Baltimore Symphony Goes To The Circus

“The orchestra’s 2009-10 season… will culminate in a four-week circus festival involving actual circus performers such as the Cirque de la Symphonie.” The repertoire for “BSO Under the Big Top” next March includes Corigliano’s Third Symphony (subtitled “Circus Maximus”), “an evening of concert operas by Barber and Gershwin and Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella.”

Lead In Children’s Books Isn’t A Big Worry, CDC Clarifies

“Could a vintage, dog-eared copy of ‘The Cat in the Hat’ or ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ be hazardous to your children? Probably not, according to the nation’s premier medical sleuths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But a new federal law banning more than minute levels of lead in most products intended for children 12 or younger — and a federal agency’s interpretation of the law — prompted at least two libraries last month to pull children’s books printed before 1986 from their shelves.”

Boris Johnson’s Tory Tack: Make The Kids Learn Poetry!

“As anyone who loves poetry will testify, when you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. You have a voice that will pop up in your head, whenever you want it, and say something beautiful and consoling and true. A poem can keep you going when you are driving on a lonely motorway, or when you are trapped on some freezing ledge in the Alps, or when you are engaged in any kind of arduous and repetitive physical activity, and need to keep concentration.”

For Subway Rescuer, Stage Role Really Came In Handy

Chad Lindsey, who on Monday rescued an injured man who had fallen onto the subway tracks, “said almost everyone seems to be an aspiring actor nowadays, but in this case, it is a critical point to the story: Mr. Lindsey currently appears in an Off Broadway show called ‘Kasper Hauser,’ in a role that requires him to repeatedly lift a character who cannot walk.”