Labor Day, without the labor

Enjoying some time at home in the beautiful late Minnesota summer. A cookout with friends this afternoon. Lots of time reading these days. Mostly with my right foot propped up because last Thursday, just before heading off for a long day at the State Fair, I was working on my handstands at home and cracked a toe hard against a piece of furniture. I assumed I'd just bruised it and then spent all day walking around on pavement at the fairgrounds, only to have my foot swell and turn all sorts of lovely colors. I think I may have broken a bone. But since I have no health insurance in the good ol' U S of A, I can't afford to go to a doctor who will probably just tell me not to walk on it (too late). So I'll get it looked at, some 2 weeks later, by my GP in London, with whom I've set up an appointment by email. And meanwhile I read all these articles in the paper about people demonizing "socialized health care" in Britain, where it costs me nothing to see my doctor and next to nothing to get prescriptions filled. The tone of the public... debate? discussion? those words seem too elevated a description ... here is so disheartening. I'm afraid the best we can hope for is so complicated a package that almost no one will understand it. An interesting article the other day in the paper quoted Bob Dole, first as saying that health care reform is the most important thing most senators and reps will ever vote on and that just saying no to everything is simply not an option (hooray there) and that having a complicated bill is actually an advantage because people can fiddle with the minor points and still feel like they have something to show to their just-say-no constituents. (I guess I'd give that a qualified hooray.)

This is why I shouldn't wait weeks between posts. There's always something present to write about and I never get caught up.

Back to Greece: While in Rethymno (on Crete) we saw two classic Greek plays, one by Aristophanes (Thesmophoriazusae) and one by Aeschylus (The Persians), both in Greek of course. I couldn't follow the dialog at all, but it was fun seeing Greek plays in a (modern) amphitheater in the old fortress at Rethymno, under starry skies. The comedy was broad enough that, with some previous description of the plot, we could basically follow it. With Persians, again we were given a preliminary description of the plot by a friend who's well read in such things, but I gotta say, I find tragic chorus things pretty impenetrable (in my limited experience). That'll be one of the challenges of the upcoming year at Lispa, when we run through a rotation of dramatic styles. Tragic chorus is one of them. I have a lot to learn there. (So what's new?) Other dramatic styles ahead of us include platform, melodrama, commedia, grotesque (and/or bouffant? not sure if there's a difference), and clown. Again, stay tuned. This is a collection of areas I can promise I'll write about.

More later, little by little.