Well, dear readers, Tubin or not Tubin, that is the question. And the answer is simple: Why has it taken me over thirty years to revisit this composer’s music? I began with his first symphony, which was great and am just going through everything – right now Music for Strings, to be followed by his second symphony (ten in all with an incomplete eleventh). Tubin was an Estonian composer, conductor and, most interestingly, choreographer. Anyway, this will be my listening for the next few days. All these are free downloads if you have Apple Music, but I’m sure they’re all on the Tube of You as well. Now, maybe someone can answer the age-old question of why do I suddenly feel like pizza? At eleven-thirty at night? Happily, I don’t think there are any pizza slice places open and mostly you get the bad chains. But today – I may just have to do Dino’s or something resembling Dino’s. Something Resembling Dino’s – that’s the title of my next novel. So, yesterday was a weird little day. I got six hours of sleep, had a little eBay irritant to work through with the fellow who’s returning the window card, but that’s all fine now and tomorrow morning I’ll fill out all the UPS forms for my insurance money. It covers most of it, so that’s good. I have lots of photos, the most damning of which is the package itself, which some idiot UPS person literally bent in half, despite all the DO NOT BEND stickers everywhere there could be one. What a pain. The poster itself is on its way back to me. I may offer it at a bargain price IF the fold isn’t noticeable in a frame. I had a good e-mail with some really good news, at least potentially really good news. Then we had our rehearsal. The first hour was me and the dance captain and I did the duet that required ography. The song is a fairly well-known tune from a big MGM movie, and I’m just borrowing most of what we’re doing from that because I think it’s fun to have it look like that with the new lyrics. Now, our two actors who’ll be doing it can’t do the hard stuff, so I simplified all that. I think we got 80% of it done and I know the ending already. Then for the next two hours we drilled, finessed, and things are looking very good now. The most amazing thing to me was a little Charleston we do in one number. No one knew what that was, the Charleston. And you’d be amazed how difficult it was for them to get it down. I always tell people, if I can do it anyone can do it. Anyway, it’s all coming along, and I did block a non-musical sequence, too. After that, I stopped at the mail place and got the UPS claim thing in the works – the rest is done online. Then I came home and ordered fried catfish, which I really wasn’t in the mood for, but I was impatient to order, and I knew that was fast. It arrived and was good but – I wasn’t in the mood for it. I finished it of course and it was of its usual quality. Here is an actual photograph of Uncle Andre’s fried catfish. I saved the potato salad for a later snack.

While we’re at it, here is an actual photograph of Maria’s Kitchen’s farfalle with Eyetalian sausage and tomatoes.

I dozed off for over two hours, helped by the sounds of rain falling on the roof, then had the potato salad and had pill two, then watched a very bad TV movie, thankfully only seventy-three minutes long, entitled Death Sentence, starring Laurence Luckinbill, Cloris Leachman at her most irritating (love her in comedy roles but not stuff like this), a very young Nick Nolte, and TV movie stalwarts like William Schallert, Alan Oppenheimer, Herb Voland, old pal Peter Hobbs, and Yvonne Wilder, directed by E.W. Swackhammer. It was made in 1974. Not all TV movies are made equal. And here we are, desirous of pizza.

Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do a tiny bit of prep work, I’ll eat something, perhaps even pizza, I’ll relax, then I’ll mosey on over to the theater for our six o’clock rehearsal with our leads, two of whom we’ve had for a total of ninety minutes thus far. My hope is to block as many of the scenes as I can, plus put the two actors into the musical numbers. That’s a lot to do in three hours and I’ll probably be lucky to get half done, but one more session like that and we’ll finish it up, but that won’t happen until we’re back in December after the Thanksgiving break. Then maybe some of us will go grab a bite to eat somewhere.

Tomorrow is a ME day, and I don’t care who knows it, I will not take calls nor let anything deter me from my ME day. Then we have three nights of rehearsals, and we’ll get as much done as we can without our two actors. However, if possible, I may have two other actors stand in for them so I can block, we’ll get all that notated, and they can get that blocking into their scripts at their leisure, so they know it by the time we’re back.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, prep, eat, relax, have a three-hour rehearsal, grab a bite, then come home. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, having answered the question Tubin or not Tubin.