1.) I was going to clean house today, this being my first free day in quite some time. Yeah. Like that's gonna happen.

2.) Evan is now in a rehab facility, learning how to use a wheelchair and to cope with his new circumstances. He has made friends with his physical therapist (a bright guy only a few years older who's apparently as big a NASCAR fan as Evan himself) and his spirits, though still struggling, are beginning to improve. His trach tube was taken out a week or so ago, and he's begun to speak again now that his neck is healing. The spinal cord damage is very likely permanent (with today's medical technology, at least). The family is talking about foregoing the Christmas exchange (for the adults, at least) this year in lieu of an "E-Van" fund to help make transportation a lot easier on my brother's family.

3.) The second week of Guys and Dolls opened last night, after a nasty review in the local paper on Friday. While the performance the reviewer saw was, admittedly, a tad sluggish, that particular aspect earned only one sentence. The rest of the review boiled essentially down to: "I've always hated this show, and I don't understand why any community theater would want to attempt it, and why the hell didn't the director do more to distract me from how stupid I think the show is?" -- basically a review not of our production, but of the very concept of a Guys and Dolls production. If you don't like the script itself, say that, but then set your personal dislike aside to evaluate fairly whether this particular production succeeded or failed in conveying the script effectively. Don't let your distaste for the script poison your assessment of everything else about the production. (This particular reviewer often does the opposite, too -- allows his personal fondness for a particular script blind him to serious defects in the production.)

One comment particularly annoyed me -- describing this show as "a show with little or no plot line and music familiar only to a particular cadre of fans". Let's see, as for plot, there are at least four distinct (though deftly intertwined) plots in the show (the potential closing of the mission, the romance between Sky and Sarah, the worry that the "oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York" will finally die out, and the amusingly stagnated romance between Nathan and Adelaide), along with a deeper commentary on the importance of being willing sometimes to gamble in life -- on people, on situations, on acts of desperation. As for the "music familiar only to a particular cadre of fans" -- this is no more true of this musical than of most others. "Luck Be a Lady" is familiar to just about anyone who was alive while Frank Sinatra was still kicking, and probably to many younger people as well, even if they are not in the "cadre of fans" the reviewer envisions. "I'll Know When My Love Comes Along" and "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat" are less familiar, but various crooners' and choirs' recordings still got occasional mainstream radio play in late-1970's rural Pennsylvania -- hardly a bastion of obscure-musical-theater fandom.

4.) Yesterday was a thrift-store blessing day for me:

4a.) First of all, I found a dozen or so CDs (culled from literally hundreds of almost equally tempting options) of very good classical music at $2 a pop. (Since I'm a huge fan of choral music, over half of what I bought was some nifty choral music. Gotta call my friend Layne and gloa-- er, share the good news.)

4b.) I also found a really nifty silver-and-blue necktie. I'm not a fan of neckties, but when I have to wear them, I figure they might as well be interesting.

4c.) Best of all, at the Salvation Army, in the window, I spotted something I never expected to be able to find for $24.99. I have only a vague general idea how to use it, but there's always the think system...

You have to guess what it is. First person to guess correctly wins! (I'm not sure what you win, but you win. Isn't that enough?)

Here are the clues:
---- Gustav Holst
---- Baldwin Special
---- 76