the dialogue in French. I do not remember much about the experience. I only recall that we arrived too late to attend the talk that preceded the performance. That put me in a very foul mood. I had purchased a CD of the opera that featured Agnes Baltsa. I was surprised that the performance in Hartford (like every other performance that I have heard or seen) used the recitatives that were added after Bizet’s death.

Willy Anthony Waters.

Sue and I also attended at least one performance before 1999, when Willy Anthony Waters took over as artistic director of the company. I remember watching a very bizarre version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. For some reason the stage director had women dressed in purple wandering around the stage in nearly every scene. They were supposed to represent Don G’s memories of his previous amorous conquest.

At some point in the early twenty-first century I purchased two season’s tickets to the CO. Each year thereafter I renewed the subscription, and each year my seats and the performances got better (in my opinion). In the last year we were in row F right in the middle. I would not have traded seats with anyone.

The CO put on several performances of three operas per year. I am pretty sure that I was able to attend each opera for the period during which I had season’s tickets. However, I can only remember the details of a few performances.

Jussi performed in Hartford! So did Luciano!
  • I remember a performance of Don Giovanni in which only one set was used. It consisted mostly of doors.
  • There must have been a production of Le Nozze di Figaro, but I remember no details.
  • I am quite sure that I watched a production of Die Zauberflöte by myself between two empty seats. That experience was depicted here.
  • I am sure that I saw Verdi’s La traviata performed in the traditional way with a soprano that I liked a lot. I don’t remember her name. During this show an Italian lady sat next to me. On the other side of her were family members or friends who had purchased the tickets with her in mind. She softly sang along to “Di provenza il mar, il suol”, but she did not seem to think much of the rest of the performance.
  • A year or two later the same soprano starred in a production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. I remember that the program made the strange claim that the only reason to stage this opera was to showcase a new soprano.
  • We definitely saw Richard Strauss’s Salome. It had more dancing than singing and was very short.
  • There was definitely a production of Verdi’s Rigoletto that starred a Black baritone who appeared in several other shows.
  • He was the star of the (rare) presentation of Puccini’s one-act opera, Il tabarro. It was coupled with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in which he played Tonio.
  • I have never been that enamored with Puccini’s Tosca. The one that was performed in Hartford had a very unimpressive climax. It was promoted by Mintz and Hoke, the one agency in the Hartford area that never agreed to talk with us.
  • I am pretty sure that one year Pagliacci was paired with its usual partner, Mascagni’s Cavelleria Rusticana.
  • I distinctly remember seeing Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel. I did not like it much.
  • We certainly saw a production of Puccini’s La bohème. I also remember seeing photos in the lobby of previous productions. Both Jussi Björling and Luciano Pavarotti starred in this opera in Hartford.
  • Presenting Richard Strauss’s Salome, a short opera with no memorable arias, was a strange choice. The big attractions were the dance of the seven veils and John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter.
  • I vaguely remember a production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.
  • One of the last operas that we saw was definitely the best, or at least the most surprisingly good. I went to see Rossini’s La cenerentola with low expectations, but I left with a real appreciation for what this company was able to do before its sudden demise.

The last season for the CO was 2008-2009. I attended the presentation of Don Giovanni in the fall of 2008. The attendance in Hartford was pretty good, but evidently the one performance in New Haven bombed. In February of 2009 the company abruptly shut down without refunding tickets already purchased. However, I had paid for three sets of two tickets using American Express, which refunded me the total cost of the tickets, including the portion for the one that we had attended.

I was shocked and very sad to hear about the OC’s demise. I enjoyed every aspect of attending operas at the Bushnell. By this time I was more than just appreciative of opera. Although the list of composers whom I did not like was fairly long, I really could hardly tolerate other forms of music. They seemed trivial by comparison.

In August Sue and I would sometimes drive to Cooperstown, NY, stay overnight at a horrendously overpriced hotel, and attend one or two performances in the beautiful Alice Bush Opera Theater. The theater was a very nice place to watch a show, but it had a tin roof. Those inside could really hear it when it started to rain. It also lacked air conditioning, but it was never intolerably hot.

I remember watching Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Jenůfa by Leoš Janáček, and Verdi’s attempt at comedy. Il regno di un giorno, There were probably others. I think that the last performance that we saw was Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, which starred baritone Dwayne Croft, whom I had heard many times on broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. His performance did not make anyone forget Robert Preston.

Sue and I also went to a couple of performances by traveling companies. We saw Carmen performed twice by foreign companies, once in Storrs and once (I think) in Amherst. We also attended a low-budget version of Figaro in Springfield, MA. After I had seen these “war horses” several times I no longer went out of my way to see them.

Sue and I also attended a couple of operas when we were on trips in Europe. We saw Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Rome as described here on p. 65. We also got to see an entertaining version of Figaro in Prague, as is described here. You can also read here about my adventure in Vienna that was capped off by a performance of the same opera.

Sue and I attended two operas in Pittsfield, MA, La bohème and Figaro. Both included a world class diva, Maureen O’Flynn, and both were extremely professional and entertaining. They were shown in and old-time movie house in downtown Pittsfield. Unfortunately the Berkshire Opera went out of business shortly thereafter.

In 2001 Denise Bessette and I witnessed a performance of Il trovatore in San Diego. That experience has been documented here. In 2006 Sue and I also spent a week in San Diego. On one evening we attended a performance of Carmen in the same theater. I also wrote about that vacation and posted it here.

I attended one opera on a business trip. It was in 2008, and the the client was Lord & Taylor. I walked from the hotel in which I was staying in Manhattan to Lincoln Center to watch a performance of La traviata by the Metropolitan Opera. That aspect of my relationship with L&T has been posted here.


Class: A guy named Mike Cascia2 gave presentations at the Enfield Public Library the week before the Live in HD performances shown at the local Cinemark. I attended a few of these. He also taught classes in opera for the continuing education program conducted by the Enfield public schools. I never enrolled in any of them because they conflicted with the Italian classes that I attended

Mike had a very impressive set of recordings. He played quite a few selections from each of the operas that he covered. However, his presentations did not, at least in the classes that I attended, provide a great deal of insight.

I also saw Mike at the Cinemark at Enfield Square mall a few times. He always sat in the first row behind the horizontal aisle, and so I was four or five rows behind him.


Recordings: In the early nineties I purchased a Sony Walkman so that I could listen to tapes while I was jogging. My cars for that period, the Saturn and my first Honda, also had cassette players. I discovered that Circuit City had a large selection of inexpensive cassette tapes of classical music. I bought a fairly large number of them, mostly just to find out what I liked. They were discarded long ago. I remember that I had samplings of many composers, including opera composers. I also somehow obtained a recording of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

I also bought from The Teaching Company3.several sets of opera courses conducted by Robert Greenberg4. The details are explained below. I really enjoyed listening to these courses, which covered in some detail a few operas and the backgrounds of the composers. The most astounding thing that I learned was that Tchaikovsky was coerced into committing suicide so that his sexual orientation was never made public.

I bought several CDs as well, including the following full-length operas:

Georges Bizet opera: Carmen with Agnes Baltsa and José Carreras. I once listened to this recording, which has dialogue rather than recitative, a lot. That, however, was before I discovered the recording on YouTube in which Maria Callas sings Carmen.

Sutherland and Pavarotti.

Donizetti opera: Pavarotti and Sutherland are wonderful in Lucia di Lammermoor. The quality of the YouTube recording is inferior, but the performances by Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano are the stuff of legend.

Four Mozart Operas:

  • Figaro conducted by Sir Georg Solti with Sam Ramey (from Wichita, KS) in the title role. This was one of the greatest opera recordings ever. The cast included Kiri Te Kanawa, Lucia Popp, Frederica Von Stade, and Thomas Allen. It also included the arias in the last act by Marcellina and Don Basilio that were almost always left out of live productions. I remembered listened to this recording as I was hiking by myself in the Dolemites in 2003, as described on page 18 of this posting.
  • Don Giovanni conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini featuring Eberhardt Wachter, Joan Sutherland, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Giuseppe Taddei. I have listened to and watched a large number of performances of this opera, and none measured up to this one.
  • Die Zauberflöte conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. Ramey and Te Kanawa also perform in this recording.
  • Così fan tutte One of the three disks was in the portable CD player that I left at an airport. I was too cheap to replace something of which I already possessed 2/3 of the contents. Te Kanawa shines on this recording, too. I once heard her say that there was no room for error with Mozart. She said that she always strove to hit the middle of each note.

Three Puccini Operas:

  • La Bohème with Jussi Björling and Victoria de los Angeles. For some reason it is not in stereo, a fact that I did not realize until I played it.
  • Tosca with Renata Scotto and Plácido Domingo. I am not crazy about this opera, but you can’t beat this performance.
  • Turandot would have been Puccini’s best opera if he had finished it5. I never tired of listening to Pavarotti and Sutherland. Luciano never incorrectly answered any of the riddles. I often have stopped listening after Liu’s aria. The rest of the opera was written by Franco Alfano after Puccini’s death.

Two Rossini operas:

  • My copy of Il barbiere di Siviglia featured Domingo (a tenor) in the baritone role of Figaro. He handled it easily. Kathleen Battle is superb as Rosina.
  • Agnes Baltsa played the title character in my recording of L’italiana in Algeri. I bought this before attending a performance of it so that I would have some familiarity with it.

Three Verdi Operas:

  • You haven’t heard La traviata until you hear Pavarotti and Sutherland.
  • The version of Rigoletto that is in my collection features Domingo as the count. This is the only set that I have that did not come with a box and a booklet containing the libretto.
  • James Levine discouraged Domingo’s ambition to sing Otello for several years. I had a recording of their ultimate collaboration. Renata Scotto sang the Desdemona (which in Italian is pronounced dehz DAY mo nah) role.

Cav/Pag: I bought two recordings of the one-act operas that are often paired in performances, Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni and Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The one that features Callas and Di Stefano was recorded in the fifties. The technology for the other one, with Pavarotti and a pair of excellent female vocalists, is several decades newer. I prefer Pavarotti and Mirella Freni in Pagliacci, but Callas’s performance of Santuzza (which she never sang on stage) in Cavalleria is unforgettable. It ruined the opera for me whenever anyone else attempted it.

Singles: I purchased a dozen or so individual CDs. Most of them were collections of arias by various artists, including sets of Verdi arias by Callas by Andrea Bocelli. My best individual CD was probably the highlights from Aida with Leontyne Price and Domingo.

