It's hard on a highly respectable man

Apparently it is culture weekend. On Thursday, I heard Susan Cooper read a remembrance of John Langstaff and the Revels at the Cambridge Public Library. (The reading was for Cambridge Voices, but she was gracious enough to sign my old trade paperback of The Grey King.) Last night I met fleurdelis28 at the BU Theatre for Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, with a pre-show talk by the composer and Phyllis Curtin. (It is one of my favorite operas, an Appalachian murder ballad with apocryphal roots; I've had the 1962 recording with Curtin and Norman Treigle since I was a junior at Brandeis, but I'd never seen a production.) And tonight, thanks to the magic of the half-price ticket kiosk in Copley Square, we're going to see Coppélia at the Boston Ballet. (It's a comic ballet based on "Der Sandmann." I can't even figure out how that should work, but you expect me not to see it?) Right, and it's also my father's birthday observed. Just in case there wasn't enough going on.

And someone on WERS just finished singing Irving Berlin's "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which I can respect very much. I was standing in the rain at ten in the morning to ask about ballet tickets. I felt like the opening scenes of The Red Shoes, or possibly Elizabeth Enright's The Saturdays. I'll go with the latter; it decreases my chances of ending up folklorically dead.