I know everyone has probably already seen The Sheep Detectives, but if you have not, you should. It’s a sweet, gentle movie about sheep trauma. And … justice.

It’s a little distracting when one is compelled to work out the nearly-familiar famous actor’s voices with the sheep they play, so I would recommend scanning the cast list before you start.

Beef tallow is a conservative dog-whistle! Who knew?

One of the delights of our trip to England in 1994 was that the London MacDonald’s served Hot Apple pies deep fried in beef tallow, even after the U.S. McDonald’s had switched to pitiful smooth baked pies without the bubbly crust.

Everyone seemed to abandon tallow in the 90s. I remember being in the cafeteria at Big Barnes downtown in 1998 and listening to a doctor mourn that Burger King was the only place you could get tallow-fried french fries anymore. (He then said the requisite doctor-talk about moderation.)

Friday I told a friend that my weekend plans involved getting a retro Hot Apple Fried Pie into my face, and she said, “Do you know Steak and Shake went back to using beef tallow in 1995?”

I then adjusted my weekend plans to eat skinny fries and Hot Apple pies, free of shame.

First off: Hot Apple Pie. I don’t know if they used tallow but they did get the crust just as it ever was. I ate it the way that was literally BURNED into my memory: remove the top edge, eat that gingerly, blow onto the filling until a bit of it looked edible, proceed.

The Steak and Shake tallow fries tasted exactly like they always have. Pre-tallow or post-tallow, I can’t tell the difference. They did make me smile with their advertising send-up of the Chik-Fil-A ads with the cows imploring us to “Eat Mor Chikin.”

And now I find to my dismay all this return to tallow is due to RFK Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again campaign. Evidently seed oils are “woke” and tallow is good and it all supposedly hearkens back to when America was “Great.”

I was there. Not Great … Gays couldn’t get jobs, I couldn’t rent a chainsaw, rest of society was awful … EXCEPT FOR THE HOT APPLE PIES. They were, and are, briefly, great again.

I find myself again in the triple-witching month when the six-month doctor’s visits coincide with the yearly doctor’s visits and I see multiple specialists in a short period of time. It’s worse if I count in Gary’s doctor visits.

Wednesday was a double-visit day. The dentist let me know my teeth were not perfectly straight, even though I had followed all the rules and achieved the goal alignment, so it will be another month of plastinated teeth for me. (Unjust, i say. Just unjust.)

From the dentist, then, to the dermatologist. The dermatologist – like next month’s ophthalmologist – is to be sure the MS medication is not causing side effects. So I trudged into the medical building where a woman joined me in the elevator.

”Seven please,” she said, and then, “Oh you’re already going there.”

I noticed on 7 that she checked the sign pointing to suite 710 and headed that direction, and when I felt myself doing precisely the same thing I called ahead to her, “Don’t tell me you’re going to 710.”

She slowly pivoted and faced me with such mock horror and amusement that I thought, this woman’s fun. So for the next ten minutes we sat in the waiting room of 710 and cross-checked birthdates, names, cities, occupations, just to be sure we weren’t actually the same person.

Her hair and my wig matched enough that we thought we might end up with each other’s procedures, but thankfully, she had a tattoo.

When my name was called, I told her if there was any identity theft in the next few weeks she’d be the prime suspect, and she essentially said, right back at you.

It was just fun, playing with a stranger. You don’t always know what you’ll get when you talk to people you don’t know.

I have been fascinated by the hospital secret codes since my Grandmother told me about them when I was ten.

I’ve been in two of them. For my first stay at the hospital we had a Code Green on the neurology floor (a patient got out of bed and was staggering into other people’s rooms ), and then I also was at a hospital during a Code Amber. I never got the details on this; it just occurred while I was waiting for a mammogram. I kept my eye out but I saw no abducted children.

That list was posted at the dermatology office. The darling children’s board book below was at the opera.

There was a page for “Masks” with cute drawings of masks.

“No page for murder?” Anne asked. “Banishment? No Poison page?”

This is a British show about the Mitford sisters. These siblings were in part known for their spouses or cousins (Guinness, Churchill, Duke of Devonshire), and in part known for their politics (Communist, Nazi, Fascist), and then for their novels and autobiographies.

There are seven of them. They look distinctive, thank God. It’s not like The Thin Man, where every man is slender with dark hair and a thin moustache.

But … it’s seven names to keep straight. And then, and I am serious, seven nicknames like Decca and Bobo and I don’t know, Chowd or some nonsense. And then TWO OF THEM call each other “Baud.”

I am half done, and those nicknames better be a plot point otherwise I don’t know why they were included. I had to make a Rosetta Stone to keep track of who had what political bent, who they were sleeping with, plus hair color, name, and nickname. Even still, I keep clicking the supplemental streaming icon that tells me who plays who in this scene.

I’m wearing that icon out anyway because Star City has two main female characters, both soft-bodied with soft brown hair, and they both sleep with two similar blond men. It’s possible it’s the same man. I can’t keep them straight either.

Consider your audience, Britbox and Apple TV. Start applying fake moles or glasses or name tags.

I’ve got your TL;DR here for you right here: we left at intermission.

Why, you ask?

• The music was unpleasant. Picture Wagnerian opera sopranos singing discordant meandering jazz.
• And it was all sung, every word, full-throated, operatically, even lines like, “Stella, get me a beer.”
• The question you want answered: Stanley half-yells and half-sings “STELLLAHHHH.”
• The subject matter for Streetcar Named Desire was very toothy for a movie in the fifties, but not toothy enough for an opera — at least not a 2.5-hour-long opera.
  • Well, there was one part that wasn’t toothless. You may not know that Blanche catches her young husband with a man, she says he disgusts her, and he kills himself. They took that out of the movie. That was toothy.
• I’m sure it is hard to project vulnerability when you also have to literally project. Vivien Leigh could whisper her lines and look haunted, while Opera Blanche had to sing her lines to the back row.
• Blanche covers the light bulb with the Japanese lantern to soften the light, and that’s just a fire hazard.

So, Anne and I discussed it at the intermission and we agreed we were not keen on seeing the next act when Stanley rapes Blanche, especially given there’d already been a really explicit thrusting sex scene with Stella. Plus, I didn’t want to see him gaslight Blanche. And, really, I just didn’t want to see him, period. I hate to say it, Marlon Brando made Stanley less of an ass just by being so handsome, somehow.

So we left, and when Anne got out of the car she said, “You know, we can’t be sure how it ends. Maybe they re-wrote it like they did Cosi Fan Tutti. Maybe Mitch and Blanche get married and Stella kicks Stanley to the curb. Let’s just believe that.”

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A postscript: Andre Previn wrote this opera. He wrote two operas. Guess what other movie he turned into an opera. Guess.

Yiiiiissssss. My favorite movie, Brief Encounter. Kill me now, for I am compelled to find that on YouTube. Does little Margaret sing “My birthday’s in June and they don’t have pantomimes in June?” Because she would have to sing it in the same monotone she uses in the movie.

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Updated: Margaret and Bobby, the best part of the movie, are not in the Andre Previn Brief Encounter opera. Even so, I preferred it to Streetcar. He wrote it years after and it’s more dreamy, less strident, and the lyrics pull some weight. They put words to what’s behind Alec and Fred’s eyes.