Maintaining Balance

Yesterday, we took Clare and her (very serious) boyfriend to the Lyric Opera for a performance of “The Sound of Music” starring Billy Zane, Kate Winslet’s bad-guy boyfriend in “Titanic.”  The Lyric likes to do Broadway musicals mixing stage and opera talent.  “Do-Re-Me” worked better than I thought it would.

Our daughter the jock has been exposed to a good deal of culture; opera worked, architecture not so much.  When Clare was twelve, we once dragged her to a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home (his Prairie Style updated to the 1950s) in Iowa; it was like taking a sit-down protester for a walk.  This may explain why Clare nearly took my head off when I pitched to her at The Field of Dreams on the way back.  God knows what the child would do if she didn’t like the large people singing.

Michele gets free tickets to the Lyric from work, which is a real perk; Clare was hooked from the start.  And now there she was showing her boyfriend the ex-football player the orchestra pit and whatnot.  My hope is that a little bit of culture will rub off on any possible grandchildren. 

Because the child is now an adult, she left for a party afterwards.  At ten, she called to ask “Guess who the Bandits picked up,” and I did.  It was a pitcher from DePaul she’d faced in travel ball.  We also discussed Josh Beckett’s no-hitter of the Phillies.

This morning, before she tackled the New York Times, Michele was reading about Beckett’s little gem.  “I love baseball,” my cultured wife confessed.  After all, we are a well-rounded family.