The alarm went off early for a Saturday. We needed to be on the road by 8:15 or so in order to be in Columbus by 11:00. While the reasons for going to Columbus should be obvious and numerous, this morning we were taking the 2+ hour drive to go see the CVCA boys’ soccer team play for the Division II state championship.

The CVCA soccer program is pretty amazing. We went to states in 2002 and lost in a shoot-out. We went back in 2004 and won the Division III title, but then we moved up to Division II (for reasons I don’t know). In order to make things really interesting this year, the playoff-caliber team from last year lost thirteen seniors from the team, and so we only had three returning players to the squad. Now, CVCA’s program is large enough that we have two “varsity” teams – a “white” team and a “blue” team. The white team plays the conference games and the blue team plays the larger out-of-conference teams. This helps the program have quite a bit of depth, but with losing so many players this year, it was not known how good the team would be.

Turns out our team was pretty good – they only lost one game all year. At 11:00 this morning, they started play for the state championship. Now, I know almost nothing about the game of soccer, but here are my impressions; it looked as if our guys controlled the first 20 minutes of the first (40-minute) half. Then, they appeared to back off a little (maybe tired? maybe a strategy?) and things were played more on our side of the field. In the second half, the guys played most of the game on the other team’s side of the field. Still, the game was a 0-0 tie until we scored off of a corner kick that slipped through the goalie’s hands with about 8:30 left to play. We then scored again with about 4:30 left to play on a break-away goal. That was the final score – 2-0, CVCA.

I was impressed by the skills of the CVCA guys – the footwork was impressive. They could stop on a dime and they could control the ball very well. If I tried any of that I would fall over. There were a few missed passes, but just a few – on the whole, the passes were impressive, especially when they were passing off of their heads. Well done!

The CVCA crowd thought the officiating was poor, but I have no way to know that. I don’t know the rules well enough to know what was wrong. There were a few missed calls that even Mer and I could make out. Still, I always take fans’ opinions about officiating with a grain of salt. It was enjoyable to be blissfully ignorant of the nuances of the game, at least in this respect.

The fans were pretty good. I admired the body-paint guys – it was only about 45 degrees out, and the sun kept coming and going behind clouds. Add a 5-10 mph wind across the field, and they had to be fairly cold. I was a little disappointed by a few CVCA fans. It is natural enough to groan when something unfortunate happens – that is a gut reaction, and I have no problem with that. But I was saddened by several adults hurling down genuine insults on the officials and even on a few opposing players. CVCA folks always need to be mindful that we are being watched as to how we act, and we should do better (in my opinion). Don’t get the wrong idea – the vast majority of the fans were great and supportive. It just makes be sad when a few Christians forget who they are and that people are watching.

So, a very good game, and a tremendous outcome for the soccer team for this year! Congratulations to the entire team and to the coach. Well done!

Meredith and I have very few traditions, and the oldest running one is that every year for at least the last 12 years, we have carved pumpkins at Halloween. This year, Halloween came right as grades were due for the first quarter, so we were really busy. Halloween came and went without us carving pumpkins. Still, a little detail like that should not stand in the way, so last Saturday I went to a local farmers’ market and bought two small pumpkins, which we carved on Sunday. We both independently went for simple designs this year, although mine was giving me fits until I realized I could use my thumb as a guide for each of the leaves. Between us, we cover fall and spring!

Mer’s pumpkin, 2007 version:

My pumpkin, 2007 version:

Ahhh. Yesterday was pretty darn nice. Last Christmas, Mer got me a gift certificate for an hour-long massage, and I finally cashed in on it yesterday. I had never had a professional massage before. It was very nice, very relaxing. It loosened up my back muscles (which get tight from my running and dancing), and put me in a nicely mellow mood. The massage place was a home-based operation near our old house in New Baltimore, so after I got my massage, I swung by the old homestead to check on it. All was well, and I got a pleasant and welcome surprise: I checked the propane tank (which is used for heating the house), and the tank was basically full. I had forgotten that the propane company had filled it late last spring, so the only propane that had been used was for hot water. That was a big help (it can cost $400 or more to fill the tank).

Then, I got home to my busily grading (school papers) wife, but she stopped to have lunch with me while we listened to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” on the radio, which is one of our happy things to do. The show was fun (as usual), and my ham-and-cheese calzone hit the spot for me.

