Two evenings

Last night Andre Watts at the Baltimore Symphony and tonight the Washington DC Nationals at their brand new ballpark -- Nationals Park. Finally. A team that's named their park after something related to the sport instead of selling naming rights. Wonder how long that will last.

Last night as I left for the symphony I discovered they've ripped up the rest of Loch Raven Blvd. -- the middle part. But still the awful pock marked, rippled, war-zone like pavement between 33rd and Gorsuch remains.

I love Andre Watts. I saw him 40 years ago in Reading, PA. He was a young, thin-as-a-rail, up and coming pianist. He'd been introduced by Leonard Bernstein on a Young People's Concert and my parents took me to see him. I remember shaking his hand out in the vestibule after the concert was over. Years later, I try to see him whenever he comes to Baltimore. Now he's like a teddy bear -- not fat, but a larger man with a dynamic, warming smile. He envelops you with his presence. He still shakes people's hands, so unusual for a pianist. When he clasps your hand you are swallowed up in his joy in the world. When he plays his hands dance over the keyboard like centipede legs -- faster than the eye can follow. His lips synch the notes so they're moving as fast as his fingers. At the end of a run his hands are propelled off the keyboard as if by an opposite magnetic field, flying off the keys turning upward as they move through the air.