While the nation wonders what should be done about the deficit, East Hamptoners are wondering what’s to be done about the surfeit of surf shit.

    Some even say it’s a metaphor for our times, emblematic of what they see as the country’s irreversible descent into deep doo-doo. And they’ve begun carrying flags that say, “Don’t Sh— On Me.”

    In rebuttal to the fecaphobes, some dog owners, I hear, are rallying around a Super Bowel Movement, a “shit-in” planned for Memorial Day at Main Beach.

    “Why are you humans so high and mighty?” Henry said to me the other day. “Aren’t you continually laying waste to the environment with your cesspools? Some of us can’t avail ourselves of indoor plumbing. Deer do it, squirrels do it, even nasty little ticks do it. And, frankly, I’ve been doing my part whenever I spy those beany piles.”

    “Ugh, deer shit.”

    “I know, I know, you always make a face, and give me a breath mint, but you’ve got to admit it’s the responsible thing to do. After all, we’re all in this together. We should pick up after one another, act collectively.”

    “You’re sounding like the president.”

    “I thought his second inaugural was wonderful stuff. ‘Out of many one,’ e pluribus unum, that kind of thing, rather than the same old ‘All for one/And all for one!’ ”

    “But you’ve got to realize, Henry,” I said, “that while this collectivist talk sounds good, there are so many slackers about that it’s a pipe dream. This country was built on people who picked up after their pets. On individual initiative. And now it’s all going to go to the dogs.”

    “Well, you’re fighting the good fight; I’ve noticed you’ve been picking up after me lately, at least when I don’t do it in the pachysandra. You’re a credit to your species.”

    “If the slackers only knew how virtuous it makes one feel — though, frankly, I’m happy you’re not a Newfie — I think we could get this country back on the right track again.”

    “Isn’t it interesting,” said Henry (he always has to have the last word), “that as you stoop for poop you’re not only contributing to the general welfare but also at the same time raising your self-esteem! Collective and individual effort are not at odds after all — the president would be proud.”

   The mark is gone now where they laid Yoco Unkenchie. The year was 1653, and a group of Manhansett men were carrying their dead sachem on his final trip from his Shelter Island home to Montauk, where he was to be buried.

    Yoco was the chief of Shelter Island’s native people, and it was said that upon his death they disbanded, some to live among the Montauketts, others to join the Shinnecocks.

    Story has it that the place where his bearers laid Yoco’s bier by the side of the path between Sag Harbor and East Hampton was marked by a small hole dug to memorialize the spot.

    In his 1840 “Chronicles of the Town of Easthampton,” David Gardiner wrote that for more than 190 years passing Indians kept the hole as fresh as if it had been lately made. For the six generations that followed Yoco’s passing, he wrote, no member of the Montauketts would pass the spot without removing whatever sticks, stones, or leaves had fallen into it.

    The hole, about 12 inches deep and 18 inches wide, was still there in 1845, near the three-mile stone that set out the distance to Sag Harbor, when the Rev. N.S. Prime paused there.

     An 1899 history of the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church tells the story as well. Its author, the Rev. Jacob E. Mallmann, said he had spoken to an aged Sag Harbor resident who told him that Stephen Talkhouse, for whom the Amagansett bar is named, would kneel down at the spot whenever he passed and clear it with apparent reverence, “following the custom of his forefathers.”

    When the turnpike between the two villages was cut in about 1860, Yoco’s spot was lost. And, as Mr. Mallmann wrote, “the sacred memorial of over 200 years’ standing was obliterated.” My grandmother Jeannette Edwards Rattray said that the place was nevertheless known as Sachem’s Hole forever more, at least into her lifetime.

    New York State erected a marker supposedly on the site in 1935, referring to Yoco as Pocgatticut, a name by which he was called in some records. The familiar yellow-and-blue sign contains several errors, from what I can tell, giving the wrong date and changing Sachem’s Hole to Whooping Boys Hollow.

    I stopped by the sign this week. I had come from Sag Harbor, setting my odometer to zero near the Episcopalian church. As I stood by the side of the road I noticed the thin winter light coming through the stands of oak and pine. Cars’ tires hissed past. Snow remained here and there in a few places. The approach from the north had been up a long grade, I noticed, and I imagined the party that carried the funeral bier being ready for a rest as they reached the crest of the rise.

