Back from DC, where we had snow on Saturday.  It was gorgeous looking out my sister's back door, with dawn coming up over the whitened trees of the nature reserve and the path sort of cutting through it so that it looked mysterious and serene, even though I know it just ends at the road a quarter mile or so on.  But it was so wrong that far south this deep into spring.  The wind was biting.

Saw the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center while I was there.  They started with a set of Ravel dances which were okay but not exactly inspired.  But the Liszt was really fun.  The pianist, Yundi Li, performed with verve and, I am tempted to say humor, though I don't know why I think that.  It was a completely different experience of the piano from March with the Philadelphia Orchestra, but almost as much fun.  Again, the program had received very good reviews, so the hall had a lot more people than usual.  So, the key to a great audience does seem to be a great performance.  And, perhaps, a rock-star level classical soloist.

After the intermission they did a collection of music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.--more than a traditional suite, I think, but less than the whole ballet.  I liked that very much.  It is one of my favorite ballet scores, and they played with a full orchestra in the grand tradition of the 40s rather than the smaller orchestra that you would normally hear at the ballet.  And they seemed to be having fun with it.  I could see the dancers in my head for the party scenes particularly.  Great fun.

Much family visiting in spite of the weather after that.  And now, to work.

Back from DC. Yawn. Sleepy from travel. Saw NSO on Friday--they did Brahms 2nd symphony and something called Einstein's violin, a modern piece, but still accessible. Very nice. Saw may sibs. Visited. Came home. Hockey on the tv--tie game going into the third. 3-2 now--Knuble make a goal in the first thirty seconds. Yeay!

The Army-Navy game was just ended as I was coming home from the train station. West Point Cadets in the subway, singing cheers. The temperature has dropped precipitously since yesterday, which meant the cadets were wearing those lovely long greatcoats. The Naval cadets on the street, looked suitably sharp in Navy. I couldn't help it--they made me smile.

For those of you who don't live in the land of college football, the Army-Navy game is the big grudge football match between the two oldest service academies in the country. They've been playing this big game for over a hundred years, most of those years in Philadelphia, which sits at roughly the midpoint between West Point,(army) in New York, and Annapolis, (navy) in Maryland. When I was eighteen, not quite a hundred years ago, I attended the game at JFK Stadium as the date of a West Point cadet I had met at a college mixer I attended with a friend from Vassar College.

The day of the game was horribly cold. There had been a big snowstorm, and the grounds crew had packed the snow under the bleachers at the stadium, so we were sitting on packed snow. And did I mention that I don't actually like football? But that was 1968, in the middle of the VietNam war. I was a liberal even then, but even at eighteen, I understood the historical significance of the game and wanted to see it and understand it. Twenty years later at the same stadium I saw U2 and Bruce Springstein perform together. By then I had figured out that I wanted to understand all sorts of odd traditions from the inside out (smirk), and was halfway through the Ph.D. program at Penn.

But I never saw that cadet again, and that was okay.