I've got some comments to add to my recent entries.

In addition to a nice evening on the mound last night, Jamie Moyer got two RBI's added to his statistics on a very strange play which the scorekeeper recorded as a single. YOu can read about it on the Rockies home page, it will probably be there for a day or two at least.

One of those quirky moments in baseball which never fail to intrigue me. As it happened, I was involved with a phone call when the play unfolded, was clued in by a co-worker and caught the replay on the team's web page.

Re performances: Beeg, I'm pretty sure the baritone cantor who stopped with show with Verdi's Di Provenza was not a singer with a wide reputation. Obviously, the conductor of the small orchestra knew about his vocal skills, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that he sang in other venues in the Chicago area, but one of the pleasures of that evening was his voice and phrasing in combination with his "oh, what the heck" persona as he sang.

And the production of Henry the Fourth, Part I was staged as if in a junkyard, with various residents of the grungy refuge of the homeless performing the play for their own amusement. Costumes were cobbled together as if from various discards - ragged draperies with pleats still visible for cloaks; dishpans and hubcaps for battle shields; brooms and shovels for spears. The actors were seated on what seemed to be rickety scaffolding all around the edge of the stage, and climbed down when the script called for them to enter the action, and clambered back up again at their exits. In the meantime, they kept all the various props on the scaffolding with them.

So it was sort of a play within a play, an extra layer between the audience and the action.

But at Hotspur's death, all those sitting on the scaffolding dumped all the accumulated junk down onto the stage. A terrific racket and almost everyone in the audience startled with surprise. The director had jerked us all back into the reality of mortality.