Last week, when I was writing about the poignant story of Yoco Unkenchie’s final journey from Shelter Island to his Montauk burying ground, and the spot between Sag Harbor and East Hampton where his funeral bier was briefly laid, I thought how sad it was that knowledge of where his body was finally placed had been long lost.

    It is said that Gravesend Avenue in Montauk is so called because of the number of Native American burials encountered there by workmen in the 1920s. That may well be apocryphal; when the Montauk Development Company laid out roads in the hamlet, they grouped them by letter of the alphabet without much ado about local references. Then there also is a question of whether the burial ground of the time is really on the east side of Lake Montauk in the place known as Indian Field.

    The poet Walt Whitman, writing in an 1861 edition of the Brooklyn Standard, had this to say about Montauk: “It was the sacred burial place of the east Long Island Indians — their Mecca . . . Wyandance lived there. The remains of the rude citadel occupied by this chieftain are yet to be seen, surrounded by the innumerable Indian grave hollows. It was called Duan-no-to-wouk.”

    Wyandance, or Wyandanch, was a younger brother of Yoco Unkenchie, also known as Poggatacut, whom he succeeded as leader of the eastern Long Island tribes in 1653. Wyandanch was allied with Lion Gardiner, of the island that bears his name, and he granted Gardiner what is today Smithtown at a time of conflict between the Montauketts and Naragansetts. Wyandanch’s dealings with the settlers and other native tribes is described in detail by John A. Strong in the collection “Northeastern Indian Lives.”

    My grandmother Jeannette Edwards Rattray in her book “Montauk: Three Centuries of Romance, Sport, and Adventure” wrote: “Most graves in Indian Field cemetery are marked only by rough field stones, set in circles deep in the tangled grass. . . .”

    Between Fort Hill, where the Montauketts built a palisade redoubt 180 feet square, and Signal Hill, the site of the Montauk Manor, is Council Rock, where, the story goes, the tribe met for meetings. Wyandanch died in 1659, the victim of poison, Gardiner said.

    Wyandanch had lived his last years in North Neck, on the high ground on the west side of the lake, overlooking Fort Pond, according to a 1651 reference. This observation from the time leads me to imagine that both he and his brother were buried there, and not in Indian Field.

    The precise location of Wyandanch’s “citadel,” as Whitman put it, and his resting place are gone to time, as is his brother’s. Little remains to remember these men, who tried to navigate two worlds: their own and the Europeans’.

   Do people who live in hot climates get into the concept of comfort food, as we do here where winters can be harsh? In my mind, comfort food should be warm, and generally also soft, sticking to the ribs —  with a spoonful of nostalgia stirred in, of course. With temperatures having been unexpectedly low recently, I’ve found myself keeping warm over the stove.

    Enter therefore quiche. I was a little embarrassed to realize that my almost-12-year-old grandson had become proficient at making a dish that I have always been hesitant to attempt. But I didn’t admit to him that I was a novice when, one recent afternoon, the pantry and refrigerator were almost empty — but for some eggs and a pre-made pie shell.

    The truth is, I love cookbooks, although it must be said that I read them more for entertainment than to follow directions. The quiche recipes I perused called for things I didn’t have on hand (ham and gruyere, for example), and I didn’t fancy a trip to the grocery store over slick roads. But the fine print suggested using whatever was on hand, so instead of announcing we had nothing for dinner that night, I made a quiche with a sauteed mix of onions, green pepper, and mushrooms, along with a goat-cheese filling. It was easy. Never fear the quiche!

    On another frigid day, I found myself cozily reading “At Oma’s Table,” a Jewish-cookery book by Doris Schechter — a friend of a friend — when a recipe for  Flanken With Vegetables caught my eye. It called for short ribs, turnips, parsnips, and a new jar of Gold’s horseradish. I went a bit overboard at the market on the vegetables and wound up with a huge amount of stock in addition to dinner for four. Those who shared the meal thought it a little bland, but, nostalgia being what it is, I liked it a lot.

