Wednesday, May 30, 2007

tonight...tonight...

Eighty-four degrees in the apt., nearing midnight...
wild swing for Seattle! Just this past Sunday morning--rainy and in the 40's!
It won't last, but a nice taste of early summer...
everybody in the Puget Sound area is giddy, if not complaining about the 'heat'...

'Tonight...tonight...'

Ring a bell?
From the musical 'West Side story.'

We went to a performance of it tonight at the Fifth Avenue Theater--what a fabulous place! Built in the 1920's for vaudeville shows and silent movies, with a chinoiserie-interior inspired by the architecture of The Forbidden City in Beijing...

Bernstein's music, even fifty years later (WSS premiered in 1957),
still sounds so modern...

And the themes in this uniquely American adaptation of Romeo & Juliet couldn't be more current:

young love...gang violence...ethnic stereotypes...immigration...juvenile delinquency...victimization...


With so much discussion in the media right now about immigration--illegal immigrants, reforming the laws, amnesty? animosity?--it made me think about a political cartoon that I clipped out a couple of years ago. Even though it's a couple of years old now (it appeared in the Seattle Times on April 7, 2005), I think it's one of the best commentaries I've seen:

Borderline, indeed...
So, about a month left before we move down to being an hour away from that schizophrenic line in the sand...

1 comment:

  1. great political cartoon. this morning they had a poll on the radio... 60% of americans support some sort of legalization... but then 52% wouldn't vote for their congressman if he passed such a law. Brilliant!

    I think it's time I rented a DVD of West Side Story. I saw half of it in High School while studying Romeo and Juliet, but the class acted up and we never saw the second half. English Class Hooligans!

    E

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