Quote of the Day

"Oh, so your husband thinks he's a f---ing hero?"

- Timothy M. Clinch. Mr. Clinch had broken into a family home in Orange County, CA, armed with a samurai sword and (authorities suspect) high. When the lady of the house went downstairs to investigate a noise, Clinch threatened her with the sword and told her her husband was tied up in the living room - but he was in fact upstairs sleeping. Upon backing the woman into the living room, Clinch saw that there was no tied-up man there and, uttering the above quote, left the house to go look for him.

The woman locked the door behind him. The police were summoned and Clinch arrested.

Boo!

Headline: Ousted tenor blames low blood sugar.

Come on. We had a perfectly good - operatic, even! - melodrama going on: unruly audience, star storming off stage, stunned understudy thrust into the spotlight in his jeans. Perhaps he shouldn't have been dismissed from the cast, perhaps he should have - I really don't know the standards of professional opera or the perks of being a primadonna. (Primodon? Sounds like a large, hairy Ice Age beasty.)

Now it's starting to sound like a boringly American celebrity "scandal," with vaguely plausible medical conditions and threats of lawsuits being tossed about. If he wrote a poorly-spelled letter to go with this, he'd be Lindsey Lohan. It's the audience's fault for stressing him out, it's the conductor's fault for not stopping the show, it's the fault of all the insensitive people who didn't stop by his dressing room to see if he was all right. He's so upset, in fact, that he may never sing again.

Well, at least we got a little of the melodrama back. Only instead of sounding like a fiery, infuriated Italian opera star who waved his fist at the crowd, he sounds like a self-pitying adolescent. Boo!