I downloaded some software that allowed me to make MP3 files out of all of my CD’s. I am not sure that I even had a CD player in 2024 when I wrote this entry.


Radio: From the eighties until the time that TSI closed in 2014 I worked at the office nearly every weekend. I often listened to two shows early in the afternoons, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturdays on WAMC from Albany6 and Sunday Afternoon at the Opera with Rob Meehan on WWUH, the radio station of the University of Hartford.

For many decades the Met broadcast its Saturday matinees live on public radio. The performances were mostly from the standard repertoire supplemented with a few new operas commissioned by the company. The singers and the production values were almost always first rate.

One of my favorite parts was the Opera Quiz that was held during intermissions. When I first started listening, my favorite participant was Fr. Owen Lee, who was an enthusiast of Wagner’s music, but not his politics.

Willy Anthony Waters from the Connecticut Opera often appeared on that program. I remember that he challenged listeners to name the character from La bohème who appeared in another Puccini opera. I never discovered the answer to this question, and it has bugged me for decades. La rondine and Manon Lescaut are also set in Paris, but I could not identify the two-timing character.

In order to enjoy the performances more I purchased a Bose Wave Radio, which remained in my office until TSI was shut down. I still had it in 2024, but I hardly ever used it in the last decade. For the most part streaming supplanted radio listening for me.

Rob Meehan in 1980.

During the months in which the Met was not transmitting, WAMC played recordings of operas from other famous opera houses, primarily San Francisco.

Meehan’s show was quite different. It featured his huge collection of opera recordings, some of which were very obscure. Occasionally I had to turn his show off because the music made my ears bleed.


Met Live in HD: In 2006 the Met began transmitting HD recordings of its matinees live to theaters around the world that were capable of showing them. This was a terrific way to allow people who did not live close to a company that staged operas to see and hear the very best presentations. The Met also showed encore presentations on the following Wednesdays, originally in the evening and currently in the afternoon. They also showed repeats of three or four previous operas during the summer months.

Here are some of the operas that I seem to remember seeing at the theater. I may have actually watched a few on my computer when I subscribed to Met Opera on Demand, as listed in a lower section.

Kristine Opolais filled in with only twenty-four hours of notice and gave a great performance as Mimi in La bohème.
  • I have watched at least two productions of Rigoletto. The first one was an update to the rat-pack days in Las Vegas. The one shown in 2022 was also modernized, but the most striking thing about it was that Gilda was portrayed by Rosa Feola as a mature woman. That part worked fine, but the problem with moving the opera away from Italy is that the “Maledizione!” declaration that links the first act with the last just doesn’t ring true at all.
  • James Levine’s conducting of Verdi’s Falstaff was the last of a trio of “great comedies” that he conducted in the teens. It featured Ambrogio Maestri in the title role. The Met’s HD presentations always feature live interviews with the performers. Maestri gave a cooking demonstration. Since he did not speak English, his wife translated. I did not enjoy this opera much at all, and I cannot imagine how Levine could think that it was better than Il barbiere di Sivigla or L’elisir d’amore or several other works.
  • I enjoyed the 2012 production of Verdi’s Otello featuring S. African tenor Johan Botha, whom I had never heard before, and Renée Fleming, who was, of course, perfect. Botha and tenor Falk Struckmann both had previously specialized in the works of Wagner. In an interview Struckmann said that he had great admiration for the abilities of Bel Canto tenors.
  • The new opera, Marnie, which was shown in 2018. It starred Isabel Leonard, whom I have enjoyed greatly in other operas. I did not however, think much of this one. Why the composer made an important character in a modern opera a countertenor escaped me.
  • The Exterminating Angel was supposed to be a nightmare, and it definitely was. It did feature the highest note, which sounded like a honk, ever sung on the Met’s stage.
  • I was surprised at how dark Jules Massenet’s opera, Werther, was. I watched it mainly to see Jonas Kaufmann, but I liked the music enough to watch several additional operas by Massenet.
  • I was not familiar with Francesco Cliea’s Adriana Lacouvreur until I saw the performance with Ana Netrebko and Anita Rachvelishvili. They both were good, but I was really impressed by Rachvelishvili.
  • I liked Massenet’s music in Cendrillon, and I especially appreciated Joyce DiDonato (of Prairie Village, KS!) as Cinderalla. I found the production, which I viewed in 2018, a little contrived.
  • The Met showed Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci together in 2015. I think that I must have seen the summer encore a few years later. I liked the updated Pagliacci, but CR did nothing for me. I kept comparing it with Callas’s rendition of the Santuzza role on my CD, and it came up very short. The entire story takes place in the piazza of a church in Sicily. I see no reason to stage it on the carousel. The dancing was an unwanted (by me at least) distraction.
  • I am quite sure that I saw the version of Hector Berlioz’s grand opera Les Troyens that was shown in Enfield in January of 2023. I remember that someone in the audience complained about Deborah Voigt’s performance as Cassandra. I thought that she was OK, but I had nothing for comparison. I recall that I was sure that Fr. Puricelli would have approved of Susan Graham as Dido.
  • I remember virtually nothing about watching Verdi’s Ernani in 2012 except that the man later known as Emperor Charles V was a central character.
  • Hvorostovsky also played the title role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. I enjoyed Renée Fleming’s Tatiana much more. I absolutely hated the stark production. I had been spoiled by the wonderful YouTube video mentioned below.
  • I also watched Domingo in The Queen of Spades I found it depressing and tiresome. I had missed out on an opportunity to view a performance of this opera in Budapest in 2007. That misadventure has been described here.
  • I saw Faust, composed by Charles Gounod, in Enfield in 2011. I watched his Roméo et Juliette in Lowell, MA, in the middle of a bridge tournament. In both cases I was by myself. I did not really like either opera very much. Since those are the only operas of his that are ever performed, I have concluded that I do not like Gounod’s operas very much.
  • I might have watched Roberto Alagna’s performance in Samson et Delila on the computer, but I think that I saw the HD telecast in the theater in 2018. Alagna’s listed height was 5’8″, and his costar Elīna Garanča claimed to be 5’7″. She certainly appeared to be at least as tall as he was, and it was difficult to imagine Alagna tearing down the temple with his bare hands. Still, Camille Saint-Saëns’s music was enjoyable, and the performances by both leads were impressive.
  • I had purchased a record album of highlights of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier in the sixties or seventies. I never saw that opera until I watched the Met on Demand version during the pandemic. In 2023 I went to the theater to watch Giordano’s less familiar Fedora with Sonya Yoncheva and Piotr Beczała. I enjoyed it immensely.
  • I had seen the same two stars (along with Domingo in a baritone role) in Verdi’s Luisa Miller in 2018. I had never heard even one aria from the opera before that occasion. I don’t know how I missed it. The Met’s performance was very good. The only thing that I found hard to take were the duets by the two basses.
  • Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow is an operetta, not an opera. I only watched it in a summer rerun of the 2015 performance because Fleming sang the title role. She was great, but the story was tiresome.
  • I decided to attend Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2014 primarily because I had heard that it was Fr. Owen’s favorite opera. It was also conducted by Levine as part of his trilogy of great comedies. The third reason was to hear Botha in an opera. I enjoyed it, which I cannot say about any other Wagnerian opera that I have seen or heard.
  • If the Met showed a Puccini opera, I went. In 2014. Sue and I saw Kristine Opolais fill in for the artist scheduled to play Mimi in La bohème on 24 hours notice. I liked her performance, and I really liked the staging by Franco Zefferelli. I appreciated that Opolais was thin enough to pass as a victim of consumption. I went back to see her in the puppet production of Madama Butterfly and a traditional Manon Lescaut. In the latter she kept taking her shoes off in every scene that included her costar, Roberto Alagna, who was reportedly the same height but appeared considerably shorter even in his lifts.
  • I don’t think that I ever got to see Zefferelli’s production of Tosca, but Sue and I did attend the presentation of La fanciulla del West in 2018 with Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek. We both enjoyed it immensely. I could easily understand why Puccini considered it his best opera. The Met’s production actually included a brawl in the saloon.
  • One of the very few modern operas that I really liked was Nixon in China by John Adams. I saw it in 2011 with James Maddalena in the title role. Parts of it, especially the parts that included Henry Kissinger, who was portrayed as a clownish figure.
  • I came late to Vincenzo Bellini’s operas. The first one that I saw on the screen was Norma, which the Met showed in 2017. It starred two of my all-time favorite performers, Sondra Radvanovsky and Joyce DiDonato. It was an amazing performance of beautiful music and a pretty good story. It caused me to search for performances of the other three famous Bellini operas.
  • When Sue and I went to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 2017 there was a problem with the transmission or perhaps with the equipment. We got to see most of the part of the opera that I was most interested in, namely Fleming’s performance as the Marchelin. The theater gave each person in the audience a voucher that was sufficient to pay for another performance. We used them for a different opera. I later watched the entire performance of this one using Met on Demand.
  • Nobody thinks that Roberto Devereux is Donizetti’s best work. Met on Demand has no audio recordings of the work and only one video. I doubt that there will be another any time soon. Sondra Radvanovsky game such a memorable performance in 2016 that no one is likely to want to undertake the role for decades to come. For some reason her renditions of the other two queens that year, Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda were not selected for Live in HD. I had to watch performances by others on Met on Demand.
  • I absolutely hated the production of Verdi’s La traviata that the Met staged in 2012. For some bizarre reason a big clock was in the middle of the stage and a bright red couch that was carried around. However, there was one saving grace, the absolutely brilliant performance by Natalie Dessay as Violetta. It caused me to seek out her other performances on Met on Demand and YouTube.
  • Levine’s 2014 version of Mozart’s Figaro was updated to the Roaring Twenties, and it worked marvelously. This was the third of his Levine’s comedic trilogy. The entire cast was good, but Marlis Petersen stole the show with her phenomenal interpretation of Susanna. I was so impressed that I made myself watch her in her famous role as the focal character in Lulu.
  • I saw the live version of Don Giovanni in 2023. The title character (and nearly everyone else) was a gun-toting gangster. I hated the production, but the singing was good.
  • The production of Massenet’s Manon that was screened in 2019 may have exceeded my expectations more than any other. Lisette Oropesa was absolutely outstanding in the title role, and the production was superb. I had seen her in several smaller roles before in Werther and Rigoletto, but she just knocked me out in this one.
  • I did not think that I would like the updated version of George Frideric Handel’s story of Nero’s mother, Agrippina. However, there were a lot of good reviews. I found the whole thing silly, and I must conclude that I just don’t like baroque opera.
  • I had low expectations for Akhnaten, by Philip Glass, as well. I am sorry, but I cannot stand listening to a countertenor for nearly three hours.
  • The latest version of Lucia was set in Detroit in the twentieth century. It did not work. The character of the priest is critically important in this opera, and it made no sense in a drug-infested Detroit neighborhood. The tattoos did not help. Javier Camarena nearly saved this disastrous production with Edgardo’s arias in the last act.
  • I hoped to see George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess when it was show in 2020 just before the .pandemic hit A few years later it was shown as a summer encore, and I went. The singing was fine, but the story was embarrassing. If this was a great American opera, it says a lot about American opera.
  • It is doubtful that anyone will attempt to put on Luigi Cherubini’s Medea again in my lifetime. Nobody had attempted it since Maria Callas, and no one could hope to match Radvanovsky’s stunning portrayal in 2022. We can only hope that she finds a few more plum roles before retiring.
  • Verdi’s La forza del destino was once part of the Met’s standard repertoire. The Polish production that Sue and I drove to Buckland Hills in 2024 to watch attempted to update it to the twentieth century. Parts of this approach worked; parts of it did not. What really upset me was that important aspects of key arias were (presumably deliberately) mistranslated.7 However, it was still worth the cost of admission to listen to the fantastic singers, the orchestra, and, more than anything, the chorus. I always have hated Peter Gelb’s idea that current audiences cannot appreciate the historical background of the original story. It certainly requires a little education to enhance appreciation of the traditional presentations, but if it takes something like this to get some outstanding operas back on the stage I am for it. By the way, this production included the worst knife fight that has not yet appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The Met used this shot from the worst scene in the opera to promote the telecast.
  • On April 24, 2024, I canceled my bridge game with Eric Vogel so that Sue and I could drive to Buckland Hills to see Puccini’s La rondine with Angel Blue and Jonathan Tetelman, who, according to Gelb, had to make his Met debut with allergy problems. I just love this opera, and they, the other principals, Emily Pogorelc and tenor Bekhzod Davronov, the orchestra, dancers, and chorus definitely did it justice. Tetelman will surely be an international star if he was not already. He has a fine voice, is a good actor, and is 6’4″. A tenor! The only cringy part was when Blue and Tetelman were obviously uncomfortable dancing in the second act. After the women of the dance troupe had been flung around on the stage, the timid swaying of the stars seemed out of place. I was also a little put off by the problems that Blue’s appearance created. The maid, who was certainly less than half her size borrowed her clothes, and Ruggero failed to recognize her after meeting her in a group where she certainly stood out for her size and complexion. On the other hand, Pogoreld and Davronov were delightful, and a special treat was the analysis of the score by conductor Speranza Scapucci during the intermission.

