DOG DAYS

posted by James Reel

    I've been absent from the air for the past two days because I indulged in Lasik surgery yesterday, which, aside from a recovery period when it felt like I was chopping onions for two hours straight, has gone quite well, thank you. Anyway, yesterday I neglected to post a link to my latest contribution to the Tucson Weekly, which begins:

    The dog days of summer arrive early this year, as Arizona Onstage Productions presents a July run of the musical Bark! It's a family-friendly but not childish show in which all the characters are dogs. No, not real dogs--you can hear that on a notorious old Sinatra record--but people singing life stories from the canine point of view.
    Think of it as composer David Troy Francis' way of lifting his leg on Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats.

    You can find the full article here. I use the term "dog days" as a joke, by the way. Recently, I've seen many references to the "dog days of summer" as if the period were synonymous with all of summer. It isn't. One dictionary definition tells us that the dog days are the "hot, sultry period between mid-July and September," and some sources would limit them to August. The term is a translation of the Latin canis caniculares, referring to the time when the Dog Star (Sirius, not XM) rises with the sun.