After a short nap (about 30 minutes) that I took while Mer took a quick shower, we drove down to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and walked on the old canal path. We went back to the boardwalk and sat and watched the big goose strut his stuff around the pond. It was a very nice day – about 55 degrees and sunny, and the path was pretty (although we both thought that the leaves probably peaked last weekend).

After the walk (which took about an hour), we talked about getting movies from the library (which are free). While Mer ran out to get a few groceries, I looked up the library hours. Unfortunately, the library closed at 5:00 and we got home about 4:45. However, the library offered downloadable movies, so I gave that a try. Everything looked like it was working, but when I checked on the download process later, the movies had disappeared. That was too bad.

Mer did remember that we had an old VHS tape of the musical Bye, Bye, Birdie which our aunt had taped off of TV 12 years ago, and we had never watched it. So, out came Conrad Birdie and swooning girls. The musical was great fun – all fluff. Most of the songs were “beltable,” and since Mer had been in a production of Birdie in high school, she sang along with her favorites. She especially liked the song about the joy of being married to an English teacher, and the song about how wonderful it was to be a woman. For those not familiar with the musical, it is a story ripped off from the life of Elvis – a hot young musician gets drafted into the army, and his manager decides to make a big production of Conrad Birdie giving one last kiss to a girl from (where else?) Sweet Apple, Ohio. It is in no way a deep musical, but it was an enjoyable musical to watch.

After Birdie, I tried one last time to download movies from the library, and this time I tried shorter films (I thought maybe the longer movies were timing out). This time it worked, so Mer and I went with Rick Steves to Italy for an hour. It was a little weird to be watching something on the computer screen (one video was only about 5 inches across), but it still worked well enough.

On top of all of these things, when we got home from our walk, I discovered a gift card from Best Buy in the mail. Two very generous benefactors (maybe in the interest of having things to look at in my blog?) sent the gift card along so I could replace my camera, which I accidentally dropped a few weeks ago, which broke it. This was a very kind gesture, and I will try very hard to take better care of the new camera, which I should get in the next few days. Many, many thanks to you responsible – it really was very kind of you!

So, on a scale of 1-10 for Saturdays, yesterday was pretty darn good!

I just finished up listening to an audio book on the 1930s-1950s radio show The Shadow. The first disc was a 45-minute history/overview of the show, and then the book had 8 of the original shows to listen to. They were fantastic! Radio drama is really cool – it is especially nice when I’m running on a treadmill. Yes, the plots could be contrived, the dialog was not always sparkling, the characters could be flat, but it was still great! The medium of radio allowed for plots and lines that would not make it on TV. It seemed to be part of the flavor. The sound effects were fun, and the melodramatic music on the organ was great.

For those who do know much about the Shadow, he fought crime. He “mastered the art of clouding men’s minds so they could not see him,” and he would track down evildoers and find ways to bring them to justice. He only “appeared” to the villains as a voice, the baritone voice of the Shadow, with a sufficiently creepy laugh. Only appearing as a voice works really really well on radio, by the way.

The thing that continually surprised me about the radio shows was the level of crime. In most of the shows, someone (or someones) dies. The Shadow is also no Superman – sometimes the people he is trying to protect die, and sometimes the villains die. In all of the shows that I heard, the Shadow always found out what was going on, but he did not always save the victim and he never seemed too shaken up when the malefactors died. In one show, he forced two murderers to sign a confession – if they did not, he was going to turn them over to a mob of their possible victims, who would kill the two men. Not exactly legal, and certainly not nice. I always think that the 30s and 40s had fairly innocent diversions for entertainment. The Shadow proved me wrong.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows….

Check out some of the shows here!
You can even download 98 of the shows for your mp3 player (click on “Whole Directory”). How very very cool.

Mer and I passed a milestone a few weeks ago, and I forgot to comment on it! After SIXTEEN months of listening on and off in the car, we finished The Teaching Company’s lectures on classics of American literature, all 84 lectures (42 hours). We finished up the lectures on one of our trips to see theater in Cleveland. I give the series a thumbs up. I did like the Shakespeare lectures we have better, but the overview of American literature was still very good. A few surprises came out of the course – I really liked what I heard on Emily Dickinson. Her stuff really impressed me, and I am not much of a poetry guy. I liked that the teacher, Prof. Arnold Weinstein, was willing to talk about books that are not in vogue in universities nowadays (according to Weinstein) – Frost, Hemingway, some Twain, James, and others. He also threw in some works that he considered important that are not usually read or discussed, like Melville’s Benito Cereno, which sounds really interesting.

