Mamacita says:  . . . and the livin’ is easy. . . .

Sadly, when I think of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, what comes to my mind first is the inexcusable misprint in our local small-town newspaper several years ago about the modern opera being presented in the college town thirty miles to the north, called Porky and Bess.  I don’t think anybody but me caught it, for there was never a retraction, correction, apology, or letter to the editor.  Ever since that headline, I somehow expect the last line of this opera to be something along the lines of “Th th th th that’s all, folks!”

Next up:  my viewing of Madame Butterball.    I mean, what else could we call it when the woman portraying Cio-Cio San weighed at least 250 pounds?

I love live performances, really, I do. I could go every night to one, if I had any money.   But certain characters are meant to be portrayed in certain ways, and it pretty much ruins the show when too many  liberties are taken.  Like the Phantom of the Opera we saw, with a Christine twice the size of Eric.  He could not pick her up and carry her back to the boat, so he just spread a blanket over her as she lay in a faint in front of the mirror.  Neither character was “right,” and it spoiled the show.

Whatever.  I’m weird, and Letterman is funny.

1. We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. –James Agee

2. Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing “Embraceable You” in spats. — Woody Allen

3. Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. — Russell Baker

4. Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you. — Erma Bombeck

5. Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.–Hal Borland

6. The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.–John Burroughs

7. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.– Albert Camus

8. People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.–Anton Chekhov

9. People take pictures of the Summer, just in case someone thought they had missed it, and to proved that it really existed.– Ray Davies

10. It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.– Rebecca H. Davis

11. A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.– James Dent

12. It amazes me that most people spend more time planning next summer’s vacation than they do planning the rest of their lives.–Patricia Fripp

13. It will not always be summer: build barns.– Hesiod

14. Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught. — Sydney J. Harris

15. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.– Langston Hughes

16. The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco.– Mark Twain

17. Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.–Henry James

18. If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.  –Bern Williams

19. Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.  –Sam Keen

20. All we need is the truth in our hand. Someone to call a friend. Never fear the darkness. All we need is just the sun in the sky. And the hope of a summer to come with the meaning of love.–Unknown

21. The summer night is like a perfection of thought. –Wallace Stevens

22. I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year. –Edna St. Vincent Millay

23. Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time. –John Lubbock

24. What a beautiful, sunny morning. It makes you happy to be alive, doesn’t it? We can’t let the sun outshine us! We have to beam, too! –Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata,

25. Many public-school children seem to know only two dates: 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.- Mark Twain

26. Nothing is more memorable than a smell.  One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains…-   Diane Ackerman

27. The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.-  Tennessee Williams

28. It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do. –Walter Winchell

29. There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart. — Celia Thaxter

30. A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.– St. Francis of Assisi

31. Dirty hands, iced tea, garden fragrances thick in the air and a blanket of color before me, who could ask for more?– Bev Adams

32. Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.– Warren Buffett

33. Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.– Ada Louise Huxtable

32. To believe in life is to believe there will always be someone who will water the geraniums.– Flavia

33. What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance. — Jane Austen

34. To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides. – David Viscott

35. I played as much golf as I could in North Dakota, but summer up there is pretty short.  It usually falls on Tuesday.  –Mike Morley

36. Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain.  –Author Unknown

37. Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.  –Roger Miller

38. My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.  –Loire Hartwould

39. I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains.  One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness.  –Adeline Knapp

40. Pity the poor creatures in warmer countries where the seasons never change.Where summer is eternal and they never know the pain of waiting and the joy at last when summer comes. –Ray Guy

41. To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment. — Jane Austen

42. How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! — Emily Dickinson

43. It will never rain roses. When we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses. – George Eliot

44. The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. — Galileo Galilei

45. When I see that first, minuscule, curled, pale green wisp of a sprout poking up between a couple of grains of vermiculite, I hear God speaking. – June Santon

46. This very act of planting a seed in the earth has in it to me something beautiful. I always do it with a joy that is largely mixed with awe. – Celia Thaxter

47. One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds. — Dan Bennett

48. Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration. –Lou Erickson

49. The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. –Hanna Rion

50. Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. –Mrs. C.W. Earle