Video Recordings: I subscribed to the Met on Demand service before the pandemic. This allowed me to watch some of the large number of operas recorded by the Met while I was walking on the treadmill. I set my laptop up on top of a cabinet that Sue once used to hold shoes. I then started plugged in my earphones, started the opera and then turned on the treadmill. Here are some of them that I remember watching.

Pavarotti, a harpist, and Guleghina.
  • I definitely watched the 1996 rendition of Andrea Chénier that featured Luciano Pavarotti in the title role. It was perfect for his “park and bark” style of acting. I was also quite taken with Maria Guleghina’s performance. I had never heard of her.
  • I also enjoyed Guleghina’s performance in Verdi’s Nabucco, which I had never gotten around to seeing. I think that she was wearing the same wig that she used in Andrea Chénier. I wasn’t crazy about the opera in general.
  • I guess that I must have seen Bellini’s I puritani with superstar Anna Netrebko, but I don’t remember much about it. I have never thought much of Netrebko’s acting prowess. However, her performance in Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur was fairly impressive. She insisted that her interview be conducted before the day of the opera because, she said, she wanted to concentrate on her singing.
  • I liked the other Bellini opera a great deal more. La sonnambula starred my favorite soprano, Dessay, and the champion tenor of the Del Canto world, Juan Diego Flórez. The attempt to update the story to the twenty-first century did not work at all, but it was still better than nothing. The story depends upon the notion that an entire town would be unfamiliar with the concept of sleep-walking. This premise seemed even less valid in the updated version.
  • I also watched the same pair in a traditional rendition of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment with the same stars. Dessay was outstanding, and Flórez was given an encore to showcase his rendition of a string of high C’s.
  • Flórez was much less successful in the 2018 production of La traviata. He just did not seem right for the dramatic role of Alfredo.
  • I was surprised to discover that Teresa Stratas played Marie Antoinette in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles. I did not recognize her. A young Fleming was also in this production, but Marilyn Horne stole the show as the exotic entertainer Samira.
  • As I mentioned above. I was able to view the rest of Der Rosenkavalier on my laptop.
  • I watched the Met’s 1979 production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Don’t ask me to explain it. I think that this was the show that made me a fan of Teresa Stratas.
  • Fleming made Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka an enduring part of the Met’s repertoire. It did not exactly showcase her skills. She was mute during one entire act. I am pretty sure that I also watched the Opelais rendition of this opera, either at the cinema or at home.
  • Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice was very short. There was not a single break. I was familiar with the famous aria “Che faro senza Euridice?” from my recording of arias sung by Maria Callas. The star in the Met production, Stephanie Blythe, was a virtually unknown mezzo, who reminded no one of Callas. It was a big disappointment.
  • For some reason the Met decided to record Joyce DiDonato’s rendition of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda in 2013 rather than Radvanovsky’s in 2016. I like DiDonato a lot, but I would have liked to see what Radvanovsky did with the role. Likewise I wish that Radvanovsky’s portrayal of the title character in Anna Bolena had been recorded.
  • Marlis Petersen was fabulous as the central character in Alban Berg’s Lulu, but nothing would make me listen to another Berg opera.
  • Watching Natalie Dessay in Lucia was a big treat for me, even though it was that horrible production with the giant clock. She claimed in the interview that she had missed a note in the mad scene, but I doubt that anyone noticed.
  • She also starred in the 2003 production of Richard Strauss’s fantasy, Ariadne auf Naxos. I found it weird (twenty-foot tall women) but enjoyable. I probably would enjoy anything that she was in.
  • I thought that I might like Wagner’s Parsifal, if only because it starred Jonas Kaufman and René Pape. It also featured the so-called Lance of Longinus, which I was quite interested in. I was wrong. It was unbearably long and, in my opinion, just silly.
  • I did not think much of the 1989 telecast of Bluebeard’s Castle either. I have enjoyed other works of Béla Bartók, but I think that this one deserves its obscurity.
  • The Met has three videos of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. I watched the film of the oldest one that starred Pavarotti. It used the Boston version in a production that I could barely tolerate. I did not realize until I researched this that the Swedish version was shown in 2012, and it included Radvanovsky. I have put it on my bucket list.
  • I was disappointed with Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. It had two things going for it. The doge actually wore that peculiar crown, and the female lead was Kiri Te Kanawa. The story, however, did not keep my interest.

A large number of video files of full-length operas have been uploaded to YouTube. I have watched quite a few of them. I have also used some software that I downloaded to make MP3 files out of dozens of operas. I have listened to them on a tiny MP3 player that I carry with me while walking as well as in my 2018 Honda, which can play MP3 files stored on flash drives.

Here are some of the YouTube videos that I could stand to watch from start to finish. In many cases I started and gave up on operas in which either the video quality was bad or the production was bad.

  • By far the best one that I watched was Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore performed in 2005 at the Vienna State Opera House. The stars were Rolando Villazón and Netrebko. She was OK, but he was unbelievably good. I often listen to his rendition of “Una furtiva lagrima“, for which he was allowed an encore. You can watch it here.
  • The second-best one was also fantastic. “Best Tosca Ever”, a film shot in 1976 featured virtuoso performances by Domingo, Raina Kabaivanska, and Sherril Milnes. The real star, however was the production. which was somehow shot in authentic locations—the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, Palazzo Farnese, and the roof of Castel Sant’Angelo. The video has been posted here.
  • Number 3 for me was the version of Eugene Onegin that was televised at the New Year’s Music Festival in 2014. This one does not have famous names as performers. In fact it has Russian singers for most roles and separate actors who were lip-synching. For me the most outstanding performances were Michel Sinéchal as Monsieur Triquet and the fantastic John Aldis Choir. The film lasts less than two hours, which meant that parts of the original score has been cut, but that did not bother me much. What was left told the story in a remarkably effective way, as you can witness here.
  • One of the comments written by a viewer of the Eugene Onegin film led me to discover Cherevichki, the comic fantasy written by Tchaikovsky about Christmas in the Ukraine. When I first sought a recording on YouTube, the only one available was a video of a concert performance. Later an audio recording of Russian singers was added. I have listened to it dozens of times while I was out walking. The tenor is exceptionally good. I later discovered the existence of an obscure DVD of a performance of Cherevichki at Covent Garden. The singers on the DVD are not as good as the ones on that album, but the finale is great.
  • I am sure that I watched one of the recordings of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, but I don’t remember much about it. I think that it might have been the BBC telecast.
  • I really enjoyed Ramey in the 1987 production of Don Giovanni that can be watched here. It is the only one that I have seen or heard that measures up to the one on my CD.
  • I also enjoyed watching Te Kanawa at the Glyndenbourne Festival production of 1973. Dame Kiri herself posted it here so that you could see it.
  • I am almost positive that I saw a British film of Verdi’s Macbeth on YouTube that starred a black woman as Lady Macbeth. When I researched this entry I could not find it. It was striking, but I did not enjoy the music much, and the filming was very grainy.
  • Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio did nothing for me. The plot seemed preposterous to me, and none of the music was memorable. At the Met’s previous home Beethoven was one of the few opera composers memorialized in an exhibit. In retrospect this seemed ridiculous. He only wrote one opera, and it was seldom performed.
  • Puccini’s La rondine has become one of my favorite operas. At first there was only one video with English subtitles. It was posted by a Russian woman who starred in it. Her Italian pronunciation was horrible. She even got her lover’s name wrong. The second version that I saw got the ending wrong! They had Magda walking into the sea. I wanted to watch the Angela Gheorghiu version, but the captions were in Japanese. I did find a wonderful recording of the entire opera that featured Anna Moffo and Daniele Barioni. You can listen to it here.
  • I was disappointed with the production of Massenet’s Le Cid with Domingo. I can understand why it is not part of the standard repertoire. I dimly remember the movie with Charlton Heston. At the time I had no idea of the historical context.
  • Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor is not often performed. When it is, the part that everyone is interested in is the ballet known as The Polovtsian Dances. The performance at the Bolshoi Theater that was posted to YouTube (here) is the only ballet that I have ever seen that I considered worth watching.
  • My fondness for Natalie Dessay was put to the test by the version of Jacques Offenbach’s insufferable Les contes d’Hoffmann. I skipped to Dessay’s section and quit when it was completed.
  • My recording of arias sung by Maria Callas included one from Gluck’s opera Alceste. I forced myself to watch a production on YouTube. I did not like it at all.