     Yoco’s burial place in Montauk is lost to time as well, and lost most of all perhaps to the development that began in earnest on its sacred hills in the late 1920s. Even so, it is an astonishing tribute to the man that his people and their descendents maintained a memorial to him for almost two centuries.

   I’m not a big fan of heart-shaped jewelry. I find it juvenile, so I wasn’t too upset when a heart-linked gold bracelet my husband gave me one year for Valentine’s Day went missing while I was wearing it. I might wear my heart on my sleeve but never around my neck, on my wrist, or ring finger.

    As is my luck, a friend of my daughter’s found it about eight months later on a wooded path I used to get to the cliffs at Camp Hero in Montauk. It was a bit crushed but still wearable. Nonetheless, I threw it in my jewelry box along with the other odd bits of gold jewelry that I owned. Hearts, gold or silver, stay tucked away. If it’s a heart-shaped box filled with chocolate-covered nuts, it will also stay tucked away, hidden actually, so I can savor them whenever one of my frequent chocolate cravings kick in.

    Once the price of gold soared, I started looking at my trinkets in a whole new light, wondering what they may be worth if I sold them. Winter in Montauk will do that to you. Now, I’ve become obsessed and have started studying almost everything I touch for its resale value.

    Since the experts have said we need more green and black tea in our lives, I’ve started drinking diet Snapple. As I sip from the bottle, I learn a lot from the little tidbits of information inside the Snapple caps, but what I really think about is if the bottle will be worth money in 50 years.

    I’ve learned that brain waves can power an electric train, which might be useful to the people who live near the Montauk train station who complain about the constant hum of the idling engines, especially in the summer months. Imagine if they could use their brain waves to move the trains about 5,000 feet west? Ready, all together now, concentrate and move that annoying train.

    But I digress. My husband and I recently sold a signed piece of art that the artist had given to us for Christmas one year. The piece was buried in a book in the space under my bookshelves, with a bunch of assorted candles, surf magazines my son has been featured in, old VCR tapes, and books. We sold it for a few thousand dollars and later learned on the Internet that it was worth about 10 times more than that.

    It makes we wonder what else we can sell. (Yes, it’s that bad out here in Montauk in winter.) I look at everything now with dollar signs in my eyes. Will the glass bottle with the swan-like S engraved on it be worth thousands of dollars someday the way old glass Coke bottles are?

    My children wonder why I save so much and I blame it on my mother, who saved nothing. When I returned home to City Island in the Bronx for a visit after my first summer in Montauk, I found my bedroom stripped of everything I owned and was told it had all been thrown away. She also read my diary that was hidden under my mattress, but that’s another column!

    I had some really cool stuff from my hippie days that included long, granny dresses, John Lennon-style sunglasses, a fake fur coat that I wore with my long bell-bottom jeans and a long black cape. I would sell it all on eBay for a chunk of change if I still had it.

    I’ve never been a wheeler-dealer. I left that up to my brother, who attempted to sell my little blue sailboat right out from under me when we were teens. Her name was Bluegirl and even though I had no sails or proper rigging for it, my girlfriends and I would row it out on the water to sunbathe in. My mother stopped the sale, but Bluegirl was eventually lost in a storm.

    It always surprises me when I read in the paper that something sold for quite a bit of money, something that most of us would think useless. A painting that was purchased at a yard sale that sells for $10,000 is everyone’s dream. I have an old wall clock, floral metal trays bought from estate sales, and a complete set of Waverly novels that were written in the 1800s that I’m holding on to so they’re worth even more when I decide to sell.

    I am currently negotiating with a New York City dealer on a book owned by my sister that was written by Theodore Roosevelt and is autographed by him. It’s all about big game hunting, which he took great pleasure in. But it’s disturbing how he describes killing wild animals. I told my sister that if it sells I expect a commission or at the very least a dinner at Gosman’s restaurant when it opens.

    My recent sale of the artist’s piece and the price I saw it could have gone for has made me greedy and I’m saving even more stuff. My daughters really give me a hard time. “You never use it,” they claim, while telling me to throw out perfectly good stuff.

    What they don’t know is that my grandmother’s elaborately embossed punch bowl from Germany that I was lucky enough to receive after her death will one day be their inheritance. I think it’s worth a lot of money, but then again I’m eyeing Snapple bottles and crushed bracelets, so what do I know?

