“When You Say ‘Ohfahn’ do you mean ‘frequently’ or ‘a person who has lost his parents’?”

I’m here in the midst of cornfields and Amish Country visiting family, researching my book and trying to out-will my health issues. I’ve kicked my 16yearold niece off her computer so that I could hide Mafia Wars updates on FB and decided to stay and write. If I don’t write I start to get twisty and mean. I feel like my soul gets constipated. I know that’s rude but I don’t know a more polite way of describing it.

Everyone is watching The Pirates of Penzance and I feel like I’m a kid again, watching musicals and wishing that I could find out more about Brian Boitano. Really it was a sad childhood. Oh, you know what movie sucks? That biographical thing about Gilbert and Sullivan where the one dude’s wife spends the whole movie crying about how she can’t have a baby. It was this movie that I thought would be happy and funny like the G&S Operettas and instead was like a trip through someone else’s pre-medicated clinical depression. I can’t think of the name of it.

It’s funny how much my niece by marriage reminds me of me in some ways. She loves musicals and London. She is not one to speak her choices outright, so therein we are no longer alike. And she can actually play a musical instrument unlike me who gave up on the piano after too many lessons with the tyrannical Mrs. Jarosz. When a woman spends the whole lesson staring at your face and then tells you your glasses are ugly it sort of makes you feel like music is not the craft for you.

The patter songs in G&S are funny, why? After awhile I sort of get like “okay, I know we all want this event to be over but you could at least slow down on the punch line, right?” I know Aaron Sorkin would wet himself at the thought of a Philistine not finding G&S the height of comedy. And I do really love much about G&S. But honestly. A little goes a long way. Like hot mustard.