Meredith has started re-listening to these lectures on her morning walks, and she is already through 42 of them! At this heady pace, she will only take about three months to go through the whole course.

Not to let our brains atrophy too much, yesterday we started in on the 24-lecture (12 hours) course on the Life and Work of Mark Twain. I’m guessing that should only take 4-6 months to get through!

Last night (Saturday), Mer and I went to Actors’ Summit to see our second play of the season, Medea. I knew almost nothing about Medea, except it was an ancient Greek tragedy (about 2400 years old). The lead role of Medea was being played by an Actors’ Summit regular who is a very good actress.

The story of Medea is pretty typical. Medea falls in love with Jason of Argonauts fame. She saves his life several times, betrays her father the king, kills her brother when he comes after her, and moves to Greece with Jason to be his wife. They have two sons together. Jason then marries the daughter of the Greek king so he can be king someday. This does not go over well with Medea. She raves so much the king fears for his daughter’s life and sentences her to exile, giving Medea one day to get ready. She uses that day to plot the death of the king, the king’s daughter, plots to kill her sons to hurt Jason, and arranges her own safe haven in Athens. It happens all the time.

While a tad on the extreme, the play is still performed after 2400 years because it does raise issues of faithfulness, revenge, hatred, justice, love, family, and more. The play was compelling. The language was a bit stilted in places (those Greeks had a thing for oratory and speeches, even in plays), but the leads in the play were excellent, so they were able to act through the stuffy language and make it seem almost normal. Usually the acting at Actors’ Summit is excellent, so I was a little surprised that one or two of the minor characters were acted fairly flatly. The lines were delivered, but they had the feel of almost being read instead of acted. Still, the major roles were excellent, and they pulled the play off well. Seeing Medea makes you want to be very, very nice to your wife.

Speaking of nice, we had a gift certificate to the Old Whedon Grille in Hudson. We had never eaten there before. It is a casual dining experience with TVs in the corners showing sports. The menu is extensive, and full of food that I like. Mer had a southwestern wrap, and I had cashew-crusted chicken. They both came with really good fries (I may have to take Sonotmu there, since he is the fries connoisseur). Dessert was chocolate lava cake. MMMmmmmm. It was a nice date night – dinner and a show! Just don’t scorn your date!

Measure for Measure and Arsenic and Old Lace were playing in repertory (both plays playing at the same time with the same actors). So, last weekend, on Saturday, Mer and I headed back up to Cleveland to see Arsenic. We knew the travel time better, so we did not have the hour wait until curtain time this time.

The staging for Arsenic was impressive. The curtain rose on the exterior of the Brewster house, and the whole house rotated at the start of the play so you could see the interior of the house, which included a full staircase. The entire play then took place inside the Brewster house, and the house was rotated at the very end of the play so the older Brewster ladies could motion for the audience to come into the house.

Arsenic is a wonderfully funny play. It is a play that is humorous no matter who plays it, as long as they are even just okay actors. The actors in the Great Lakes Theater company are exceptional, so they enhanced the play with great acting, and even added many sight gags to support the play. Mortimer (the lead) was played by the same actor that had played Angelo (the bad deputy) in Measure for Measure. One of the great things about repertory theater is getting to see actors do widely different roles back-to-back. Mortimer is a very very funny role, with a ton of energy required to play him well. It is about as different from Angelo as you can get. As good as the actor’s Angelo was, his Mortimer was brilliant. He played the straight man to the entire farce perfectly. He was stunningly active, being all over the stage all the time as he tried to keep his aunts from doing anything else.

Some of the wonderful sight gags they added to the play included:
– “Teddy” was bringing a body down to the cellar to bury the body in “Panama.” He decided it was easier to let gravity do the work, so he dropped the body down the (hidden to the audience) cellar stairs. We got to see Teddy’s head bounce up and down as he watched the body bounce down the stairs.
– One of the aunts bent over to pick up a throw pillow, and had a very hard (and funny) time getting back up. This was away from the main dialog, which was across the stage. It was still funny enough to have the audience laughing, even though the attention was supposed to be many feet away.
– Mortimer staggered all over the stage in shock when he discovered that the body in the window seat was not the same body that had been there a few hours ago. The shock was way over the top, which fit the play perfectly.
– Mortimer staggered all over the stage because his limbs had fallen asleep after he had been tied to a chair for several hours.
– The mean brother, Jonathan, has had his face altered, and now it looks like the guy that played Frankenstein. At one point, his companion lights a match, and Jonathan grunts and waves his arms at the flame – that was great.

