Sugar Teat

° Did you know that if you give birth to your baby under water, he doesn't breathe for several hours, not till the umbilical cord stops pulsating?
° Well I didn't know it.

° On the other hand, the midwife didn't even know how to make a simple sugar teat.
° Take a fairly clean tea towel, dump a cup of sugar--brown is so very tasty--into the center, tie the corners as tightly as possible, handform the confined sugar into a sort of pointed teat.
° Then whenever Baby cries, just hand him the thing.* He'll suck contentedly for hours and hours on end.
° Those first teeth aren't permanent anyway.

° The midwife was less impressed with my observation that cows eat the afterbirth as a quick pickmeup.
° Natural childbirth, it seems, only goes so far.--Giac

*Nota bene: not medical advice, just a record of an actual country custom.

La Rondine

° Had the sala all to myself for a matinee projection of San Francisco Opera's La Rondine. Hadn't so much as heard the thing in decades, had never seen it.
° Excellent sets, costumes registering a bit chintzy on the big screen, singers less aggressively miked vis-à-vis the orchestra than their Met Live counterparts.
° That aria, thrown away so early in the day, able to express all of Room with a View in a few measures.
° Act III did not tug my heartstrings. If Magda had been a trollop and was still a liar, what of it? She's a good egg.

° Afterwards, in the car--New York's governor was confessing himself a trollop and a liar.
° Yea verily, he was an ass to persecute prostitutes in the first place, the quintessential Amerarabian vice. The persecution of Venus, I mean to say.
° But my goodness, if he'd only taken millions of dollars in bribes from special interest groups, Mr. Spitzer could still be neckandneck for the Democratic nomination.
° Nobody's perfect.