Melina Takes In Some Culture, Does Not Spit On Walls

I'm a little bit dazed this week from a culture trifecta: I went to the Metropolitan Opera with our new character El Caballero on Monday, to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade on Tuesday, and then to the musical Grey Gardens on Broadway on Wednesday.

There were certain similarities between the Opera and the Halloween Parade. Both were gigantic undertakings, involving a lot of loud music and astonishing numbers of people in costume traveling in more or less the same direction. The funny thing about the Halloween parade was that as weird as it was, it wasn't *that* much weirder than walking down the street on a normal evening around here. It was unclear why some people were onlookers and others were in the parade - while there were a few organized groups, there were a lot of just people in your standard costumes (superman, George Bush, killer E-Coli Spinach) walking down sixth avenue. It really seemed very normal. The opera, by contrast, was so impossibly elaborate and complex that although it was a stage production, it read like a movie or a TV show. Most "normal" theater is far more sparing in design, so it was hard to remember that the opera involved actual humans doing the things that usually take an army of computers to invent.