POST-OLYMPIC BLUES - the summer's too hot to handle

Summer is baking away like my attempt at souffle.

I keep reaching for the remote thinking the Olympics is a regularly scheduled TV show.

When I was forced at gunpoint to read Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN in high school, I scowled like the devil. What a pile of crap.

As a young more conscientious adult, I saw a televised production of OUR TOWN and hit the library the next day to secure a copy of it. I loved it. Oh impatient youth.

I spent the first half of the summer as Howie Newsome the milk man in The Amherst Players' production of OUR TOWN. It's a checkpoint on my bucket list - cast in "Our Town".

We had a great little run - two weekends - and I met a warm group of wonderful actors and theatre folk. Oh, and I won a bottle of wine in a basket raffle drawing at the theatre.

                                     The cast of "Our Town".  As always I am bottom left.

I'm cast as "Factotum" - all the bit parts - in The New Phoenix Theatre's Curtain Up production of Mr. and Mrs. Nobody, by renowned British writer Keith Waterhouse (novel: Billy Liar), and directed by his son, New Phoenix's Artistic Director Robert Waterhouse. I'm privileged to be part of the production.

My bro wires me shows he thinks I will like. He sent me HBO's Luck and I savored each of the nine episodes. I don't see a lot of tee-vee programs, but I loved this horse racing drama that was cancelled after one season when a third horse died during the production of the series. I'm fan-boy.

Is there any one else in all the world who can not find a reason to like Entourage?

I was crawling through the second floor of a junk store (a rapidly disappearing enterprise) when I found a rolled up tube of cardboard underneath a pile of rubble and reached in it to find a beautiful Van Gogh print of The Bridge in pristine condition. The cashier charged me 50 cents for it. I put it in a green frame and it is  -

I went to a lecture on antique glass bottles at a local library and afterwords they had a drawing for an antique milk bottle. I wish I was as lucky with Mega Millions.

Watched another Norwegian documentary about 1990s black metal music. Until The Light Takes Us is dark and cool and grim. It's available on Netflix instant viewing.

I'm listening to Saint-Saens' Carnival of The Animals.

And reading recently resurrected Magnet magazine issues.

And thinking about a quote from the recently passed Phyllis Diller: "I am such a bad cook, my TV dinners taste like radio."

Close 'er up big dummy.