Check It Out

Beautiful melodies, lavish costumes and unbelievable love plots. Now, that’s opera! The Florentine Opera will be performing an English translation of Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) by Franz Lehar November 16, 17 & 18 at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. The opera, first performed in 1905, is based on the play, L’Attache d’Ambassade by Henri Meilhac.

In a nutshell: Baron Mirko Zeta, the Pontevedrian ambassador in Paris orders his secretary, Danilo, to marry Hanna Glawari, a very rich Pontevedrian widow, in order to keep her late husband’s fortune in the financially ailing country. Hanna and Danilo were once in love but Danilo’s uncle interrupted their romance because she didn’t have a cent to her name. Still in love with Hanna, Danilo refuses to court her because it would appear that it was only for her money. Meanwhile, Valencienne, the Ambassador’s wife, trying to fend off the affections of Camille, Count de Rosillon, the French Attaché to the Embassy, pushes him in Hanna’s direction and Hanna plays along in order to arouse Danilo’s jealousy. Naturally, the opera ends with a twist. Zeta decides to divorce his wife for being unfaithful and marry Hanna but Hanna surprises them all by saying she will lose her fortune if she remarries. After Danilo expresses his desire to marry her, she adds that she will lose her fortune only because it will pass to her new husband. Happily, Danilo resigns himself to his fate and saves his country from financial ruin. Finally, Valencienne proves to Zeta that she has been nothing less than “a highly respectable wife” and all ends well.

Well-known music from the opera includes the songs, “Vilja”, “You’ll Find Me at Maxim’s” and “The Merry Widow Waltz”. Join us for a program featuring excerpts from this delightfully entertaining opera performed by members of the Florentine Opera Saturday, October 27th at 12:30 p.m. in the Wauwatosa Library Firefly Room.

Roald Dahl’s fiction is not the type of work to make the reader wonder, is any of this based on real life? His most popular book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is a surreal tale of a nice boy with a serious sweet tooth winning the prize, a chocolate factory. Two popular movies, both called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, have been made from the book. Surprisingly, much of the inspiration for the story came from Dahl’s own childhood and his knowledge of the legendary secretiveness of the candy industry.

Dahl had an obsessive sweet-tooth. In his autobiography, Boy: Tales of a Childhood, Dahl nostalgically described stopping at the local candy store on his way home from school where he and his friends would buy gobstoppers, licorice bootlaces, sherbet suckers or some other sugary bit whenever they had a pence or two. When Dahl later attended a boarding school, the Cadbury Chocolate Company periodically sent samples of their bars in a plain gray cardboard box to the school for the students to sample and rate. Dahl soon realized that large chocolate companies possessed inventing rooms and he fantasized about inventing something fabulously delicious that would bring him to the attention of Mr. Cadbury himself.

Other aspects of Dahl’s life show up in his books. The outsider status of many of his main characters reflects his own family’s situation. Both his parents immigrated to pre-World War II Wales from a small village in Norway. In his autobiography, Dahl wrote “We all spoke Norwegian and all our relatives lived over there. So in a way, going to Norway every summer was like going home.” Influences of his grandmother’s stories about giants and witches are apparent in many of his stories, especially in The BFG and The Witches. Dahl attended four different British schools including an exclusive boarding school, all of which provided him with many models of punitive principals, harsh teachers and mean bullies. Miss Trunchbull from Matilda comes to mind. Many other connections between Dahl’s real life and his whimsical fantasies can be found, but none are so all pervasive as his fascination with chocolate and all things sweet.

Assignments given to students to be completed at home, also known as homework, may leave parents with the task of tuning up their own skills or finding the resources to help their children. Here are a few helpful resources from the Wauwatosa Public Library to get you through:

Textbook Collection
Don’t panic! The Library has the Wauwatosa Public School textbooks for each academic year for use in the library, just in case.

Young Adult Classic Collection
The Library has multiple copies of assigned titles and the corresponding Cliff’s Notes available for check out and further study.

Social Issues Table
This table contains a handy collection of books on timely and controversial social issues topics-great for research papers and reports.

Here are a few helpful databases accessible from home via the Wauwatosa Public Library homepage:

SIRS Knowledge Source
SIRS provides access to documents and articles in the social sciences and a “How to cite” feature using the MLA, APA or Turabian format.

World Book Online
This is the online version of World Book’s atlas, dictionary and encyclopedia.

BadgerLink
BadgerLink is a great resource for full-text articles from thousands of periodicals and newspapers and the LitFINDER componant provides access to the texts of poems, short stories, essays, speeches and plays.

A couple of additional homework help sites on the web:

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/homeworkhelp/bjpinchbeck/
Also known as B.J. Pinchbeck, this popular homework help site provides links to homework resources and gets high marks by reviewers for its navigation and accuracy.

http://www.infoplease.com/homework/
The Infoplease Homework Center site allows students to ask questions and steers them to sites that help them find the answers.

Good luck this year!

Books

50 Best Sights in Astronomy and How To See Them: Observing Eclipses, Bright Comets, Meteor Showers, and Other Celestial Wonders by Fred Schaaf

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground
by Robert D. Kaplan

Pontoon: A Lake Wobegon Novel by Garrison Keillor

Warren Buffet Speaks: Wit and Wisdom From the World’s Greatest Investor by Janet Lowe

You’ve Been Warned: A Novel by James Patterson

Books on CD

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

Breakpoint by Richard A. Clarke

Eye of the Beholder by David Ellis

Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman

DVDs

Australia Revealed/Discovery Channel

Blades of Glory

Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. Cesar’s Toughest Cases

10 Items or Less

Wind That Shakes the Barley

Music on CD

Children Running Through/Patty Griffin

Lush Life/Billy Strayhorn

Mi Sueno/Ibrahim Ferrer

String Quartet No. 3: Songs Are Sung/Henryk Gorecki

We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank/Modest Mouse