Tom Rollins was voted the greatest intercollegiate debater of the seventies

Recorded Lectures: The Teaching Company was founded by a great debater named Tom Rollins. I watched him in an elimination round one. It was something to behold.

His company contracted with academics from around the world to produce recordings of series of lectures about specific topics. The professor that he signed up to explain the world of symphonic and operatic works was Robert Greenberg. Each course came in several book-sized boxes that contained a number of magnetic tapes8 and booklets that were less than transcripts but more than outlines. The format provided a good way to learn, at least for me. The prices were very high, but the company often had sales. I paid between $20 and $30 for each course. I found four of these courses on the shelves in the basement.

  • The first course that I purchased were How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. Its forty-eight (!) lectures were organized chronologically. So, it was essentially a history of western concert music. A list of the titles of the lectures can be found here. Greenberg included musical samples of many of the periods. I don’t remember much of this but I do recall that the sonata-allegro form and explained that it was derived from the structures of three- and four-act operas. He also presented a great deal of historical information about various composers. The most striking story was the dastardly tale of how Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries coerced him into committing suicide rather than reveal his sexual orientation to the public. The other amazing revelation concerned how productive Mozart’s career was even though he died at the age of 35. Greenberg said that the best way to think of it was that Mozart was twenty years old when he was born, and he was therefore a productive composer from the age of twenty-five through his death at fifty-five.
  • Concert Masterworks contained less history and more details of compositions. Included were piano concertos from Mozart and Beethoven. A major part of the differences between the two styles was accounted for by the presence of much better pianos after Mozart’s death. There were several lectures on Dvořák’s ninth symphony, which I really liked. I preferred Beethoven’s violin concerto to Johannes Brahms’. In fact, I don’t think that the work of Brahms has held up at all. The last two composers were Felix Mendelssohn, a child prodigy who seemed to burn out in middle age, and Franz Liszt, who was a genuine rock star.
  • My favorite course was How to Listen to and Understand Opera, a subject that had haunted me since my college days. I learned in this course that the ancient Greeks apparently had what we would consider as opera, but the technique of combining music with plays was lost for centuries. A small group of men in Florence (including Galileo’s father) in the early Renaissance resolved to bring it back. Claudio Monteverdi’s9 L’Orfeo was still being performed in 2024. I learned about recitative (or recitativo in Italian)10, which refers dialogue that was sung at a conversational pace. Greenberg contrasted Mozart’s ponderous opera seria, Idomeneo, with his comic masterpiece, Figaro. He also played and discussed Il barbiere di Siviglia, Otello, Carmen, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Salome, and Tosca.
  • The twenty-four lectures of The Operas of Mozart inspired me greatly. They brought the young genius to life in my mind and also explored the details of Così fan tutte, Figaro, and Don Giovanni. I was quite surprised to learn about the Masonic elements of Die Zauberflöte, which technically was a singspiel, not an opera. It contained a great deal of dialogue.
Robert Greenberg

During the pandemic I purchased one more course, Understanding the Fundamentals of Music. These lectures, which catalogued the various elements of musical composition came on CD’s. Although Greenberg considered them his most satisfying set of lectures, they did not enhance my appreciation much. For example, I still could not recognize key changes.


Books: I found six books about opera on the shelves in my office. Several of them were gifts from people who knew that I liked opera.

  • The one that I have consulted the most is John W. Freeman’s Stories of the Great Operas. It has short histories and synopses of 150 operas that have been performed the most often. My only objection is that it included the laughable Boston version of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.
  • Johanna Fiedler’s Molto Agitato was an entertaining read. It included a lot of gossip about Kathleen Battle’s off-stage shenanigans.
  • Jacques Chailley’s The Magic Flue Explained provided a lot of details about the Masonic influences in Mozart’s masterpiece.
  • Italian for the Opera by Robert Stuart Thomson was something of a disappointment. It explained a few things that had puzzled me, but it hardly helped me to listen more attentively at all.
  • The A to Z of Opera has synopses and short histories of hundreds of operas, many quite obscure. I had forgotten that this book came with a CD set that I had not played for decades.
  • I likewise had no recollection whatever of a short book called Quotable Opera. It was a collection of quotes by and/or about people involved in opera. I must have gotten to page 48 at some point. That is where I found a bookmark. My favorite quotes were both about Wagner. Mark Twain quoted Bill Nye, the humorist from Wyoming, as saying, “I have been told Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Rossini opined that, “Wagner has some beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours”

Miscellany: I discovered while doing this entry that Google capitalizes every major word in German and English operas. However, it only capitalizes proper nouns in Italian and French operas. I never discovered the reason for this discrimination, but I followed the same rules in this entry.

I did not mention in the YouTube section the recording that I listen to the most. It has fifty arias performed by Maria Callas.


1. The movie has apparently disappeared. As far as I can tell, the two images displayed here are the only traces of it on the Internet. I have found no recordings in any format. Its IMDB site is here. Presumably if recordings are located, they will be listed there.

2. Mike Cascia died in June of 2020. His LinkeIn page says that he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston until 2008. His obituary, which detailed his efforts to promote opera, has been posted here.

3. The Teaching Company was founded by Tom Rollins, whom I knew of as a legendary debater. I only got to see him in action once, but It was an awesome experience. He was extraordinarily talented. He later was chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Relations. The company was sold in 2006 and now operates as Wondrium and The Great Courses. Tom’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

4. For several years Robert Greenberg had an arrangement with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He supplied the lecture; the orchestral provided the music. Sue and I attendedseveral of these performances. His webpage is here.

5. Puccini could not think of an ending to the story that work. I think that I could write a good one, but it would require rewriting at least one of the trios by Ping, Pang, and Pong. It would also require staging a murder by an arrow that appeared to be shot from a bow. That could be done, right?

6. Because of its powerful transmitter located on Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires, the reception of WAMC in Rockville, Enfield, and East Windsor was much better than that of WNPR, the local public radio affiliate.

7. In Don Alvaro’s primary aria, in which he provides the motivation for his character, he says the following (in Italian):

My father wished to shatter the foreign yoke
on his native land, and by uniting himself
with the last of the Incas, thought to assume
the crown. The attempt was in vain!
I was born in prison, educated
in the desert; I live only because my royal birth
is known to none! My parents
dreamed of a throne; the axe awakened them!

I could not locate a transcript of what was in the captioning at this performance. It certainly was nothing like the above. For me the acid test of a novel production is whether its captioning needs to lie about what the characters were actually singing. Incidentally, the word “last” in the third line is feminine Italian (“ultima”). So, in the original version Don Alvaro’s father married the last surviving Inca woman. So, the “forza del destino” driving Alvaro. The forces driving Carlo are family pride, racism, and Church-sanctioned colonialism. This version muddles all of this in favor of blaming everything on war.

8. During the period in which this transpired I had a Walkman and a cassette player in the Saturn and my first Honda.

9. Monteverdi in Italian means “green mountain”. Greenberg in German means the same thing.

10. Greenberg used the Italian term “recitativo”, but he pronounced the “c” like an “s”, as it would be pronounced in French. He mispronounced numerous other Italian words.

2022 Return of the Variants

Dairy for 2022. Continue reading

My notes from 2022 are rather comprehensive. Tournament bridge finally started again in that year. My experiences at the sectional tournaments in New England have been recounted here. The events sponsored by District 25 (D25) are described here.

I decided to organize this blog entry chronologically. Several other major events that occurred during the year received their own entries. Links to those entries can be found in the appropriate month.

I was looking forward to 2022 with hope of a return to some degree of normalcy. Both of the bridge clubs in which I played regularly seemed to be doing fairly well, and tournaments were scheduled nearby at the unit (state), district (New England), and national level. Furthermore my wife Sue, my friend Tom Corcoran, and I had an exciting trip planned for May. Finally, although the U-M football team lost its last game of 2021 badly, it was a gigantic improvement over the team that won only two games in the first year of the Pandemic.


January: On New Year’s Day the temperature reached 50 degrees. I walked five miles outdoors with only one stop. I also found René Conrad’s (introduced here) LinkedIn page.

Ohio State was lucky to beat Utah 48-45 in the Rose Bowl. Both teams had great offenses and terrible defenses.

On the next day I received an email from René. I wrote back to her, but there was no further interaction.

On January 3 I brought the car into Lia Honda because the windshield washers were not squirting. The service guy told me that mice had chewed a hole in the hose. He put in a new one and advised me to put traps in the garage in which the car was stored.

On the morning of the 4th I used the Dealer4 machine at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) for the Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). I encountered no problems that I could not immediately resolve. On the way home from bridge I bought some mouse traps.

At the Zoom meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) the big news was that Linda Starr, the director who had sent out so many clever emails during the shutdown via MailChimp, was resigning from communication duties. I thought about volunteering, but at that point I was still busy with my work for D25.

On January 6 I caught a mouse in a trap that I had set near the wooden chest on the northern wall in the garage.

I suspected that I might be charged by the BoT with finding and/or training a replacement for Linda. So, I asked for and received copies of Linda’s write-ups of what she did in MailChimp. It was certainly nice (and unusual) to work with someone who had thoroughly documented her responsibilities.

The traps for the first two mice were set just to the left of this chest.

On January 7 I caught a second mouse in a trap set in the same spot.

I had ordered a blue sweatshirt with Michigan spelled out in yellow (actually maize) from someone on Espy. I received it on January 8. I already had on that I liked a lot, but the collar and the cuffs were quite frayed, and it was a little too big. The color was right and it seemed comfortable, but the letters were not precisely yellow. They had blue specks in them. I decided that it was close enough, and I did not send it back.1

On the 10th I caught a third mouse. By then Bob (the cat) seemed to have moved into the new bedroom with Sue. Bob and our other pet for 2022, Giacomo, were black cats. They were both introduced here.

The plain old mousetrap of decades gone by still worked perfectly well.