    If I decide to sell the punch bowl sooner, I’ll be moving to an island somewhere warm and will leave the house and all the junk in it to them. That will be their inheritance, and I’ll get even for the mean things they’ve said to me over the years.

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   Things were certainly simpler back in the days when it was good old Eames Taxi or bust. My husband and I had an experience on the weekend with a cabbie who acted like he was auditioning for the Robert De Niro part in “Taxi Driver.”

    There are so many cab companies in town these days that I don’t even know which one was involved. If I had paid attention to the service’s name or phone number, I might have complained, but I hadn’t and I didn’t. Instead, I thought, “I’ll write a column!”

    We were coming home from the city on Sunday night, post-blizzard. The Jitney had made good time, even though the bus had to use the Sunrise Highway a good part of the way, what with the Long Island Expressway still being littered with snowbound vehicles, and indeed being closed east of Exit 57. We pulled in smoothly at the Huntting Inn, five minutes before the scheduled arrival time. (Jitney drivers, in my book, generally deserve nothing but praise.)

    Normally, we would walk the extremely short distance from the Jitney stop to our house, but we were coming off four days in the city where my husband had recuperated from outpatient surgery. Each of us carried a tote bag, and I was dragging our bulky, heavy suitcase, in which we had consolidated our belongings. Our car, left in the Reutershan parking lot, was buried under a mountain of snow. Even though it’s only a five-minute stroll to our front door under normal circumstances, on this dark and icy night we had no choice but to get into a cab.

    If you keep up with the news in these parts, you know that the East Hampton Town Board has been trying to come up with an effective law for licensing taxis. After Sunday night’s misadventure, I am convinced some sort of more diligent oversight is indeed overdue.

    When someone approached us to offer his services as we stepped off the bus, I gladly said yes. He picked up my heavy suitcase and forged swiftly up Main Street to his vehicle, which was quite far away. I chased after him, maneuvering the patchy snow and ice, as Chris waited at the stop for us to come back and pick him up.

    The taxi driver was already in his seat when I made it to the van, and he didn’t look up as I awkwardly navigated my way up and around snow banks and struggled to pull open the heavy sliding door. When I said I couldn’t get the door closed again, he was forced to turn around and acknowledge my presence. We went to fetch Chris, who just managed to make it from the snowy curb to the car. As he opened the front passenger door, the driver told him to get in back.

    The driver knew where Edwards Lane was, but for whatever reason was reluctant to leave us in front of our house, instead wanting to go around to the back, which would have meant a considerably longer trudge through the mounds of snow. When we asked how much the fare was, he answered, “Eight dollars,” then quickly recanted, saying, “No, twelve.”

    Chris climbed out of the car first, and as I got out, the driver started to pull away. “The suitcase!” I shouted, banging on a window. So he got out, carried it around to where I was standing, and dumped it unceremoniously into about eight inches of snow.

    After pushing open the partially frozen front door and getting inside, we felt like we had been attacking the summit of K2 — on the back of an abused and resentful sherpa — not paying a premium for a short taxi ride.

    The morose, strange, and indeed even hostile behavior of the taxi driver toward two — let’s just say it — senior citizens on an slippery winter’s night was inexplicable. Unless, I thought, he was stoned. Or jonesing for a fix. Or possibly just too simpleminded to notice the struggles of others. (There is, of course, a third explanation: That the driver had simply had a long, hard weekend ferrying people through the storm, and he was overtired.)

    Whatever the case, I’m glad I’m not among those trying to decide how to write a local law to make sure that fees are fair and predictable, that taxi drivers are competent, and that they aren’t climbing behind the wheel while under the influence of some substance or other.

    But if I see that taxi driver again on a dark night, he should watch out, or I might go De Niro on him.

    You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?

   It is difficult to imagine that a building as substantial as the Montauk Bathing Casino, which once stood on the ocean beach, was gone within 30 years of its opening. The sprawling set of buildings and covered pavilions was part of Carl Fisher’s Montauk Beach Development Company’s grand plan to build a sparkling summer resort at the far eastern tip of Long Island.

    I recently stumbled across an advertising brochure the company put out in 1929 among some of The Star’s many old files. It described an elaborate facility with a 150-foot-long saltwater swimming pool, which overlooked a 1,600-foot-long boardwalk — wide enough for two cars to pass. What happened to the boardwalk and if it ever really was built to all of its promised length, I have not been able to discover, but photographs of the casino, or pavilion as it is sometimes described, show it was quite an attraction.

