Play On!

There may be sermons in stones and good in everything, but there is only gloom on the pastry horizon that once made my matinal coffee a welcome treat.

Danish pecan rings, like so much in American contemporary life, have ballooned in price while concomitantly plunging in quality.

Abandoning my habitual pecan ring, I had meandered hopefully through the pastry world without finding any item constant both in deliciousness and price.

Finally, my search came to rest on “donut nuggets,” which, in their modest past were simply called “donut holes. ” OK! — so I coasted along for some weeks with coffee and “nuggets”.

Sure enough lately, the “holes” lost their former dimensions and deliciousness.

The grocery management may have had its mind on something else, but not on its loyal, ever hopeful, “nugget” clientele.

The perfectly adequate grocery store, where I had expended my pastry budget for some three decades, is now being replaced by a monstrous establishment costing untold millions.

I hope that the grocery company is not counting on profits from my “donut nuggets” to help them with their prodigious construction costs.

My beloved wife and I have decided tentatively to switch to raisin bread toast with our morning coffee.

I wonder if the grocery moguls will find a way to get to me with my plain old raisin bread.

Ain’ nuthin’ sacred?

Let Nasty Pelousy

Stay in her housey.

Her husband is a rich bird who loves his own abode.

He spends a wad on airfares that keep her on the road.

When aches and pains have come to stay,

And your doctor is so far away,

Just think of your friends Pelosi and Obama,

It’ll do you no good to holler “Mamma!”

Obama and cohorts don’t care about how

They’ve carved up our glorious rights, until now.

We shudder to think of disasters ahead —

If this is called “leading,” who needs to be led?!

I do not think that it would cause a ripple,

If you switched an absent gerund for a present participle.

Enormous expensive White House parties are now the routine of “Obama’s Hearties.”

The New York Times recently told me that soprano Jean Carlton had died in California. In the fall of 1948, this beauteous lady and I were on the stage, on many balconies — I hanging on the side of the wall — as we sang Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” on a coast-to-coast opera tour.

“Faust” is Gounod’s best-known opera, and I sang it with pleasure many times.

However, “Romeo and Juliet” tells the most famous and beloved of all love stories, and I enjoyed singing the part of Romeo more than that of Faust.

Charles Gounod wrote some of the most singable music ever composed and stands with Puccini at the top of singers’ favorites.

In Act 2 of “Romeo”, tenor Romeo sings, “Ah! Ne fuit pas encore!” (Ah! Do not leave yet). My Juliet of 60 years ago has now departed the stage forever.

I shall not forget her or her lovely singing.