    (Anyway, if you ask me, “slightly bland” is practically a requirement of the best comfort dishes. How else would you characterize the dense, stodgy, classic mac and cheese, or mashed potatoes — which, by popular acclaim, are the ultimate American comfort foods?)

    The vast quantity of beef-vegetable broth leftover from the flanken presented something of a challenge. After pondering the variables, I put most of it to work as the base of the best lentil soup I ever made . . . with a little help from Mollie Katzen’s original “Moosewood Cookbook.” In addition to the starchy favorites mentioned above, soup — glorious, hot soup — is a standby for winter comfort. Where would we all be without chicken noodle?

    There is one old-time, local comfort food, however, that I am long overdue to make again: samp, the hulled and dried kernels of corn that were a once-upon-a-time staple of the East End diet. I never made it the old-fashioned way, as a porridge served with milk, but many years ago developed a recipe that called for the broth that results when you braise a ham, French-style. Perhaps if the weather stays nasty into February, we’ll have samp for Valentine’s Day. Not terribly romantic, I admit. But heartwarming? Yes.

   The logo of an angry, two-fisted bee on the padded wall beneath the basket was a nice surprise. It put me in mind of the pugilistic hornet on the screw tops of Mickey’s Big Mouth malt liquor, one of which I’d last drained not long after I’d last set foot in the Bridgehampton School — graduation day, 1985.

    I’m speaking here of the Killer Bees basketball game last week against Smithtown Christian. I was there with my boy, Griffin, to introduce him to the joys of high school basketball. I’ve got to say, I could’ve done without the two-cop police presence, but that’s the world we’ve made, isn’t it?

    Griffin had just completed a few weeks of Hampton Youth Athletic League hoops sessions in Westhampton Beach. (Another sign of the times — kids get trophies just for showing up.) He dribbles pretty well, so I have hopes he’ll keep at it. He’s in only the second grade, however, and on this night he was a bit more interested in a can of lemonade from the vending machine in the corridor.

    Next to that vending machine stood another reason I’d brought him: a towering display case of Bridgies memorabilia, going back at least to Carl Yastrzemski. I’d hoped in vain that a plaque from the 1983-84 state championship team, or one from the following season’s almost-champs, might be propped up inside, adorned with a picture showing one pale benchwarmer’s face staring out — mine, as I posed with my hands clasped behind my back, trying to look tough.

    This fall I joked to a soccer mom how my riding the pine afforded me the best seat in the house for those title runs. The point of the exchange had something to do with how certain kids freeze up in the spotlight. Like me. Like a couple of the Smithtown Christian guys who obviously didn’t want the ball. I came to enjoy and look forward to practices, to the point of overhearing the coach at the time, John Niles, enthuse about the progress I’d made. But put me in at garbage time with all those eyes on me . . . it was enough to induce a Jim Eisenreich twitch.

    That progress was lost, by the way, when I declined to play summer ball in ’84 in favor of pursuing my version of Dick Cheney’s “other priorities” — doing absolutely nothing.

    So, what’s it like to set foot in your old school after 28 years? It’s like that Alfred Hitchcock innovation in which the camera zooms in on something or someone while simultaneously pulling back. Time compresses even as the past recedes.

    The school building itself, one imposing brick pile when seen from the street, inside now seemed almost cramped. (To say nothing of that rabbit box of a gym, with the sides of its 3-point arcs crossing over into out-of-bounds.) At the same time, it’s positively unchanged, heavy on the stone and impossibly solid. When that day comes when demographic changes and a shriveled tax base lead to the consolidation of all the schools around here, to take down Bridgehampton’s will require a bunker-buster bomb just for starters.

    I can’t say I saw anyone I knew in the bleachers, though that might have been different if the opponent had been the rival Pierson Whalers, always a hot ticket, instead of Smithtown Christian’s lovable rogues’ gallery of cellar-dwellers.

    The game? High school basketball is barely contained chaos. That was eye-opening and struck me as possibly a newish phenomenon. Each drive to the hoop was executed by a player not really in control of what he was doing, even when he scored. It was close for a while in the first quarter, but the Bees’ pressing D and balanced attack made it a laugher before long. (I know, I know, this hasn’t been the best season for them; the evening’s highlight was in fact the national anthem sung by the Bridgies cheerleaders in four-part harmony.)