    Shaded cabanas lined the beach on the roughly seven-acre site, which was toward the east end of downtown Montauk. Behind the cabanas, in later photographs in our archives, you can see at least a second swimming pool and a sheltered sandy play area. An awning displays the place’s later name, the Surf Club. In a photograph, probably taken by the late Dave Edwardes, a couple sits pool-side in the afternoon sun, the woman gesturing, making a point perhaps, the man tilting his head as if he is but half-listening.

     In 1967 the site was the subject of an East Hampton Town Hall controversy over whether to allow multiple residences there. In an echo of today’s Montauk disputes, homeowners nearby feared that the development would harm their interests, even though town planners said that allowing the retail zoning to persist could result in more intense use of the parcel, with buildings up to four stories high.

    The final chapter for the Montauk Beach Casino came in August 1969, when it was razed by the Fire Department in a training exercise. It had been partially destroyed by fire the prior spring, and the then Montauk Improvement Corporation’s directors had decided to “make a complete job of it,” The Star reported.

When someone proposed at a recent meeting of The East Hampton Star’s editorial staff that I might like to write about my 28-year marriage, I said, somewhat derisively, “You’ve got to be kidding.” And everyone laughed.

Actually, I hadn’t heard what the subject was to be; it’s my generic response to anything that has to do with one of our supplements.

And now that I’ve sat down to think about it, and about what goes into a good marriage — what makes it work, as it were — I’m still dubious. I don’t know that you can deconstruct it, that you can speak of marriage as if it were a Lego set.

I know one thing, having been married twice: It’s a crapshoot. That you have succeeded the second time (I’ve read that most second-timers don’t) has a lot to do with luck, though experience teaches you what to want.

I don’t know. . . . There’s a certain way she smells, the way she feels, the warm curve of her neck, the way she looks, especially with her high, intelligent forehead and perfectly shaped nose in profile . . . her true blue eyes. . . . I could go on in this vein, but perhaps that’s enough, this being a family newspaper.

No, no, one more thing. We all think when we’re younger that “the excitement,” as Frank McCourt referred to it, is the be-all and end-all. And yes, of course it is delightful and mysterious — and thus, to my mind, not to be analyzed overmuch — but I tell you, those of you who might tend to doubt that old people can be lovers, there’s great delight in merely touching. There’s a thrill in just that.

And then there’s delight in just being with the one you love. That’s the mental part and, frankly, a very important part when you’re speaking of a love and friendship that lasts.

Of course, it’s not always bliss. There will be disconnections, misunderstandings, slights, pouting, and full-throated recriminations of Vesuvian proportions even among those who most hours of the day ride the same wave length. But the storms, whose origins often can be traced to the archipelagos of childhood, pass — if you want them to. And with perspective, you’ll probably laugh about them some day.

I have my late father and stepmother to thank for this next: that if you love someone you will let that person do what he or she wants to do. Constraint, whether overt or covert, will not further love’s course. Resentments will build and love will ultimately die. Reform is not the answer. Think of your spice (plural for spouse), let them be, and love will flower.

I wrote a poem about that early on in our marriage:

I know this about love

that you must always be willing to let it go

that it is delicate, like a bird,

who, if you are worthy,

will alight, and re-alight,

that it is a most wonderful

feeling

disarming, not expecting, commingling

alight and re-alight

we live from day to day

no longer hopeful, wistful, resigned

sure

yet surprised

who would have expected it?

we laugh about that, and many

other things

Which brings me to the most important thing: Laughter is the straw that stirs the drink, at least in our experience. Mirth is frequently my preferred response to the human condition, yet it can lighten and refresh the spirits of kindred souls.

And keep in mind, as Dante, who had a great love, said (it’s on my bulletin board): “How brief a blaze a woman’s love will yield if not relit by frequent touch and sight.”

I intend not to let that blaze go out.

And remember: If you want your marriage to have legs, keep on your toes.

—

In the Quakers’ Grove

In the winter of 1984, Jack Graves, who is The Star’s senior writer and editor by far, having joined the staff in October of 1967, and who had been a bachelor for six years following a divorce, met a new member of the production department at her typesetting machine. Her name was Mary Anderson — and the rest is history.

Mary was leery of an office romance. Besides, she thought his advances would cease once he learned that she had 4-year-old twins.

