Friday morning, on my way to work, I made my usual stop at the Starbucks at the corner of Hanley and Wydown.  Earlier in the week, the manager had introduced me to a new Latté Lady, “This is Mark.  He always orders a Grande Latté and sometimes he orders biscotti.  He hardly ever complains.”  I guess that was a compliment?

One of the other Latté Ladies is moving to New York City.  There have been snippets of conversation about it for weeks.  I asked her Friday, what she planned on doing there.  She wants to appear on Broadway.  I recounted our spring trip there this year and mentioned that we had seen Exit the King with Geoffrey Rush.  She had heard of it, but when I also mentioned “… and Susan Sarandon.”, she visibly brightened.  I forgot to tell her that we stayed only a block away from 42^nd Street.  😉

On Friday night, Anne and I went to go see the play, Sleuth.  It is a British mystery of sorts.  The play originally aired in the early 1970s.  Since then at least a couple of movie adaptations have also been made.  The Rep made a decent production of the play, but I still came away somewhat disappointed.  Sleuth like Amadeus, the Reps’ previous production, are both ancient properties.  Neither of them are indicative of the Rep’s history of bring hot, cutting edge productions to Saint Louis.  Both productions are more indicative of another Saint Louis theatrical institution, the Muny.  Don’t get me wrong, I love musical theater and I love the Muny for what it is, but I would hate to see the Rep take that road towards mediocrity.

In other news …

Saturday night, long after le Marquis had gone to bed, Anne was still up.  When she switched off the TV at one in the morning, she could still here the sounds of heavy machinery working late into the night on The New I-64.  After October’s month of rain, the construction crews were making the most of this weekend’s warm and dry weather.  After two years, the project now has less than a month to go.  The construction crews are racing to finish early and collect a rather lucrative bonus for doing so.  They must have computed that it will be more profitable to pay overtime and run around the clock shifts and finish early then it would be to just finish on time.  In another more immediate sign that the road construction project is drawing to a close the Big Bend Boulevard Bridge is scheduled to reopen some time this week.  This will ease Anne’s work commute and reduce the traffic in the neighborhood.

On Sunday, Anne biked to Maplewood and spent the afternoon passing out flyers for the school board.  I biked to the Park.  It was mobbed and because one of my batteries was not charged, my camera would not work.  Somewhat discouraged, I left early and only got ten miles.  Anne got eight miles.