The Headlines: -Sondheim wrote "Into the Woods" while falling deeply in love with cocaine. This makes sense. "Woods" has always seemed overstuffed and sloppy. It's a show that may make you think, "Here, the writer was abusing cocaine...." -Most lyricists make grammatical errors. Tim Rice, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Steven Sater: These are all writers who have trouble with grammar. But Sondheim is an exception. So the following line always bothered me. "Nice is different than good." I now know that Sondheim *deliberately* made this error--he believed that Little Red would not say different from ....Sondheim insisted on the choice he had made even when others questioned the choice. -Daniel Okrent offers a smart reading of the song "Finishing the Hat." The money note occurs in the bridge--you get a startling jump from the bottom to the top of the scale. "And how you're *always* turning back too late from the grass or the stick or th...
I have been hired to teach reading and writing to a student -- there is no ISEE, no SAT, attached. This sort of thing fills me with terror, because there is no built-in structure, no test date, no bubble sheet. I had a writing teacher in college who would enter class in a serene way, with chocolate-covered blueberries, and who would then just speak eloquently about Raymond Carver for ninety minutes. She did not have an advanced degree. She had bottomless depths of self-confidence; she was mesmerizing. My current student, a fifth grader, is working on her own newspaper. She interviews residents of her town and publishes her findings. Since Mother's Day is approaching, she has chosen to interview a mother -- and her thought process is straightforward, unimpeachable. "I chose K, three doors down from me, because she has three kids. No one else has *three* kids. So K must be the most interesting mother." My student and I ran through the standard soft-ball questions. "W...