Importunate Choice

Poet t.s. eliot may have been an expert on naming cats, but Fiorella knows all about naming dogs.

The most important thing is give your dog a name you are comfortable with, one that you can use to call him/her home.  Names like Tina and Bella and Sandy and Hugo and Wendy and--well--Sonia.  Not a name like Freelove Nicklebeer, which Husband and Fio, in their university days, imposed upon a poor, helpless beagle puppy.  It referred to a UT student rallying cry of old--"Free love on campus and nickle beer in the Student Union"--and Fio thought it had a good rhythm.

She was not as enthralled by her choice when puppy went missing and she had to stand in the middle of the street shrieking, "Freelove!  Freelove!"

Boffo!

How long has it been since Fiorella's given an all-positive review of a production at Georgetown's Palace Theater?  But it turned out there was a reason she had problems getting tickets four weeks beforehand and had to settle for ones much closer to the stage than she and Husband prefer.

Yes, the miracle has happened.  The show was Cats, and it was uniformly fabulous.  Of course, it started with one leg up because of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's music, exciting from the first screaming seventh.  And the cast didn't hurt--fabulous voices, fabulous dancers, fabulous directing, unbelievable pacing.

Cats is an ensemble show, a series of numbers dramatizing poems from T S Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats loosely tied together by a weak plot, but what made it work was the direction and choreography. Fio had seen Cats before, on the big Bass stage, but it was even better when the approximately thirty actors were all crowded together onto the Palace's much smaller stage   

What a catharsis. Fiorella laughed and cried, then applauded and applauded and applauded.