I cooked carne asada tacos using a seasoning packet that Sue had purchased, but I did not think much of them. In the national championship game Georgia beat Alabama with s fourth-quarter rally. U-M finished third in the final voting, the highest that they have been since the shared national championship of 1997-98.

On January 11 a fourth mouse was executed for illegal residency in the garage.

The computer in the office at the HBC was on the fritz. I had to make the the boards for the SBC game on Wednesday manually. John Calderbank and I somehow finished first out of twelve pairs.

On the next day I trapped mouse #5. In the morning game at the HBC the boards did not match the hand records. Somebody messed up when making the boards

I caught no more mice in the garage, but on the fourteenth I trapped one in the kitchen. They can run but they love cheese too much to hide.

On January 18 Giacomo had trouble getting to his feet. That was also day on which I learned that after the latest rebooking of the cruise for May, Tom was not on the same flights as Sue and I. Tom remembered that we had paid extra to be on the same flights.

Linda had made .pbn files on Tuesday evening for me to use when making the boards. On Wednesday the 18th at 9 am I made boards for the Simsbury game. We had four tables at the SBC.

On the 20th Giacomo was frantic when he could not get to his feet, but he finally made it. He could get around OK after that. Obviously his 19th year is going to be a difficult one for him. He had never been ill or injured. Occasionally he coughed up a hair ball, but that affliction is common to almost all long-haired cats.

On the next day I made a MailChimp “audience” (the MailChimp word for contact list) for the HBC using my laptop. I had to reuse the audience that I had previously created for emails from the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) that welcomed new members.

Not a litter box.

On January 22 Sue’s cat Bob had for some reason spent the last three nights in the bathtub in which I take a shower every evening. This morning he left behind a turd when he departed. I did not thank him for it.

Tom negotiated with Viking and got us all on the same flights: SwissAir to Budapest and British on the return.

On January 23 I walked nine laps (five miles) wearing a mask in the Enfield Square mall to investigate using it as an option for exercising in foul weather. What a sad place! Hardly anyone was shopping in the few stores that were open. The two restaurants each had one table occupied. No one seemed to be in the movie theater. I encountered a dozen or so walkers, some with dogs! An obese guy in a white strapped undershirt with a shopping cart full of stuff was at the Asnuntuck kiosk. He had plugged in some kind of weird machine. This trip inspired me to keep a rather complete log of my subsequent walks. It has been posted here.

On the next day my left lower back was sore in the morning, but it did not prevent me from walking another five miles.

On January 25 both sides of my lower back were sore when I woke up. If I did not know better, I might conclude that I was getting old.

The Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) scheduled another meeting for Wednesday night, the only time all week that I cannot attend! This infuriate me. I complained, but I did not know whom to be angry at.

I learned that Unit 126 (Connecticut) was facing the possibility of holding two major face-to-face STaC2 games a week apart.

On the 26th I could barely walk with the pain in my left lower back. For some reason lying down made it worse. I immediately took an ibuprofen tablet. It helped a lot.

On the next day I spent an hour and a half on the rowing machine; the back felt OK.

On January 28 a “bomb cyclone” was predicted to arrive at about 10 pm. I forgot to pay the bill for the Chase credit card because Sue was “checking” the charges. I received a nice email from Rick Cernech. He was living in Florida and was either working as or had worked as a cruise planner.

There was plenty of snow on January 29. I decided while using the rowing machine that the creaking sound that I could hear in my bedroom was really coming from the shelves in the basement directly below it.

Joe Brouillard, a co-chair of the committee that was running the event, reported that the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) had finally posted the schedule for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) that was scheduled for July. The preparatory work that Joe and his team (of which I was in charge of email publicity) did for the NABC has been documented here.

On the last day of the month I decided to try to bleed as many of the radiators in the old section of the house as I could. Since boxes, bags and furniture were virtually everywhere, this was not an easy task. One that I was able to get at in the living room started pissing after I bled it. It was extremely difficult to get the screw back all the way in. The hot water burnt my hands pretty badly, but I finally prevailed.

I watched episode 1 of season 2 of the series “Resident Alien.”3 It didn’t seem as good.as the first season, but I still enjoyed it.


February: On Groundhog Day only five pairs registered for the evening bridge game at the SBC. I had to cancel the game. Eric and I were first at 68% in the morning game at the HBC. In the afternoon game online Sue by tied for first. Her partner was John Willoughby.

In the evening I went to see Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Cinemark in Enfield Square. About ten people were in attendance. I thought all of the performances were quite good, especially Rosa Feola’s portrayal of a more Gilda who was more mature than usual. However, I hated the production decisions in the last act.

On February 5 I sent 20,000 emails for the NABC. I played pretty well but got a bad result at the HBC game with Peter Katz. I realized that I had forgotten to send the invitational email to SBC players on Friday. I set Outlook up to remind me to do so on Fridays and Mondays.

On February 8 I received the toner that I had ordered from Ink Technologies LLC.

February 11 was astoundingly warm—55 degrees. I walked 3.5 miles outside. Sue’s left big toe was very sore from gout.

The next day was 60 degrees! I finished the blog entry on Enfield Square, but I planned to update it as stores closed and (hopefully) opened.

On February 13 I received a mysterious email from Floyd Smith in response to my query about the name of his boss at Stage Stores (introduced here). It said “Sure. She is also on Facebook.  Good luck and great to hear from you!”

Two inches of snow appeared on the grass, but the surfaces were clear. I drove Sue to the Urgent Care place on the north side of Hazard Ave. for her toe. They prescribed some drugs for her.

On the next day Sue’s toe was much better. I drove her to heart doctor. The appointment was for 10:15. I made sure that she was awake by 7:45. Nevertheless, it was 10:50 by the time we reached 1699 King St., which is just north of East Windsor. They would not see her. We were home at 11:30. The temperature only reached 20 degrees, which made it one of the coldest days of a very mild winter.

On February 15 I received this email from Floyd: “Suire is her last name.  Sorry about that; spell check changed it last time. “

That evening the HBC’s Planning Committee held a Zoom meeting. Earlier I had committed to playing in the Swiss game at the HBC on February 27 with Ken Leopold, Y. L. Shiue, and Frank Blachowski. Frank and Y.L were very good players with a lot of masterpoints.

On the 17th the temperature reached 60 degrees, but it was very windy.

At a Zoom Meeting the D25 Executive Committee (EC) approved the Gala tournament on May 19-22 (coinciding with the dates that I planned to be in Europe on the cruise). The plan was to charge full price for events with lots of hospitality. I abstained; the other representative from Unit 126 (U126), Sonja Smith, did not attend. She may have already moved to North Carolina.

On February 18 the temperature hit 55 degrees in the morning but it fell throughout the day. I had to return the toner to Ink Technologies. I ordered the wrong thing. The company gave me a partial refund of $31 out of the original charge of $78.

On February 21 Russia sent troops into breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. I walked four miles outdoors in the rather warm 52 degrees. Rob Stillman and Y. C. Hsu agreed to play as the third pair for the Wednesday evening game in Simsbury. Sue will play with Maria Van der Ree.

On February 23 it was 72 degrees when I left the HBC after winning the open pairs game with Eric in morning. An email at 3:00 from Judy Larkin informed me that Ida Coulter could not play. Minutes later Renee Janow and Lucie Fradet asked to play. Sue was too tired to play, and so Judy ended up playing with Maria. I played terribly. I was stressed out from juggling the schedule.

On February 24 Russia invaded Ukraine. I walked nine laps in the mall.

In the Swiss on the 26th we lost our first two matches on flukes. We came back to win the last three by 18, 18, and 20 victory points to finish second out of twelve. YC made 6NT after he underled his A.


March: For Sue’s birthday party on March 2 at the SBC she brought cupcakes for everybody. There were only 3 tables, but we had a good time.

On the next evening Sue and I went to supper with Tom at the Puerto Vallarta Mexican restaurant. The tacos al carbon were not as good as I remembered them. Tom ordered his usual gigantic bowl, which was no longer on the menu. I don’t remember what it was called.

On March 6 I walked 5 miles outside. The temperature was 62 degrees, but I needed to circumvent many puddles from the snow melting.

On March 9 about two inches of snow was on the lawn. The streets had been cleared, but Eno Hall was closed, and so the SBC could not hold a game.

By March 10 I had read the following books from the Enfield Public Library: T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk; Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May and Lexicon. I liked Lexicon the best, but they were all good.

On March 18 the temperature hit 76 degrees, a new all-time record for the date. I walked five miles in a tee shirt. I learned that the Xiaos (aged 10 and 13) won the 0-10K Swiss at the NABC in Reno. The two youngsters

On March 20 Sue and I played in the “8 is enough” Swiss with Mayank and Aarati Mehta. Finished in the middle because of a hand in which Rob Stillman and Ronit Shoham bid 4 against Sue and me, but the Mehtas let Y. C. play 3.

On March 27 there was no pee or poop in the litter box. I brought the box upstairs, and Giacomo took a pee and then lounged in the box. He had never done this before. It was not a good sign.

On March 30 Ken and I won a five-table STaC game at the SBC. Sue and I could not find Giacomo when we returned to Enfield.

The cat’s door as seen from the back yard.

On the next morning I found Giacomo’s body lying in the back yard just outside of the cat door. He had not gone outside in weeks, maybe months, and he had not been downstairs for days. Nevertheless, he must have used up all of his remaining strength to descend the stairs, walk over to the ramp, climb up the ramp to the cat door, and exit through that door.

He was a wonderful cat. I really mourned for him, and I still miss having him on my lap while I watch television. More details about long relationship with Giacomo before the Pandemic can be found here.

In the last few years of Giacomo’s life I apparently became allergic to something about him. Several times I had rather severe outbreaks of hives, and I got the sniffles when he sat on my lap. After he died these symptoms disappeared.

I did the income taxes using FreeTaxesUSA.com. My federal tax was $0, and I received a refund of over $900 from Connecticut.

A lot of other things happened on the last day of March. An oil bill for $780.52 arrived. I brought the litter box, which now is officially Bob’s, back downstairs. While I was doing so, I fell into some empty boxes and bruised my left hand. It hurt, but it was not fatal. The Sony audio recorder that I ordered for the cruise arrived. I played with it enough to feel fairly comfortable using it.


April: On the 2nd of the month M&T Bank took over our previous bank, Peoples United Bank, which had a few years earlier purchased United Bank. United had purchased Rockville Bank, from which I negotiated our final mortgage, as documented here. This changeover seemed to go rather smoothly, and I like the new website slightly better than the old one.

Bob has found the litter box. Thank goodness.

