Stay behind the blue line

Another grocery run today. At one store there is now blue tape on the floor. At the meat counter the workers wearing masks requested we stand behind the blue line in front of the display cases. Once they made up a package they no longer handed it to customers, they left it on the display case and backed up. The blue tape lines at checkout were a guide to spacing ourselves six feet apart.

At the second store, much smaller, they now have a policy of only so many people in the store at any one time. I had encountered that last Sunday when I was the only one waiting outside. Today there was a line and I waited more than 20 minutes to get inside. Fortunately, it wasn’t cold. I roughly measured the sidewalk slabs to be about six feet and spaced myself accordingly.



There was an article in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press by Joe Guillen and Gina Karufman about how COVID-19 hit the police department in Detroit. At the moment even the police chief is infected. There was a community event back on March 6 with about 100 people in attendance, before any cases were found in Michigan. And one attendee was contagious. Once people started getting sick there seemed to be a lack of responsibility of who should tell the other attendees to quarantine themselves.

Then a policeman arrived home from travel on March 9 and went to his job on the 10th. He started showing symptoms 4 days later. Colleagues were already infected.

Michigan Radio says there are now well over 9,000 cases and 337 deaths in the state. Half of those cases are in Wayne County and another 2000 in Oakland County just to the north. This link has counts that are updated every day at 3:00pm.



Tonight’s opera is Nixon in China by John Adams. No, this isn’t the early American president come back to life to write music about a later president. There really is a modern composer with that name. I quite like some of his music, Harmonium, Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and Hoodoo Zephyr – and the first 12 minutes of this opera. He is grouped with Minimalist composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, though I wrote a term paper for my master of music (sheesh, two decades ago!) on what there was in the music that explained why I liked Adams and not Reich and Glass.

The opera is, of course, about the 1972 visit of Dick Nixon to China, which opened China to the west. The first act features the Nixons and Kissinger getting off the plane. Then Dick Nixon and Kissinger meet Mao Tse-Tung and when Mao spouts off we wonder if he’s talking philosophy or is just senile. The act ends with a big state dinner and several toasts.

In the first half of Act 2 Pat Nixon is taken around to meet factory workers, grocers, farm workers, and students. In the second half there is a dance presentation, a play within the play, of a story about an unscrupulous landlord’s agent, titled The Red Detachment of Women. I read on Wikipedia that there really was a show by that name and dominated the stage in that era, and really was performed for the Nixons. One of the Chinese bad guys is played by the same actor who played Kissinger and at one point Pat remarks he looks familiar. But the story gets brutal, which distresses Pat and she tries to interfere. Madame Mao shrieks at the characters to be true to the little red book. The scene ends in mayhem, showing what Madame Mao wrought in her Cultural Revolution.

There is an Act 3. I didn’t watch it. It’s just weird. I know because I’ve seen it before, perhaps when this same Met performance was broadcast to area movie theaters 9 years ago.

This past summer I played a video of the last movement of Harmonielehre for my niece. She wasn’t impressed.

Because I actually watched parts of the opera, especially the dance, some of my other stories will have to wait until tomorrow.