The play had me laughing from beginning to end. If you have never seen the play, you can get the excellent movie from 1944 staring Cary Grant, and you should go get it now!

Last Christmas, Mer and I got a gift card to use at Playhouse Square in Cleveland. We mused on how to use it, with no real consensus until we found out that we could use it for the Great Lakes Theater Festival, which performs at Playhouse Square. The GLTF has a special 2-for-1 subscription package, where if you are a new or lapsed subscriber, you can buy one subscription and get one for free. This season is pretty great – Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, Miller’s The Crucible, and Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well. With a little bit of our anniversary funds thrown in, we found we could afford the Saturday matinee package for the four plays listed above.

So, two weeks ago (yes, I’m behind in blogging), we headed up to Cleveland to see Measure for Measure. We have not gone to the theater in Cleveland since moving to the new house, so we got there really early. We caught part of a talk about the play (a feature that happens an hour before curtain on Saturdays), where the speaker talked about how relevant Measure for Measure is today in an age where powerful men have been brought low by sexual scandals. It was not a deep talk, but it was a good overview.

Since we still had about 45 minutes until curtain, we had time to wander in the gift shop. Meredith got distracted by a book on Mamma Mia, so I wandered to the small gallery in the theater. This gallery never seems to be open on weekends, but you can look through the windows. They have a fair amount of sculpture, and my current favorite piece was back after it had been away for a few months. It is a larger-than-life sculpture of a woman playing the fiddle. I love this piece – it captures motion really well, and it just speaks the joy of music to me. It is called Melody by a sculptor named Tuan. If you are looking for a Christmas gift idea for me, consider Melody – it is only $79,000. I’d put her next to our piano.

Mer found me and we went to our seats. Briefly, Measure for Measure is the story of a city (Vienna) where the the Duke has become concerned that laws are being ignored, especially sexual laws. His solution is right out of modern boardrooms – he decides to leave and installs an upright and just man (Angelo) to start enforcing the laws. The Duke also reveals later that he is curious to see if Angelo can remain just with the temptation of power. It’s not a very charitable solution, but there it is. Angelo sentences a man (Claudio) to die for the crime of fornication (Claudio has gotten his lover pregnant). Claudio appeals to his sister (Isabella), who is entering a nunnery, to plead with Angelo for his (Claudio’s) life. Isabella does so, and in pleading for Claudio’s life, Angelo (the powerful official) falls desperately in lust with Isabella. He proposes that if she sleeps with him, he will spare Claudio’s life. She refuses. Things are moved along and patched up by the Duke, who comes back to the city disguised as a friar. It is a comedy, so all ends in marriages. However, it is considered a “problem” comedy, because it is a very dark play, and some of the things the Duke does are bordering on cruel (not telling Isabella that her brother is still alive when she thinks he is dead, having Isabella briefly arrested for “slandering” Angelo, etc.).

The director decided to set Measure for Measure in a modern police state. The set was stark, with many steel bars showing. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, and the sets were changed by police guards, who often stayed on stage without lines. Angelo was dressed well in a suit, and was often behind or near a large desk. The “walls” of rooms could quickly become the bars of a cell, or the walls of a convent. It worked really well. Having the cameras everywhere was effective – when Angelo decides to offer his deal to Isabella, he goes to great pains to turn the cameras off. When Isabella says she will expose Angelo as a fraud, he asks her who would believe her. She points to the cameras, after which Angelo smiles as he turns a camera on and off. It exposed Isabella’s powerless situation really well.

The acting was first rate. Angelo was smooth and powerful. Isabella was strong in resolve, but realized she could not save her brother. The Duke was smart and scheming. It was a well-done production. My only slight gripe was right before the intermission. The police had been hauling prisoners around strapped upright to dollies. That worked really well. But right before intermission, while the Duke was musing over justice and the lives he can save, the police wheeled four prisoners on stage. Of the four, only one was under the death sentence. I thought wheeling all four on stage was heavy handed, and I think it would have been more effective to just have Claudio on stage. Small detail in an excellent production.