Nevertheless, he invited them all to dinner at a small house he had rented on Floyd Street. The twins trashed the place, but he didn’t care. She did, however, and duly admonished them, after which she said, “Thank God I don’t want to date him!”

Yet they remained friends through thick and thin throughout the following year, and, in the end, his invincible surmise proved true and love blossomed.

Jack and Mary married themselves at the Quakers’ grove on Shelter Island, in March, 1985, the twins, Johnna and Georgie, cooing “kiss the bride” as M & Ms — which served in place of communion wafers — dribbled down the sides of their grinning mouths. The late Shep Frood made it official in their back yard on August 22 of that year.

   Lulu, an old cat, is still resident in my late mother-in-law’s sunny house, and we’re dutifully paying calls to feed her, though Mary worries that she might be lonely.

    It was unlikely, said Jane Callan. Cats aren’t like people. “Their number one question is ‘Who’s feeding me?’ Number two is ‘Do I have a soft, warm place to lie on?’ You might be number three. If you see to their food and comfort, you might be privileged enough to be tolerated.”

    “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were like cats and didn’t give a damn about one another,” I said, tongue-in-cheek, to one of our daughters and her husband, who were to head back this afternoon to California following a brief visit.

    “Mary feels so much,” I said during our tender farewell. “She’s always saying she wants to be more like me, somewhat less attached. . . . I wish I were more like her. Anyway,” I said with a smile, “you can’t say you’ll not be happy to see blue skies again. And, even though I hate doing it, don’t forget to text.”

    When, later, I told our doctor, who had asked how Mary was faring following her mother’s death, that we’d had a large gathering at my brother-in-law’s house, “an Irish wake,” over the weekend, he said, “Ah, a celebratory thing. . . . That’s one thing the Irish got right.”

    My brother-in-law said at the gathering that his mother and he had spent a lot of time together in cars when he was a kid — traveling back and forth in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” fashion between the coasts. Thus, at 9, he was pressed into duty as his mother’s navigator — foreshadowing his later career as co-owner of a metropolitan area delivery service.

    “I was her navigator,” he said. “And,” he added — speaking for himself, for his siblings, and for others in the room — “she was my compass.”

   I’m a little tired of this — propping up the economy every year when it comes to Christmastime. I read in the papers where we must keep spending to keep ourselves out of yet another recession, and I’m doing my part, but it’s becoming burdensome. I can’t do it all alone.

    “Never again should we take a vacation early in December,” Mary said on our return recently from a week in Palm Springs. She was talking about walking underdressed into winter, and, initially, I’ll admit, it was a shock to go all of a sudden from the 70s and 80s to the 40s and 30s, but we’re acclimated now. In fact, I’d say it’s almost balmy as of this writing.

    While her thoughts were weather-related during that dawn takeoff — the only time during our stay I’d seen the burnt radiance of the desert sunrise over the backlit mountains, as compelling, by the way, as our sunsets at Three Mile Harbor — mine tended toward the agony of the holiday that awaited. Christmas will be upon us with all the vengeance of Superstorm Sandy, I thought.

    We had for a week somehow sluffed off the weight of obligations, and it had been wonderful. But, on our return, as I said, Christmas in all its enormity loomed.

    The Rubicon has been long crossed, nothing can be done. “Don’t, whatever you do, feel obligated in any way whatsoever,” we say to each other — out of a sense of obligation, before being tossed about once again by the season’s storm surge of social, economic, and psychic imperatives.

    Yet, once it’s all over, boredom and ennui, wonderful boredom and ennui, ensue — at least until Memorial Day, by which time, I hope, our credit card gods — and yours too, I say, with hearty good cheer — are fully appeased.

    Boredom and ennui . . . ah, the true tidings of comfort and joy.

   About a week ago, a small parcel, postmarked San Juan, Puerto Rico, arrived at the office. Inside, cushioned against breaking, was an old glass bottle of the sort that might have once contained a soft drink.

    The legend, “J. D’Amico Quality Bottler,” in raised letters, appeared on one side, and “Amagansett, N.Y.” on the other. Vertical ribs made it reflect light in a colorful way. In the hand, its tapered midsection was vaguely reminiscent of the classic Mae West Coca-Cola bottle. The raised letters at bottom said it once contained seven fluid ounces.

    Rolled and tucked into its narrow neck was the following note, dated Jan. 2:

    “Hey Man!”

