Leon will arrive in Prague today, and he and I will take the night train to Krakow Thursday night. Caroline and Jirka will not be joining us, because Caroline is very sick with a kidney infection. She has taken the entire week off from work so she can rest--doctor's orders.

I spent most of yesterday with her, lying in her big bed and watching movies, including Titanic. Two of her roommates just graduated from film school and we just knew that one of them was going to walk in on us while Rose was "flying!" or we were belting out "My Heart Will Go On" over the end credits. Thankfully we were spared, but it would've felt like getting caught looking at porn.

Earlier, we were watching Hello, Dolly! and Asger wandered in to watch Barnaby, Cornelius, et al. put on their Sunday clothes in all their Technicolor glory. He's far too polite to cast judgment but it was easy to see that he was incredibly amused.

We may have earned back some of our film cred, though, by watching Hedwig and the Angry Inch with him. Maybe.

Anyway, I really hope that Leon has a good time while he's visiting. I'm actually quite nervous about showing him around. I really want him to like Prague as much as I do, and I want him to have a better understanding of me because of it. At the very least, I hope we can navigate through the sea of other tourists easily and painlessly. After spending a day in Old Town last week, I know that will be an incredible challenge.

Jirka's dad is a curator in Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts, and he's responsible for a room filled with clocks and music boxes. When Caroline's mom was here last month, he let us into the museum for free and gave us a tour, including the storage room where their extensive collection of clocks not currently on display is kept and a garden that was not yet open to the public.

But the coolest thing was that he unlocked one of the cases in the room of clocks and, with a white-gloved hand, wound two music boxes from the first quarter of the 18th century.

One music box was a bird inside a cage, and the bird turned its head and moved its beak and tail while making very realistic sounding chirping noises.

The second music box was a fiddle-playing monkey that moved its bow-wielding arm over the violin and bobbed its head so enthusiastically that I feared it might fall off.

But it was so cool and such a privilege that this still remains one of my favorite experiences in Prague. Seriously. It probably helps that an instrument-playing monkey music box reminded me more than a little of The Phantom of the Opera, since I am a huge musical theater dork.



One more clock that happened to catch my eye:

I talked to my dad on the phone this weekend, and he informed me that my high school is going to put on a production of Les Miserables this summer. I almost have no words. Almost.

The truth is, I can't wait to hear the reaction to this show, which features gyrating prostitutes and half a dozen references to erections, from a town that picketed the opening weekend of Showgirls. 16-year-olds humping other 16-year-olds on stage? Fabulous.

Of course, this will be cut out. Fantine will probably sell her hair and then die in bed. But it's her prostitution that leads to Jean Valjean lifting the cart and eventually revealing his identity, so, really, I can't wait to hear how QHS rewrites this plot. They'll probably work in tap dancing.

I went to my share of high school musicals when I was younger, and what is usually the most painful part is that there are only two or three good singers in any given production. Les Miserables demands about a dozen of them. And two of them need to be under the age of ten. Even the touring companies seem to have trouble finding exceptional children. I don't suspect that there are any of immense talent just sitting around in Quincy, Illinois.

Can you tell that I'm annoyed by this? What you probably don't know about me is that I was in love with Les Mis from the time that I was 11 until I was maybe 15. I escaped into the melodramatic and frequently fanciful world of Broadway show tunes when I was a teenager, because I was depressed and unhappy in my own life. I had Stephen Sondheim to make me feel poignant, Claude-Michel Schonberg to make me feel bigger than I was, Kander & Ebb to make me feel clever, and Andrew Lloyd Webber to underscore it all with something soaring and significant.

But so much of my unhappiness stemmed from my life at school, which was the totality of my life when I was 12 and 13. And so seeing Les Miserables joined together with the establishment that drove me to listen to such desperate and pathetic anthems to rid myself of angst is like putting together two puzzle pieces that simply do not fit. It will be a travesty, a tragedy, a disaster, and a wonderful spectacle. I wish I could see it for myself.