Peter and I won the six-table STaC game at the HBC. On consecutive hands grand slams could be made in hearts. We only bid one of them, but no one else took all the tricks on the other one.

On April 6 the switch for the lights in the basement did not work. Two days later I got it to work, but it was difficult. Eventually this problem disappeared or maybe I just adjusted to the toggle.

On April 11 I received the second booster shot at a pharmacy in Springfield. Sue had already gotten hers

On April 15 I downloaded the VeriFly app that Viking had recommended for my phone and eventually got it to work. This was a complete waste of time, and it stressed me out. It was never needed or, for that matter, useful on the entire trip.

On April18 Ken and I learned that we had been dumped as teammates for the upcoming Grand National Teams (GNT) online qualification tournament by Felix Springer and Trevor Reeves again. Details can be found here. I was not looking forward to the online part again, but I thought that we would have a pretty good chance of qualifying. Playing in the GNT in Providence in July had been my goal for many months, and I had avoided accumulating masterpoints throughout the Pandemic in order to maintain my eligibility. I ordinarily do not hold grudges, but I still feel bitter about this more than a year and a half later.

On April 29 Peter Katz and I won the last Saturday game at the HBC before it went on hiatus. There were only three tables. I faked out Y. L with a terrible overcall.


The huge hump of hair on Bob’s back was an embarrassment to all of us.

May: Something incredible happened on May 2. Sue took Bob to the veterinarian. She learned that the big clump that had been on his back for years was just hair. The vet shaved it off, and it never grew back. How can this be? He would not let us touch it; why was it so sensitive? What cat has that much hair? What made it keep growing for such a long time? Sue said that the vet said that it was just bad grooming. He also said that Bob was at least thirteen years old.

That cat never ceased to amaze me. After his haircut he suddenly liked to be petted, he also became more friendly to me. One untoward result was that I developed very small bumps around my ankles that were itchy and a little painful. I must have been allergic to him or at least his dander.

I downloaded the Uber app for possible use in Vienna to get back to the ship from the opera. The rest of the bizarre preparation for the European cruise has been catalogued in some detail here.

I learned that thirty staff members of Henry Barnard School have Covid-18! I did not realize that the school even had that many employees. The state of Connecticut was showing a 9.4% positivity rate. The good news was that Germany’s level, which I had been following closely, was down by quite a bit. The other three countries on our itinerary were also improving.

The European cruise trip began on May 5. The incredible story of that day and the rest of the journey is well documented here. One thing that is not related there is the fact that the little bumps on my ankles cleared up while I was in Europe. The ones on my right ankle began to reappear in June or July.

On May 23 I mowed the lawn, which had by then become a jungle. While doing so I realized that I had to attack the poison ivy, which was much more prevalent than in 2021. I ordered some Roundup that could be sprayed on the plants from Amazon.

Only five pairs had registered for the Wednesday night game in Simsbury, but I had not yet heard from Lori Leopold. She could usually find a partner on short notice.

The next morning brought another frustrating bridge game. When I got back to the house I needed to cancel the Wednesday evening game at the SBC because only five pairs had registered.

I brought to the Verizon office on Hazard Ave. the Pixel 2 cellphone that had failed me on the cruise. The tech guy at Verizon showed me that the phone was considerably thicker in the middle than on the edges. He explained that this was a symptom of overheating. So, the phone was officially dead. In retrospect I concluded that the transformer in the cable that connected the phone to the outlet in my cabin must have failed to convert the current to 110 at least once on the cruise, and the European current fried the battery or something. I kept the phone plugged in virtually all of the time that I was in my cabin.

We planned on eating at the Kebab House before entering the Cinemark at Enfield Square to see the opera, but it was not open. We watched the rust-belt production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The character of the priest just did not work. Otherwise, the first two acts were very moving, but the third act was a total mess until Javier Camarena’s outstanding performance near the end. The many interviews during the breaks. were insipid. Sue and I settled for popcorn for supper. Incredibly she stayed awake throughout the performance.

On May 25 I discovered that our mortgage on the house was completely paid off! I was not expecting this news for several months.


June: At some point in June Sue purchased for me a new (well, new to me) cellphone. This one was a Samsung Galaxy S7. It was similar to Sue’s, and so she could sometimes help me with it. A year and a half later I still hated it, but not as much as I loathed the Pixel 2. The Samsung had not ordered any pizzas for me, but, then again, I had not downloaded the Slice app. I could almost never figure out where the app that I wanted to use was hiding, and it randomly plays YouTube videos and other stuff from the Internet. I figured out how to answer the phone in a minute or two, but it took me eighteen months to figure out how to hang up.

On the 1st I learned that Sally Kirtley, the director at the SBC, had tested positive for Covid-19. Ken had to direct at the Wednesday night . Ken and I won easily.

On the very next day Sally came to the ACBL’s walk-through in Providence. I very much enjoyed talking with old friends like Paula Najarian.

On June 13 I received two bottles of Roundup that I had ordered from Amazon. I immediately went outside and sprayed the poison ivy that was growing along the fence on the north side of the yard. Two days later I sprayed the poison ivy again. I wore a mask during both sprayings, and I was careful not to get any on my skin or clothes.

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat the serious inflation that began after the country reopened. Any moron could see that the main culprit had been pent-up demand from the shutdown, and the secondary cause was shipping holdups. Nevertheless, I had to peel a sticker off of a gas pump at Costco that claimed that “Biden caused this.”

I met Mike Barke, a geography professor at the Northumbria University, and his wife Vivienne on the cruise. Mike had recently published a book entitled Newcastle upon Tyne: Mapping the City. As soon as I got back to the U.S. I ordered a copy. It finally arrived on June 17. It was both beautiful and interesting. It made me want to visit the Tyneside area.

The Longest Day game on June 21 at HBC very annoying. There was much too much noise. Donna Feir pressed everyone to play faster and then canceled the last round because the pizza had arrived. This turned out to be a super-spreader event for Covid-19.

From an email from Cindy Lyall, the treasurer of the CBA, I earned that U126 lost $4,000 on the tournament in Orange. Ouch!

On June 23 Mary Whittemore reported that her name was missing from the “Top 200 List” on the CTBridge.org website. I asked the CBA board members if anyone knew why. Don Stiegler sent me a correct list. It showed that many names were missing from the one on the website. Evidently no one knew how that page got updated on the website. Bob Bertoni, who died in 2021, set up the website and, because the unit had no webmaster at the time, did all of the updating.

Graham Van Keuren.

On June 29 Sue and I attended a potluck supper at Sue’s church, the Somersville Congregational Church. I always feel very uncomfortable at these religious gatherings, but this one was tolerable. After supper we listened to Graham Van Keuren’s presentation on his vacation with his spouse Eric in Israel. I recorded it on my audio recorder. It was a good presentation, but it certainly did not make me want to visit what I considered to be an apartheid country.

On June 30 Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he had Covid-19 for the second time. This news astounded me. Did he take no precautions? The Pandemic was finally running rampant at the HBC. Only five tables were occupied on Tuesday morning, and the evening game was canceled. Only three tables appeared on Wednesday, and the Simsbury game was canceled. Both of the games at the HBC on Thursday were canceled.


July: The big event of the month was the Providence NABC. I attended most of the event, but Sue decided not to go. I kept notes on my laptop and wrote them up a little later. They have been posted here and here. It was good to see some familiar faces, but the bridge games were not much fun.

The tournament was another super-spreader of Covid-19. Almost everyone with whom I played or associated caught the virus. I almost ripped the driver’s side mirror off of my car, and the hotel rooms were never cleaned. However, I avoided getting the disease. So, in a period of about two and a half months I had survived three super-spreader events—the cruise, bridge at the HBC, and the NABC. I credited my collection of free N95 masks that I had amassed from giveaways at various retailers.


August: I was hoping to have a party at the SBC to celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday. Not enough people were able to attend on the 17th. Instead, I decided that the SBC would have a Christmas party on August 24. Twenty people attended, and so we had five tables and lots of food. The players gave me a $100 Amazon card and $20 in cash. I was a little upset that Sue and I arrived so late because she, as usual, was not ready on time. I had made beef Stroganoff that needed to be heated up in the slow cooker. I crawled under the table and plugged in the pot, but I neglected to turn it on.

On August 26 the refrigerator stopped working. Panic set in. Sue and I resolved to deal with it the next morning. By then it had resumed functioning. If we ever figured out the cause of the outage, I made no note of it.

Throughout the period from my arrival back in Enfield after the cruise up to the end of August the weather had been hot, and I had spent every spare minute working on the journal for the Grand European Tour. On August 28 I finally finished it and sent an email to quite a few people announcing that the journal had been posted on Wavada.org. I was quite pleased to hear back from both the Barkes and the family from Saskatchewan.

A Big Y Express replaced the Shell station.

I noticed that the Shell station on Hazard Ave., which had been operational since we moved to Enfield in the late eighties, was closed.

On August 29 I received a long email from Tom Caputo, whom I had worked with at both Lord & Taylor (described here) and Saks Fifth Avenue (here). He was looking for a job at the age of 60. He asked me if I knew about anything being available. Since he knew very well that I had had nothing to do with retail for at least eight years, he must have been desperate. Maybe he thought that I had kept in touch with people more than I had.

I also received an email from Mike and Vivienne Barke.

August closed with an incredibly disappointing Ocean State Regional tournament in Warwick, RI. I had a rotten time, the attendance was abysmal, and the district lost money. The details have been posted here.


September: On September 13 Bob decided to take over Giacomo’s old position atop the back of the couch in the living room. On the next evening he lost his balance (something that Giacomo had never done in eighteen years) and tumbled off the back. He was in a panic and tried unsuccessfully to climb up the drapes to regain his perch.

On the following evening Bob had clambered back into Giacomo’s old spot. When I seated myself in my chair a few feet away, he obviously wanted to come join me, but he was evidently afraid to land on the pillows that were arrayed on the couch’s cushions. I moved them out of his way. He then descended to the sitting level and, after executing calculations in his walnut-sized brain, made the “mighty leap” to the armrest of my chair. He sat peacefully on my lap for a few minutes. Then he got nervous, peed on me, descended frantically to the floor, and did his “breakdance.” Much more has been written here about the misadventures of this very strange feline.

After sleeping comfortably for a month or more on beds in hotels and cruise ships, I judged that I needed a new mattress. The one that I had been sleeping on was more than thirty years old and was a little too short for me. Sue selected one for me as a late birthday present. It arrived on September 14. The delivery people set it up and took away the old one. Sue, of course, kept the obsolete pieces that held it off the floor. I found them leaning against the bookcase in the hallway. The new mattress was considerably better than the old one, but I still woke up with a backache more often than not.

