Fun City

     Uncle Jack's cup ranneth over this week what with the springlike weather and a surfeit of first-class cultural activities.  The thermometer actually reached 70 F on Friday which made his morning walk through the Johns Hopkins campus even more enjoyable than usual----and not just because so many of the co-eds had shed their winter garb.  He has a lot of sympathy for the male students on days like this because it must be very hard to concentrate on dull stuff like math and physics.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
     Friday night's concert by the Baltimore Symphony was enjoyable as always but particularly so because the first piece on the program was Rossini's Overture to William Tell which has had special meaning for him ever since he was a kid.  Aged persons like himself will remember (if they ever knew) that William Tell was the theme music for the Lone Ranger radio program to which he listened faithfully every weekday afternoon for many years.  It was the first piece of classical music he ever heard and he is sure it helped to turn him into a lifelong lover of same.  Who could not love that blood-stirring finale to which accompaniment the Masked Man and Tonto galloped off into the sunset after each thrilling episode.
      Saturday afternoon he and Mrs. Uncle Jack repaired to the Everyman Theater a few blocks down Charles Street where they enjoyed an excellent performance of an intriguing play called "Shooting Star" by the prolific American playwright Steven Dietz.  It's a 90 minute one-acter in which the two characters, a man and a woman who were lovers a long time ago, are forced to spend many hours together in the waiting room of a snowed-in airport.  Uncle Jack remembered to put his hearing aids in so he could hear every word of the dialogue and he can tell you it was very clever and he understood it all which is more than he can say about the Harold Pinter play he went to last week.

     This afternoon he and Mrs. U.J. will stroll over to the Mattin Center on the JHU campus to hear the Johns Hopkins orchestra, a group of students, faculty and alumni, in concert.  They went last year to this same annual concert and were blown away by the quality of the music.  They will be playing Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring"  which he dearly loves and he knows he will enjoy it even though the high temperature is back down to 40 today.  You can't have everything but you can come close when you live in Charm City.

                                 This is how one part of the worksite looked three weeks ago.

The same corner yesterday.  These guys have not been sitting around like they are in this picture. (It's lunch time obviously).

                     Another part of the site back on January 31 before Uncle Jack left for Nags Head.

                            And how it looked yesterday.  Only a year-and-a-half to go now.

                                                    In the beginning......six months ago.