    “Found this bottle wedged in between two rocks on a beach in Belize. I’m traveling the Caribbean, photographing hotels and wealthy families on vacation. I am in P.R. now, on my way to Anguilla. Running out of paper so I’ll drop you a line when I return to N.Y.C. All my best! Chris. P.S.: Happy new year.”

    Chris, who sent me the bottle, is Chris Manis, a friend who is singularly the most adept finder of things I have ever known. Back in the 1990s, when I lived in the city, he was continually picking up loose cash from the sidewalk, a dropped earring, some interesting tool, or piece of furniture left in the trash. I asked him what his secret was. “I never look up,” he said.

    According to Carleton Kelsey’s “Amagansett: A Pictorial History, 1680-1940,” Joseph D’Amico ran a barbershop and ice cream parlor on the north side of Amagansett Main Street in the early part of the 20th century. An advertisement in a 1910 issue of this newspaper for the J. D’Amico Tonsorial Parlor noted that he stocked cigars, and canary birds and cages.

    Later, in 1932, an immigrant from Sicily, Salvatore LaCarrubba, bought the building, which had once been occupied by the Life-Saving Service, and opened a shoemaking and repair business. A few months later, LaCarrubba’s began selling clothes. From my cursory reading, I did not find out what became of Mr. D’Amico.

    It is difficult to imagine by what circumstances a bottle that may well have first been sold in an Amagansett shop ended up on a beach in Belize, some 1,800 miles away in a straight line. In those days, there was still a vigorous coastal trade, so it is possible that, after being carried to New England, it accompanied a shipment of salt cod or some other commodity on a long voyage south. Doubt I’ll ever know for sure.

   Let’s hear it for the Springs School’s fourth-grade opera, “Cat Tales” — or  “Ton of Fun 61 Opera” —  which was performed four times at Guild Hall this month. Imagine, 61 kids divided into small groups, writing a libretto, composing music, building sets and doing lighting, working on makeup, sewing costumes, and handling promotion. I’ve been to lots of kids’  productions over the years, including some directed by theater professionals, and you can take it from me: This was extraordinary.

    “Cat Tales” was the 16th annual adventure in opera at the Springs School. The genesis was a Metropolitan Opera Guild program for elementary school teachers. Sue Ellen O’Connor, Springs’s academic enrichment faculty member,  who has been coordinating the productions from the start, said Springs had expanded and refined the program over time. Ms. O’Connor supervises the writing, Margaret Thompson, the school’s music teacher, helps students experiment with sounds and melodies, and Kyril Bromley, a professional musician, puts the music and words together and gives the songs their finishing touches. They have been at it for years.

    The story line this year was familiar. One cat, Max, played by Brody Eggert, wants to play, but the others aren’t interested until . . . well, the opera has a happy ending. Ms. O’Connor said the program generates a lot of interest among students, with some waiting to emulate their older siblings. Third graders fill out preliminary applications for what they might like to do, and the project gets going at the beginning of the next school year with auditions for those interested in being in the cast. 

    Eleven cats had title roles in “Cat Tales,” with another 11 in the chorus. Their costumes were perfect. The kids drew them first and then were helped by parents at the sewing machines. Mr. Bromley said he likes to work with three or four students at a time rather than a batch of  fidgety 9-year-olds.  And, while fourth grade sounds awfully young for what is involved, he finds them less self-conscious than students in higher grades. They come up with “oddball, multiple ideas.”

    Adults assist, but the kids originate everything. To this listener, some of the outstanding songs (and there were 16 of them!) and some of the dialogue would have made adult writers and composers proud. I was particularly impressed by the message and melody of one of the songs, “When Does Later Come?,” and by the patter in “Whisker Twisters,” for twin cats. The cat twins were played by real ones, Caleb and Colin Wright, one of whom wrote the words, the other the music. (Evan Mendelman stood in at the last minute for the last performance when one of the twins took ill.)

    Ms. O’Connor believes that the operas have raised the bar on what students believe they can accomplish, and that therefore they help contribute to academic achievement and even test scores. “It’s empowerment,” she said.

    I am amused by the fact that three operas were on Guild Hall’s schedule this month in as many weeks. “Cat Tales”  was sandwiched between “Les Troyens”  by Berlioz and Donizetti’s  “Maria Stuarda”  in HD performances from the Met.

    Who knows? Perhaps someone who got his or her start as a Springs School performer will make it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera some day.