On September 16 I talked with someone from the town of Enfield about the tax bill that I had received that day. It contained a significant interest charge because I did not pay the July installment. The simple reason for my delinquency was that I had never received a bill. It turned out that the mortgage holder, Peoples United Bank, had payed the portion due in January. The mortgage schedule indicated that five payments were remaining when the bank declared that it was fully paid. I was sent a notice of this, but I was never apprised of the bill from the town that the bank must have received. The lady with whom I talked refused to waive the interest charge. Since the bank that held the mortgage at the time that the bill was sent no longer existed, I did not have any recourse except to pay.

On the same day using my free MailChimp account, I sent an email that I had previously composed to try to improve the attendance of the players with less than 500 masterpoints at the upcoming sectional tournament in Orange.

The bookshelf fell onto the bed in 2023. The light is now attached to a screw in the wall.

On September 17 two items that I had ordered from Amazon were delivered. The first was a reading light that I would be able to clamp to the bookshelf above the new bed. The second was a book by Daryl Gregory entitled We are All Completely Fine. I liked this book much less than the one by Gregory that I had read on the cruise, The Spoonbenders.

Bob had mysteriously disappeared on September 16. He returned two days later and spent all day and night by the stove. Something was apparently wrong with him, but we were not too concerned. His behavior had always been eccentric.

Eric, Motoko Oinaga, John Debaggis, and I finish second out of ten in the Swiss event held at the HBC on September 18. We were the #8 seed. Eric and I bid and made slams on two of the last three hands to win the round by 24. We lost only to the winners—Lesley Meyers, Laurie Robbins, Felix, and Trevor.

Sue made an appointment at the vet for Bob on September 20. I heard him at some point after 4 a.m. on the 19th. At 5:45 I brought the litter box upstairs and shut the door to the basement, but when Sue woke up Bob was nowhere to be found. I opened the door to the basement. He came in about 9:30, and I shut the door to the basement again.

Before my bridge game on September 20 I placed Bob in the cat carrier, but at some point he somehow escaped. Sue was able to get him back in and took him to his 12:30 appointment. We found out that he had a tumor in his mouth or throat. There was not much hope for him, but the doctor gave Sue some medicine for him. Sue gave him the drops when I got back from bridge and could hold him. He needed them twice a day. I was so involved that I forgot about my Zoom meeting of the HBC Planning Committee.

We probably should have put Bob down when we heard about the tumor. He had always been Sue’s pet. She had to make the decision, and she could not do it.

On the last day of the month I sent a second email for the CBA.


October: On October 3 Sue started giving Bob antibiotics and steroids. He started eating a little better. Sue took him to the vet again on the 18th. He was still not eating much even though Sue was diligent about preparing meals that were both nutritious and easy to swallow.

Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.

The October 19 Simsbury game was canceled. I drove Sally to Southbridge to check out the hotel that we would be using for the tournament in October, which was named the Spectacle Regional because the hotel was the administration building of the defunct American Optical Company. The ground floor was very modern, but the the playing area not very large. The restaurant, which was called Visions, was not open except for groups.

On the same day Sue’s cousin Robby Davis was found dead in his apartment.

On October 21 I had breakfast with Sue and Mark Davis. Mark was very involved in a gigantic project involving his ancestry. For some reason I have almost no interest in exploring mine. Someone from the Spokane branch of the Wavada sent my dad a lot of research that she had done. Sue got it from him and put it somewhere. I have never seen it.

On October 22 there was no game at the HBC. I went by myself to see Cherubini’s Medea at Cinemark at the Enfield Square. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an outstanding performance in an opera that had not been performed since Maria Callas played the title character. A carnival was set up in the mall parking lot.

On October 24 I drove to the mall for a walk. I forgot my little blue mp3 player, and I wore the wrong shoes. I had to drive back home and start over.. A girl in a red suit made of balloons and a small backpack was walking stiff-legged around the mall. I think that she was supposed to look like an astronaut.


November: The first week of the month was unseasonably warm. On the 7th it was 67 degrees at 5 a.m. and 80 as I drove through Hartford at 1 p.m. after playing with Nancy Calderbank for the first time in the mentorship program. She had asked me to teach her 2/1.

On November 8 I finished writing the Bulletin for Southbridge and sent it to Sally for printing.

In the mid-term elections the Republicans, as expected, won the House of Representatives, but the Democrats held onto the Senate after Senator Warnock won another runoff.

I received a bill from Somers Oil for $798.86!

The hilarious postscript to the Grand European Tour occurred on November 8, almost six months after I departed. Sue and I were in the living room when we heard the unmistakable sound of claws shredding paper. Sue rose from her chain, hurried into the kitchen, and yelled, “Bob, what have you gotten into now?” She snatched a paper bag from beneath his claws. When she looked inside she found the passport for which she had searched for several days back in early May. She should have just asked Bob where it was.

11/23 Sue and I spent Thanksgiving alone. I sent the following email to the Barkes and Steve Flamman:

I hope that you are all doing well.

I thought that you might be interested in this. Two weeks ago my wife Sue and I were watching TV in our living room in the evening when we heard the unmistakable sound of our cat Bob shredding something made of paper in the kitchen. Sue sprang from her chair to prevent further damage. She found that Bob had somehow discovered a small paper sack and had pulled it out onto the floor. Sue retrieved it from him and discovered her current and expired passports as well as a few other items that had been missing for over two years.

Incidentally, I included two photos of Sue unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a deal with Viking on the Day 0 page of my journal and one that she took of Bob on Day 12.

Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is hard to find things to be thankful for lately, but I am definitely thankful for the friends that I made on the cruise in May.

I had more to be thankful for three days later. Michigan defeated Ohio State 45-23 at the Horseshoe in Columbus to win the eastern division of the Big 10 for the second year in a row. They did it without the Big 10’s best running back, Blake Corum. Donovan Edwards filled in for Corum very well. The Wolverines finished the regular season 12-0.


December: A week later the Wolverines beat Purdue in the Big 10 title game 43-21. They have qualified for the four-team College Football Playoff for the second year in a row.

December 8 was the tenth anniversary of our wedding ceremony. Sue and I are about as unhappy as we have ever been. Sue blames her health and various inanimate objects. I blame the house.

Curtis Barton, the president of D25, sent an email to members of the Executive Committee indicating that all senior employees of the ACBL had been fired. He then sent a correction that said that, according to Mark Aquino, who as Regional Director should know, “fired” is not the right word.

On December 9 Sue suddenly screamed, “I hate my life!” I was thinking that I hated our house, which was a pigsty. I also resented that almost whenever I needed something I must ask her where it was. Usually she did not know and said that she would look for it. In addition, we had so much junk everywhere that every time I that I went to get something I must remove four or five other items and then replace them in the right order. The refrigerator, for example, was always full to overflowing. THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF US!

However, as always, I said nothing because I did not want to trigger a tearful reaction or a panic attack.

December 12 brought the first snow of the season.

At 5 a.m. on the next day the weatherman on WTIC AM reported that it was 8 degrees in Granby and 19 in neighboring East Granby.

On December 17 I bought a rib roast. Sue forgot about Tyesha’s confirmation. Then she also bought a rib roast because she forgot her shopping list, and my phone was off because I forgot to turn it back on after bridge.5 I discovered that for weeks she had been leaving me voicemail messages that I did not know about. We have become two incompetent old farts.

On December 21 we had five tables at the SBC game. Sue and I arrived too late for the holiday party because Sue went to the store at 4:30 p.m. to buy the fruit that she had promised to bring. The players gave me $130.

On December 23 very strong winds uprooted the pine tree in the front yard. I heard a loud crashing sound at about 5 a.m. The tree fell straight towards our house, but there was no damage at all because the top section landed harmlessly on the patio between the old section of the house and Sue’s garage.

The high temperature the next day was only 19. I got a letter from ConnectiCare. The premium for my dental policy went down from $79 to $56.

We did nothing special on Christmas day. Sue may have watched It’s a Wonderful Life,6 but I didn’t.

Crystal Lake Construction, the company that cleared the snow from our driveway and sidewalks chopped up and removed most of the fallen tree. They came back later for the stump.

On the same day I received an email from Mark Aquino about the new training required for directors at sectionals, On the 27th I met with the HBC directors after the bridge game. Peter Marcus, who generally knew these things, had reported that the new rules applied only to events with masterpoint limits in excess of 500.

On the last day of the year Michigan lost to TCU 51-45. Early in the game J. J. McCarthy threw two interceptions that were returned for touchdowns. It was a wretched end to an awful year.

A week later TCU got clobbered by Georgia in the championship game. U-M would have done better, but they probably would have lost.


1. By the fall of 2023 a small spot had appeared on the front of the sweatshirt. It looked like a grease stain, but on closer inspection it was obvious that the exterior had worn thin. I could hide the blemish with ink from a Sharpie pen, but that was not a good permanent solution.

2. STaC stands for “sectional tournament at clubs”. These were games held at clubs that awarded more points, and the overalls included all of the participating clubs. Regular STaCs paid silver points. The points in Royal STaCs were evenly split between black, red, gold, and silver points.

3. “Resident Alien” was originally shown on the Syfy channel. Sue and I watched season 1 and season 2 on the streaming service called Peacock. At the time it was free on Cox cable. Eventually they wanted people to buy monthly subscriptions and restricted the free option so much as to make it worthless.

4. Apparently Peoples United Bank wanted our mortgage off of its books when it was taken over by M&T bank. The five mortgage payments that I saved by this action more than covered the cost of the July tax bill, but someone should have told me that that amount would be due.

5. I did not learn how to put the Samsung cellphone on “vibrate” until much later. It was easy to do but not a bit intuitive.

6. All year long Sue watched TCM during every waking (and many sleeping) moment.

2020 Part 2: The Election

Too close to call? Continue reading

The year 2020 began with the two major parties facing contrasting challenges:

Zelensky and his principal phone.
  • The Republicans had only one serious candidate, President Trump, who had just been impeached by the House of Representatives because his telephone call with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, clearly indicated that he was holding up military aid passed by Congress in hope that Zelensky would do him a political favor first. At that point the Russians had already seized Crimea and had covertly invaded eastern provinces. The party held a few early primaries but called off most of them for lack of interest.
  • The Democrats, on the other hand, had a large number of candidate, probably too many. The front-runner was Bernie Sanders, the liberal senator from Vermont who was not afraid of being labeled a socialist. The party had eleven so-called debates among the candidates! It also had a large number of heavily contested primaries.
Republicans were expected to toe the line.