    As for Griffin, the more I think about it, the more I think it’ll be okay if the only sport he takes a shine to involves chasing a little white ball around an overmanicured green. Just as long as there’s one sport he’s into. I’m not worried; he’s all of 7 and already a better person than I am — diligent, thoughtful, considerate. Who knows where such attributes come from? If not his mother, maybe the good Lord.

    Of course, as the Bees’ coach, Carl Johnson, would no doubt tell you, the good Lord’s got nothing to do with how hard you crash the boards.

   Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

   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.

   The very first attempt I made at  journalistic writing was a fictional obituary as an academic exercise in an evening course at the Columbia School of Journalism. It never occurred to me at the time that I would go on to write and edit hundreds (and hundreds) of them.

    Not long afterward, I married into the Star family and began writing obituaries for real. Ev Rattray, whom I met at the journalism school and who had come home to edit the paper, set the standard: Obituaries were not to be written by rote, and they were to celebrate the life of those who died.

    At first, I found calling grieving family members very trying — believe me, it’s not easy to pick up that phone and attempt to ask questions with sympathy and sensitivity — but I soon learned that many were often, if not exactly pleased,  at least somewhat relieved to talk about their loss.

    As I have gotten older, I must admit, I’ve found myself handling far too many obituaries for contemporaries, for people I knew well, but it always remains gratifying to find something significant to add, whether it is a small, telling detail that illuminates character or a notable accomplishment that reminds the reader of just how much was lost. This has become harder to do as the community has grown, but we try.

    This week I found myself editing an obituary about a 90-year-old man I had never met. His family had given us material about his remarkable professional life. They had little to say about his long connection with this community, however, so I took the time to find out and to add something to what they had given us. I hope they will be satisfied with the result.

    Overfamiliarity with these matters comes at a certain peril, sometimes. A man I know told me something a week or so ago about his wife that was quite wonderful but little known. Because I spend a lot of time working on and thinking about obituaries, I blurted out — with an embarrassing lack of mindfulness — that I was going to write down what he had said and make sure it got in our archives so that it wouldn’t be forgotten when it came time to write her obituary. Naturally, he was quite taken aback, so I quickly added, “Thirty years from now, of course!” Oh, dear.

    I managed to check my tongue before I got around to injecting my plans for my own obituary into the conversation. Although I intend to be around a long, long time before anyone else has to think about it, I’ve had plenty of professional hours to ponder it. Ev Rattray, who was 47 when he died, had written his own obituary in anticipation of his final out. I think I will make it a family tradition.

I think of the 24 years since I moved full time to the South Fork as a coming home of sorts . . . the first one in 1993, the second one more recent.

Until I was 4½ I had lived in Paris, mainly with my mother and brother and various family friends. Then we came to New York and lived with my father above the most wonderful French bakery on Madison Avenue and 86th Street. My brother, David, and I enjoyed dropping water balloons on the heads of passers-by. I went to P.S. 6 for a year and hated it. My mother took David to the sculpture classes for children at the Museum of Modern Art. He produced amazing sculptures in clay. 

My parents also bought a house in Amagansett. I fell instantly, deeply in love with the house, the garden with the trees I could climb, the ocean, and the hamlet, and wanted to be there all the time. I never developed the feeling of being at home in the city as I did immediately in Amagansett, although when I was older I did ry to develop a small-town familiarity within whatever neighborhood I was living.

When my parents divorced — I was 6 and my brother 8 — I am sure the impact was softened by our being able to still have the house on Indian Wells Highway, the less fancy portion of it. My parents married other people and both, within several years, had divorced. 

I was too young to understand why we could not simply live on the South Fork all year. There was no way my single working mother, an editor and writer who often had to take jobs she did not like, could have made a living on the South Fork. I remember walking down Indian Wells Highway with her when I was about 9 and asking, “Why couldn’t life be simpler? Why couldn’t I marry a farmer and live here?” 

