Jacques Brel is dead and depressing

The first time I ever saw "Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris," Jacques Brel was, in fact, still alive - it was the mid '70's, it was Boston, and we were all young and took "The Middle Class" to be an anthem, rather than sarcasm, because we all sat around in bars swearing never to become middle class.

Now that I have a ranch house with a swimming pool in the back yard, I get a painful case of hindsight seeing myself turn from exactly that sort of person into exactly that other sort of person.

And the depressing anti-war songs are just as depressing, more so, even, since they've added Sarajevo and Baghdad to Hiroshima. This particular production of JBIAAWALIP had slides being screened as backdrops, a lot of burnt out cities and desperate people. The set itself was spare but adequate: a corner of the Eiffel Tower evoked by metal strutwork, a giant picture frame for the Louvre (in which the slides appeared), and a large rolling rose window (no glass, just the outlines) to evoke cathedrals. At times, people climbed on the Tower, leaned through part of the rose window, and stepped into or out of the picture frame.

It wasn't the greatest JBIAAWALIP I've ever seen, but it was strong enough. Depressed the hell out of Cindy, too, who had never seen it before, couldn't even recall having heard of JB before. Sometimes I wonder whether we were all on different planets during the 60's and 70's, because neither Cindy nor squirrel_magnet seems to remember much of what I thought were the most important things going on.

Getting there, we got to argue with the GPS unit - as futile as such things ever are, but it talks, so one feels impelled to try and reason with it when it's being unreasonable. Which it's had a couple of cases of lately, telling us we had arrived at an address when we were in the middle of a street that had nothing along it and no side streets in sight. We had a really good supper at the Silver Diner afterwards.

Today we bought pet food and supplies. Some cages were cleaned; Cindy went and looked at the Inner Harbor while I napped, we knitted a bit, we ate. Tomorrow will be busier.

Today's touristy stuff

We went to the Poe House & Museum - a very small house, indeed, and even reading every word of every sign, it didn't take us terribly long. And in the house lived Poe's grandmother, his mother-in-law/aunt, his wife/cousin, her brother, and himself. 4 tiny rooms, and then even after they built a couple more rooms on the back, still tiny. We then went over to the cemetary where Poe's final grave is (both Poe and his relatives got moved around a bunch post-mortem.) Some nice shady spots in the cemetary.

Then we went down to the Inner Harbor, ate lunch, and took the 60-minute Sightseeing Cruise on the Prince Charming. A few interesting things on that route - especially the Domino Sugar factory - huge ship being unloaded of its brown sugar, and then the factory itself - refinery, I guess, would be the correct term - which smells strongly of caramel, which wafts across the water, sometimes with a whiff of what my nose interprets as burning raisins to go with it. Even with the stiff breeze that being on a moving boat on the water brings, it was quite warm, though, and we were glad to get home and take a nice, air-conditioned nap.

Tomorrow: the Smithsonian Art Museum.