The impeachment trial occurred in the Senate from January 22-February 5. The Democrats asked for the ability to call witnesses. 51 Republicans voted this request down. In the end all of the Republican senators voted against the charge of contempt of Congress. Mitt Romney was the only senator to vote in favor of the charge of abuse of power.

On January 14 a “debate” was held among six Democratic contenders in Des Moines, IA. Senators Sanders, Klobuchar, and Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend, IN, and someone else participated. I did not watch. I have always found these events too embarrassing to watch.

Popular in Iowa and New Hampshire.

During the impeachment trial the senators all needed to stop campaigning in order to attend. The Iowa caucus on February 3 was a gigantic mess for the Democrats. They tried to use an app, but it malfunctioned. Later they recanvassed and determined that it was a virtual tie between Sanders and Buttigieg.

The New Hampshire primary was on February 11. Sanders and Buttigieg split the eighteen delegates evenly. This was bitter news for Warren, who expected to do well in a neighboring state.

Biden and Clyburn.

For some reason the media decided that the most important primary was in South Carolina, a state in which no Democrat could possibly win at any point in the foreseeable future, on February 29. It turned on the endorsement of Jim Clyburn, the most powerful Democrat in South Carolina, allegedly because Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court if elected. After Biden’s victory in South Carolina, Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden.

Bloomberg did poorly in the debate.

On March 3, Super Tuesday, Biden won ten states, Sanders won four, and Mayor Mike Bloomberg won American Samoa. Warren and Bloomberg dropped out, leaving only Biden and Sanders as serious candidates. I was astounded and quite disappointed that the best that the party could come up with were two guys who were even older than Trump! He could even claim to be the youthful candidate.

A week later Biden won four fairly large states, and Sanders prevailed only in North Dakota.

Most of the remaining primaries were postponed or, in New York’s case, canceled because of the rapid spread of COVID-19. All of the center-left candidates gave their support to Biden. Not even Senator Warren1 endorsed Sanders.

On June 15 Louis DeJoy became postmaster general. He immediately implemented cost-saving methods including banning overtime and the removal of mail sorting machines. Because of COVID-19 many states began to expand or even require mail-in balloting. On July the Postal Service announce that it would not be able to meet some state deadlines. On August 18 in response to lawsuits from several states DeJoy rolled back his cost-cutting measures, but most of the sorting machines targeted for removal were already gone. On August 21 and 24 DeJoy testifies before the Senate and House that the USPS will do its job. On September a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting DeJoy’s changes because they were “politically motivated”.

This guy probably survived the Tulsa rally.

On June 20 Trump held his first rally in Tulsa, OK. Attendance was far short of Trump’s prediction of almost a million. The actual attendance was probably less than ten thousand. Herman Cain was there without a mask. He got COVID-19 there or somewhere else and died on July 31. Despite the rising death count due to the pandemic, Trump continued to hold rallies both indoors and outdoors throughout the summer and fall. God only knows how many of his own followers died because of his election strategy.

Bernie campaigned hard everywhere.

The last primary in the nation was in Connecticut on August 11, the same day that Biden announced that his running mate would be Kamala Harris. Because I had voted by mail a week or so earlier, that did not affect my choice. The options were Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Uncommitted. I voted for Uncommitted. Biden got nearly 85 percent of the vote. My candidate got 2.26 percent, which was more than Tulsi Gabbard received. This may have been the least important vote in the history of elections.

The convention started six days later. The Republican show began on August 24. Because of the fact that the results were predetermined and COVID-19 was still rampant, the parties did not really convene. Instead, they both took advantage of the free TV time to put on shows promoting their ideas and people. Of course, the Republicans only had one idea (more of the same) and one exalted person.

I did not watch any portion of either convention. I saw a few clips on Twitter.

On September 1, more than two months before the election, an article on the news website Axios stated that if more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail—as seemed very likely—any results from election night might falsely skew toward a landslide victory by Trump.

It is hard to believe in retrospect, but much of the media attention during the summer was on Black Lives Matter protests concerning police violence and the response from right-wingers. They had better optics than Trump’s ceaseless rallies and Biden’s masked drop-in visits.

On September 18 Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at age 87. She was a remarkable woman, but her refusal to retire during the Obama administration was, to me, unforgivably arrogant. It has exacted a huge cost.

On September 26 Trump nominated federal circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. At least eight attendees at the nomination ceremony subsequently tested positive for COVID-19.

The New York Times on September 27 published summaries of Trump’s tax returns for fifteen years, in ten of which he paid no income tax. Trump, of course, dismissed the article as “fake news”.

On September 29 the first extremely chaotic presidential debate took place. At least eleven people involved in it got COVID-19. I did not watch, and I did not get COVID-19.

Both Trump and his wife tested positive two days later. The following day Pence and his wife tested positive. Trump was taken to Walter Reed Medical Center where he was treated with dexamethosone and remdesvir, which were not generally available at the time. While still in the hospital he took an unmasked victory lap in his limo. He was released after three days and pronounced himself “immune”, but he was still experiencing coughing fits on October 8.

The second debate was canceled because Trump refused to participate unless it was face-to-face.

Trump began making personal appearances on October 10, and shortly thereafter he started to appear at rallies throughout the country. Biden’s campaign was much more low-key, and Biden almost always wore a mask.

On October 26, a week and a day before the election, the senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett. One Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, and all Democrats vote against her.

On October 27 the White House science office released a memo that said that “Ending the COVID pandemic” was the greatest accomplishment of Trump’s career. Someone in the White House staff had apparently read a newspaper or listened to the news at some point in the last few months. The statement was quickly withdrawn.

Throughout the summer and the fall Republicans filed lawsuits in many state courts in an attempt to throw out various kinds of ballots or extensions of time periods for voting. This strategy was understandable. For the last three decades whenever the turnout was high, the Republicans had lost, and the demographics had worsened for them considerably. A primary element of their strategy had been to restrict voting in every possible way. On November 1 and 2 a Republican suit to dismiss 127,000 drive-through votes in Harris County, TX, was rejected by the the Texas Supreme Court and a federal judge.

On November 1 and 2 Trump attended ten different rallies in swing states! Since he seldom spoke for less than an hour, I wonder how his handlers got him to all of those places. Pence and the Democrats campaigned a lot less.

On election day, November 3, the voting and counting went smoothly almost everywhere. However, the USPS previously claimed that 300,000 ballots that it had received had not been scanned as delivered. It then disobeyed a court order to search for them.

At 11:20 p,m. Fox News named Biden the winner in Arizona, the first state to flip from the 2016 results. Trump and the Republicans were furious at the network for doing so. They had been painting a picture of a Trump landslide from early returns from early returns that mostly did not count mail-in ballots. This was exactly what the Axios article predicted.

At 2:30 a.m. on November 4 Trump claimed “Frankly, we did win the election.” It was lie #30,001 of his presidency, perhaps the biggest one of all. At 6 p.m. the Associated Press awarded Wisconsin and Michigan to Biden. He therefore needed to win only one of the four remaining states: Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

On November 5 a bevy of ludicrous lawsuits by Trump supporters in those states were dismissed while the counting continued.

Rudy Giuliani at the Four Seasons (Total Landscaping).

On November 7 all the major networks reported that Biden won Pennsylvania and therefore the election. The Republican litigation machine, however, was just getting warmed up. It filed more than sixty lawsuits challenging the methods or the results. All but one was rejected; it was a ruling that extended the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania for three days. The effect was negligible.

When all was said2 and done, the election was not a close one. Biden received more than seven million votes than Trump, and the margin in the Electoral College was 84. Of the last four states only North Carolina went into Trump’s column.

So, then President Trump graciously conceded defeat and, like all of his predecessors, participated whole-heartedly in a smooth and seamless transfer of power and responsibility.

Uh, not exactly. Trump, who had also claimed that he had been cheated by a rigged Emmy award system3 and that he had actually won the popular vote in 2016, never conceded defeat. Instead, he insisted that he had been the victim of what he called “The Big Steal”. Several aides later claimed that they heard him say that he would never leave the White House.

He was still there at the end of 2020. A description of the electoral brouhaha of 2021 can be found here.


The other races: The Democrats lost some seats in the House of Representatives, but they still maintained a majority.

The Republicans had controlled the Senate, but the Democrats picked up a few seats, which brought their number up to 48 from 45. The two seats in the state of Georgia remained to be decided in a special runoff election to be held on January 5, 2021. Rev. Raphael Warnock challenged Kelly Loeffler, who had been appointed senator by Governor Brian Kemp in January of 2020. Jon Ossoff vied for the seat that had been held by David Perdue for six years. Since Biden had carried Georgia, it was considered plausible that the Democrats might unseat one or both incumbents. However, Biden’s victory margin was only 17,000 votes.

What a contrast between the two candidates! Loeffler and Perdue were both CEO’s who were accused of using insider information when they both unloaded large quantities of stock just before the market crashed. Warnock was a black pastor, and Ossoff was a Jewish documentary film producer and investigative journalist. No black man had ever been elected to the Senate from a former Confederate state. Both Perdue and Loeffler loudly proclaimed that they had actually won in November, and they called for the resignation of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. He told them (and later, Trump) to go pound sand.

The key would be turnout. Republicans did everything they could to suppress the turnout. I joined many others in supporting Stacy Abrams’s Fair Fight campaign to get out the vote. I sent them $100. It worked. Both Warnock and Ossoff won. Warnock defeated Loeffler by more than two percentage points. Ossoff’s margin was smaller, but it exceeded Biden’s margin over Trump.

So, the Senate would consist of fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats. Ties would be broken by the President of the Senate, who was the newly elected Vice-President, Kamala Harris. No one foresaw this outcome.


1. I was hoping that I might at least get a chance to vote for Warren in the primary. She seemed like the only candidate with specific ideas. The other reasons that I liked her were enumerated here.

2. Well, actually a lot more was said and done in the fantasy land of Trump supporters.

3. During the last debate with Hilary Clinton Trump claimed that the presidential election was probably rigged. Clinton replied that he had made the same charge against the Emmy awards. Trump’s “reality” show, The Apprentice, was nominated for four Emmy awards and lost to The Great Race each time. I never saw either show, and for all I know, the results may have been rigged. It certainly would not surprise me if most of the voters hated Trump. Practically everyone who ever dealt with him despised him.