Today was ballet day in New York. Since the blog era commenced, the Mets have never won on ballet day. But they've never lost in Arizona. Something had to give.
Our offense [1], apparently.
The ballet du jour was a big-deal production of “Romeo + Juliet” [2]. Sad to admit I'd forgotten most of the details since I read it in ninth grade, even since I saw Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes have their go at it ten years ago. At intermission I was thinking, well, this is kind of a downer, but at least there's a happy ending.
So I was off by a couple of suicides.
I was briefly content that this performance's conclusion coincided with the fourth inning and the lone successful Met rally of the day. Five-plus innings of baseball remained beyond that, but not much of a happy ending there either. Picking up bits of play-by-play between Lincoln Center and the new P.J. Clarke's on Columbus (don't order the chicken pot pie) and then peering over the bar for silent video of Pelfrey struggling and Hernandez cruising and then whatever I absorbed heading in and out of the subway to Penn Station, punctuated by my first full-blown cursing out of a David Wright at-bat, brought no joy beyond the joy that I didn't miss all that much Mets baseball on a Sunday afternoon turned evening. After 13 straight wins in Arizona and an otherwise lovely outing with my ballet-liking wife, I guess I was being greedy.
But I was not the only one in New York [3] being that today.