Charlie

On the surface, it's not much different from an Elks convention. Behind the scenes, it's also not much different from an Elks convention, but the action is all-male.

When I lived in NYC in the 1970s and 80s, I knew a number of people with connections at Lincoln Center, and heard lots of stories about the administration of the Met repeatedly having to bail Levine out from sexual escapades, including arrests in public men's rooms. I find the declarations of the current administration that they knew nothing until recently completely unbelievable.

We could be identical twins, except that I have never even had a VCR or DVD player. I never have any reason to use a smartphone, so why would I want to spend the money for it, and carry around something that awkward (Where do men put their smartphones? Much of the time I wear only a short-sleeved shirt and shorts.). Of course, I am considered technically sophisticated by one of my close friends, who doesn't have any kind of cellphone, nor computer, and has never even owned a TV or an automobile. The only invention of the last 150 years that he really treasures is the electric light.

Of course, I was looking at W&M a quarter century before you went there; by the time I arrived at the campus, I had passed too many "Whites Only" drinking fountains to seriously consider applying for admission to any public college in the South. In 1971, a close friend of mine was offered a professorship there, but halfway through the interview she realized there was no way she could feel comfortable there. I'm glad to hear that things got better at W&M in later years.

One of my college friends who was incredibly smart also was convicted of drug dealing. He had a Ph.D. from Yale. My friends from Princeton didn't get caught.

Only one of the schools on either list surprises me. The anti-LGBT schools are all either private schools with conservative religious affiliations, or public schools in extremely conservative areas. Eighteen of the 20 LGBT-friendly colleges are private liberal arts colleges, and one is a famously liberal state university. The one surprise is William and Mary, a large public college in the South that was a fairly conservative, segregated school when I was looking at colleges in my youth.

Interesting name choice. I hope he does more than masturbate.

The only opera I can think of offhand with fewer male voices than Fanciulla is Billy Budd.

Opera is an unusual art form, since most of the truly popular ones are based on stories that reflected the popular beliefs and prejudices of the time they were written, usually 17th to 19th centuries in Europe. Many are based on plays which would not find an audience today without the music, which is not ideologically offensive. That is not to say that those byegone beliefs and ideologies don't still resonate with many members of the modern audience, but it is easier to justify them to oneself when they are coated with beautiful music that has no ideological weight. It is interesting to me that music and art that was produced centuries ago still appeals so strongly to our tastes, long after the ideas which stimulated it have lost their conscious appeal. I happen to love Richard Strauss's music, yet while watching a performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten in Berlin several years ago, I started to pay attention to the words, and it suddenly hit me that they were incredibly sexist, because the underlying thesis of the story is that a woman who can't have children is a failure. It actually changed my reaction to the music, which I began to see as ridiculously bombastic (I'll admit it: I normally love bombastic music). I haven't been able to bring myself to attend a performance of Frau since then. If I were to apply the same test to every opera I love, the list of operas to which I would buy tickets would probably shrink drastically.

In #20, the future King Edward VIII, King George VI, and their younger brother Henry are obviously enjoying the races at Ascot (note the field glasses all are carrying).

I enjoy sprinting around a tennis court, but distance running bores me.

My grandmother was sort of a wild child. She was orphaned at 3, and put in a NYC orphanage. After a few years, she was taken out and sent to live with her much older married sister in Bermuda. In her teens she become romantically involved with a well-known married man in the community. Her scandalized sister shipped her back to NYC, and she was met at the ship's landing by her 20 year old brother and his new wife, and his wife's 30 year old brother. The 30 year old saw the 17 year old, and fell in love immediately. Within a couple of months they were married. The marriage lasted till his death 25 years later, and produced six children. As an attractive young widow, my grandmother "dated" a number of men, and eventually married an elderly widower for whom she was working as a housekeeper. His outraged grown children accused her of using him as a meal ticket, but it was actually a love match till his death. Even as a 60-something grandmother, the two-time widow still attracted male admirers, and had a few younger "boyfriends," with whom she canoodled, mostly behind their wives' backs. I used to stay with her when my parents went away on vacations, but my parents would never have let me stay with her if they had known what their innocent child learned there.

My parents were Mom and Dad, and my paternal grandparents were Grandma and Grandpa. My maternal grandparents were Nana and Grandpa John (her second husband).

My parents were introduced by sympathetic mutual friends after each had suffered a family tragedy: my mother's father died unexpectedly of heart failure the same week that my father's younger sister was killed in an auto accident. They dated for nine years before finally marrying.

To be perfectly clear, my brother-in-law's husband wasn't yet family when we had sex, because he hadn't even met my brother-in-law at that time.

Does my brother-in-law's husband count?

I have always found that I am hornier than usual during a full moon.

I feel the same way about walking in it. I can't imagine buying shoes online--I have to walk in them first.

It depends. I moved in with my first partner six months after we met--and moved out less than four years later. My current partner and I signed a lease together on an apartment two weeks after we met; we have lived together for almost fifty years since then.

Thanks. At least it doesn't mean that I did something wrong.

Does anyone else here have aol mail? I have been trying every way I can think of to get to it, but I get only a blank screen whenever I try.

I am typing this at a computer desk that I bought several months ago from Wayfair, the only piece of furniture I have ever bought online, and I have been very pleased with it. I never buy anything online until I have searched locally and can't find what I need. For furniture, my next option is to drive 85 miles to the nearest Ikea, where I can almost always find something that works.

The previous owners of our house were a gay couple who were both named Michael (the neighbors refer to them as "the Michaels").

I want my body to be buried in my family plot. I don't like cremation, because there is nothing for future archaeologists to examine.

The first time I saw Kat'a Kabanova was at the ENO, which performed everything in English. The English translation sometimes sounded so childish that I couldn't help giggling. I really prefer to hear operas in the language in which they were written, even if it is a language that I don't know well.