That was our afternoon – we got home about 4:30. We still had more going on that Saturday! Our friends Ray and Sara had extra tickets to go see the Summit Choral Society do an a cappella concert in Akron. We were told it was at a church downtown at 7:30, so we headed out about 7:00. We parked at a parking garage about 7:20 that was next to what I thought was the church. As we approched the church, there was a wedding streaming out, so we figured it was the wrong church (it was almost 7:30 now). We walked quickly (Mer was running at points) to try to find the street the church was on. We walked four or five blocks down the street, then went to another street and walked back to the car. We jumped in the car to drive around looking for the street. We went six or seven blocks, then drove back another way. We came to the same garage, and saw that it was on the street that we were looking for – the church that had the wedding in it was the right church after all. It was now 7:45, so we were a little surprised to see Ray and Sara standing on the steps. It turns out the concert started at 8:00. Ray and Sara had seen us walk by, but had not been able to stop us (they were still in their car). So, we had good exercise before the concert.

The concert itself was much fun. The choir was about 60 people strong, and they opened with some pieces I really like (a piece by American composer William Billings, and they did a wonderful job with “Magnum Mysterium” by Lauridsen). The concert had several arrangements of gospel songs, and they even threw in a PDQ Bach piece for fun. The choir had three brothers as special guests. These three brothers could really really sing – they all could sing different parts, and they sang their own arrangements of gospel songs and originals. The high tenor was getting higher than many of the sopranos in the choir. They were amazing.

The concert was much fun, and ran for about an hour and a half. I had a mild headache for much of the concert, so I did not enjoy it as much as I should have. Ray and Sara took us out to eat at Applebee’s after the concert. We had a good time visiting and laughing with them at the restaurant, and my headache went away with the food.

So, theater, music, and food! Not a bad way to spend a Saturday!

Meredith and I got together with our friends (and soon to be married!), Zach and Londa. We met in Kent, at the (aptly named) Kent Stage to see David Wilcox in concert again. The four of us saw Dave last year together, and Mer and I have seen Dave at least 5-6 times over the last 15 years. We are both big fans of Dave – his songs tend to start out about the ordinary or the small, and then you suddenly realize he has made a large or even universal application out of the song. A good example from last night was a song inspired by his wife’s leg healing after it broke; he decided to write a song about talking to the bone cells that were growing. He tried to explain to them how they were just small and he could not explain how they were part of a bigger, more complicated system. Then you suddenly realize that Dave is not singing to or about cells anymore….

Dave did two sets, lasting about two-and-a-half hours. He did almost all new stuff; he has an album about to come out. Some of his songs were so new he was still reading them off of sheets of paper. They were good, and I’m looking forward to the album (once we sell the house).

I love getting together with Zach and Londa – they have such joy, and it is fun to be around a couple so excited about each other. It reminds me that I’m very lucky to have a good ‘un like Mer. We bought the tickets for the concert with the last of our anniversary money (from August). Happy anniversary, honey!

Baseball on TV tonight is exciting – and I’m not talking about the Indians/Red Sox game. The REAL action was in Wii baseball tonight. I was playing in my sixth pro-level game. Prior to tonight, I had never scored a run against a pro team, so I was not expecting much. When I went down 0-3 after the second inning (Wii is a three-inning game), things looked really bad.

My lead-off runner got to first. Whoo hoo! Rally time! My next batter got out. My next batter got out. Things looked grim – two outs, down by three runs, man on first. I decided I was going to swing hard and low – the pros throw a lot of splitters, which I cannot hit, so I was committing to swinging low at the pitches. I hit the ball and actually hit a home run! My first runs in the pros! Now it was two out, 2-3. My next batter hits a home run! The crowd (me) goes nuts! My next batter hits a double! 3-3, man on second! Amazing! My next batter hit out. Bummer.

I can still play for the tie, if I can find some pitching. I’ve had TWO home runs hit off me tonight off the handle of the bat (I threw way inside and they still nailed it). Somehow I managed to get all three out – two flies and a strikeout. My very first tie in the pros! Note that my score is still not pro-level (you have to get to 1000 points to be a pro yourself; my current score is 877). A good baseball night!

In other sporting news, I also made a 23-yard chip shot out of a bunker in golf for a birdie. A two-sport athlete!