Ten Penny Opera: Is It Me, Or Is This Really Bad?

Last night my friends and I gathered at Mama Iguana’s, a Mexican joint in downtown Noho. Cindy was meeting us there. When she showed up, I felt a great burst of pride when I introduced her to Jim Neal a friend who had never met her. I had told her about my blogger compatriot, Jim, and having Cindy show up with her warm smile and gracious manner made me feel great.

After some s0-so Mole, we repaired across the street to the Academy of Music where Commonwealth Opera was putting on “Three Penny Opera.” The show was awful…you couldn’t understand the words, the musicians were amateur and the whole thing just stunk. I wondered if I was the only one who didn’t like it, with the hard to decipher lyrics, dull music and people reading from scripts. It turned out my distain was shared by my seatmates. We headed for the door after the first dreadful act.

I went into the cafe early to help out Matt, a newbie behind the counter. Here I read the Recorder, a sad story about one of Greenfield’s best assets…the nine clay tennis courts free for the public to use. Kathryn and I used to bat the ball back and forth on these lovely clay courts when we lived in the town in the ’80s. Now the town’s DPW has announced they are no longer going to maintain them, and a bunch of volunteers are trying to fix up the courts by reusing the tape for the lines. It turns out that the labor to do this by volunteers is way cheaper than paying DPW workers, so for now it will take tennis lovers to keep these courts open.