When I was 16 my father moved the Amagansett Coast Guard Station to a lot on Bluff Road, and I had a second home to go to and also to be at when my younger half sister was there. My parents stayed friends, an accommodation that was easier for my father than my mother.

In whatever bedroom I was sleeping in that was not in Amagansett, all the way through school and university, which included spending a year in France and also in Israel, I would put up on the walls photos taken in Amagansett of family and pets, also the color map that used to come inside the small phone book. I took with me special stones and shells from the beach. In Israel I lived for a while near a train track and the lovely whistle sound made me feel at home, comforted me. 

I came back from a year in England, having decided not to go to graduate school at Oxford, settled in the city, and still came out to both my parents’ houses as much as I could. My mother by that time had reconnected with a man she had been engaged to at 21 in wartime London. They married in 1976 and had a good partnership. While working in magazine and book publishing, and translating articles from French to English, I began running and racing, winning trips, money, and other prizes. And then, after a long relationship and marriage that produced a daughter, in the breakup I came back to Amagansett, where I had a support system of all my parents as well as other friends of theirs and mine.

I learned that The Star was looking for a proofreader. I got the job and, once my daughter had become more independent, I was able to work more hours, go to editorial meetings, and write a bit. Finally, I felt doubly at home, both because of living in Amagansett year round and also working with people who, like me and my whole family, were interested in all sorts of things, including animals, language, and communication. 

I did leave The Star for a while, went off on a kind of sabbatical to the East Hampton Historical Society, where I worked for a brilliant director who was, at heart, a curator. It was an opportunity too good to miss. Once there, I was embraced by a smaller family and also got to learn about East Hampton Town’s cultural, material, and art history. I still freelanced for The Star but missed the day-to-day proofreading and interaction. I began proofreading again part time at The Star and then, when the director decided to be the organization’s part-time curator, I was able to return to the paper. 

Although my mother’s family were among this country’s early settlers, somehow the generations had not stayed in those places, as many of those on the South Fork have. And even though I was unable to keep either Amagansett house and could no longer afford to live there, I live a stone’s throw away and can again hear the whistle of the L.I.R.R. and smell the ocean. My mother’s house was beautifully renovated by its buyer, not torn down, and we gave my father’s house to the town, which moved it back to its original footprint where it is a museum.

And so, dear reader, that is how I was able to return. Not only had I got my wish to live in the place I had yearned for my whole life, I also got to come back to my second home at The Star. 

Isabel Carmichael is a proofreader and writer at The Star. 

   In my mother-in-law’s house are two large black-and-white photos prominently displayed, of Secretariat with Ron Turcotte aboard, leaving their four 1973 Belmont Stakes competitors in the dust, 31 lengths behind, and of Jackie Robinson stealing home on Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford in the opening game of the 1955 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers.

    She’s had them there ever since I can remember, and they’ve become all the more important to me as I think of her who died at Southampton Hospital early this morning, leaving the four children who had held her hands the last few days, way behind.

    It’s not dying that hurts, it’s living, says Emily Dickinson.

    These children, one of whom is my wife, are the birds that stay. And her mother, who had said, unafraid, “it’s the end of the game” when told the morphine drip she’d wanted was on its way, has, after having danced off third, stolen home.

    Only one thing worried her about me, that I tended to hunch, foreshadowing, I suppose, for her a full-circle return to the fetal position. I’ve been mindful therefore in the past few days that I should keep my chin up and my shoulders back. “Don’t hunch,” I hear her voice saying in my head. “Don’t hunch.”

    And so, trying not to hunch, I walked into the milky lights of Herrick Park the other night, after the morphine came, and stepped out onto the chalked line and ran twice around.

    Though I knew she had been a militant atheist, I told her on heading back to the car that I was accepting her as my personal trainer.

    Emily Dickinson also said that time did not assuage — if you really loved the one behind the door — though I have a hunch that the loving are, indeed, assuaged . . . that Mary Kernell, with all her keen intelligence, wry humor, and abiding love, lives, and will always live, in the birds who (for the moment) stay, until the pitying snows persuade their feathers home.

    In the name of the Bee — And of the Butterfly — And of the Breeze — Amen.

   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.