I guess next week we'll spend a day at the races.

We're culture vultures, or what passes for it, here on the very edge of the tropics. So, for some years we've had a subscription (or "season tickets" as my BiL calls 'em) to the opera.

Which is fine and good and enjoyable and all that. The hitch has always been the venue which, frankly, has always been a glorified barn. Finally, last year, they (along with the ballet crowd, with whom they'd decided to go halfsies) had mustered enough money to finish construction on a new Center For The Performing Arts.

Which is fine and good and better and all that. The hitch is that it being a new venue, it has a wholly different seating layout. They came up (or more accurately, said they came up) with some sort of equivalency thing for the seats. So, if last year we had seats 34Q and 34R and this year we have T89 and T90 and they're supposed to be just as good, only better, because now we have this shiny new hurricane-proof building in which to listen to the opera. And/or watch ballet, if I could get excited about the ballet, which I can't because every season there's one or two worthy of my ducats, but the rest are Modern and Interpretive. These give me digestive discomfort because I am hidebound and reactionary.

But anyway.

The good folk who decided on the seating equivalency thing had a "Meet Your Seat" sort of cocktail thing last night and that was nice too. We went not only to get out of the house and to push a few soothing beverages into our bloodstreams, but also to see if 34Q and 34R proved equivalent to T89 and T90. Which you'll be surprised to note, they were not exactly. There's a different between "just as good" and "the same thing." We'll live, but now we have people surrounding us and I just KNOW one of them will pretend to wave a baton and another one will show up late and walk across us.

Bastids.

-J.