Oh, what can we say? It's perfect. Perfect! The Peanuts gang shows us every possible way to screw up the holiday: Snoopy decorates his dog house like it's Atlantic City; Sally asks Santa to send cash money; Charlie Brown, that blockhead, mopes, sulks, overanalyzes, expects too much, and then settles on a terrible crappy little tree simply to test the Christian patience of everybody else. Thank God for Linus, who recites the relevant passages of the Gospel of Luke from memory, who wraps us all up in a blanket of good will, who can make animated characters and human viewers alike cry and cheer. It's what secularists have on Christmas Eve instead of church. [ABC, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: Ace In The Hole

There are some out there who believe 1951's Ace In The Hole is Billy Wilder's masterpiece—they're wrong, of course, because The Apartment exists, and Sunset Boulevard. Nonetheless, this is a foul, sad piece of work, and maybe the most misanthropic movie ever made. Kirk Douglas stars as the down-on-his-luck reporter lucky enough to stumble upon the dream front page subject: a man trapped under a rock slide but still awake and circulatory enough to give interviews. Around the cave entrance, rubberneckers, first responders, well-wishers, misery tourists and a sloppy-seconds press corps all gather in expectation of an unhappy ending, which turns out much unhappier than you think. [TCM, 9:30 a.m.]

Wednesday: Leverage

We're related to one of the writers, so consider our recommendation corrupt. Regardless, we have a tremendous weakness for any show or movie where a group of grifters operate with the elegance and efficiency of an Olympic relay team. Timothy Hutton is too saggy, shaggy and self-serious to be our Danny Ocean, but his supporting cast is a nerd summit: Gina Bellman was the sexpot in Coupling and the schizophrenic-loving wife in Jekyll; Christian Kane was the bad lawyer on Angel; Aldis Hodge guested as q.b. Voodoo on Friday Night Lights; and Beth Riesgraf you might know as Jason Lee's wife and the mother of their child, Pilot Inspektor. Their geek résumés somehow lend them more credibility as smarter-than-thou con artists. [TNT, 12 a.m.]

Thursday: The Thing

Here's the only thing you really need to know about this John Carpenter–directed remake of Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World; Kurt Russell has a flamethrower, and he kills aliens with it. [SciFi, 7 p.m.]

Friday: Frosty the Snowman

We can't be positive that CBS is going to show our favorite version of this other Christmas classic (after all, the network is airing something called "Frosty Returns" right after). But, we're optimistic—it's Christmas after all! And nothing reminds us of being kids quite like crude, jerky animation and ominous narration. You know the song, so we won't tell you what happens. And yes, it might make you cry. [CBS, 8 p.m.]

And that’s what David Michaelis does in Schulz and Peanuts. Charles Schulz, who drew Peanuts for more than 50 years, turns out to be a fascinating, demented mass of contradictions. He wasn’t just a grandfatherly, kindly, smiley person who wore expensive checkerboard sweaters on Charlie Rose—although he was that. He was also a brilliant self-hating near-genius who was consumed with the desire to be in everyone’s consciousness simultaneously. “I’m torn,” he said, “between being the best artistically and being the Number One strip commercially.”

Even after he had made a huge fortune by using his characters to promote Ford Falcons, Brownie Cameras, sheets, towels, lunchboxes and plush toys, he craved wider coverage. During the Vietnam War, he gave the military permission to use Snoopy on sidewinder missiles. He was intensely jealous of any cartoonist who syndication numbers began to rival his own—Garfield’s Jim Davis, for example. He needed all of humanity to be sitting there with him at the drawing board every day, musing over the adventures of Snoopy and his group of tiny-bodied children with big round heads. He was willing to draw these same minimalist, round-headed people thousands of times—tens of thousands of times—decade after decade. If he didn’t draw them, he once said, he would be dead. He was more than a little crazy.

As Mr. Michaelis’ biography brilliantly shows, Schulz sometimes used Peanuts to allegorize and make sense of his secret life. After an affair in his 50’s with a woman of 25, Schulz had Snoopy say, “Can a person really be in love with two different snowflakes at the same time?” Schulz’s wife, Joyce, was, by many accounts, a difficult woman—belittling and bossy in ways that resembled Lucy in the comic strip. She built an ice arena, and managed the Peanuts Visitor’s Center. She and Schulz squabbled a lot.

The affair happened this way: One day a young businesswoman named Tracey came to visit. Tracey was flirtatiously admiring of the crew-cutted, professorial Schulz, and Schulz was very taken with her gold-green eyes and her perfect little nose. They skated together and had a snack at the Warm Puppy, the restaurant at the Peanuts ice rink, and eventually they had an affair. Schulz was a “red-blooded American man,” she said later. He wrote her letters extolling the greenness of her eyes and the perfect shape of her nose. But he didn’t leave Joyce.

Eventually Tracey got tired of waiting. She had other suitors. Schulz wrote her more letters about her eyes and her nose, but Tracey, by then, knew that Schulz wasn’t the people-loving Will Rogers she had thought he was—that he was in fact massively egocentric and impossible to make happy and that she really couldn’t spend her life with him. He proposed to her as they sat in a restaurant by the water. She didn’t answer. His eye flitted to a large sailboat sliding by, and he said, “If you married me, you could have anything you want. I make four thousand dollars a day.” Her heart fell, and that was the end of the affair.

It might seem as if this sort of thing would diminish Schulz—but oddly enough, it doesn’t. After reading Mr. Michaelis’ rich, appreciative, closely researched biography, your brain makes room again for the remembered greatness of Snoopy, hero of childhood, dancing in the floating, nose-up, chin-stretched way he danced, and for the kind voice of Peppermint Patty in the TV shows, and for Linus’ disorderly hair curving around his ear. Everything that was good in Schulz went into what he drew, and what he drew was worth the daily devotion he lavished on it. As a draftsman he did not have the artistry of Don Martin, Dr. Seuss or Rowland Emett, but he was able to chisel his own personality into fragments and turn those fragments into characters that become our life companions. And that’s very difficult to do.

A reporter for The New York Times called up Schulz’s ex-wife Joyce recently to ask her what she thought of the biography. “I’m not talking to anybody about anything,” she said. Which is a line you can almost see in bold capitals coming from a loud, irritable Lucy in the last panel of one of Schulz’s strips from the 1970’s.

Nicholson Baker is the author of seven novels; with Margaret Brentano he wrote The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898-1911).

In the piece, Joe Lieberman's loyalists suggest that "the goalposts have been moved," but Scocca explains why it was more a matter of "Lucy Van Pelt yanking the football away from Charlie Brown yet again."

He notes, in particular, that the Times' decision is actually consistent with what they've written about Lieberman in the past - notably in 2000, when there were no fewer than three angry editorials taking him to task for his double-track candidacies for VP and Senate.

And, crucially, Scocca gets Editorial-page editor Gail Collins to talk about the cookies the Times served to the candidates up on 43rd Street.

-- Josh Benson

The weather outside is frightful, we've had it up to here with Christmas-party Evites, and several residents of $10 million Fifth Avenue apartments have been outclassed by two flying creatures who like to eat rats -meanwhile, Osama is trimming his tree in Pakistan, everyone is suddenly wearing jaunty pea coats, The New Yorker is trying to spice up its fiction issue with "arty" nudie pics (again), Hillbillary Clinton's pardoned pal Marc Rich seems to have been the evil hand behind Saddam's looting of money meant for starving Iraqi children , well-heeled New York women in their 30's are being sliced and diced by plastic surgeons (but telling their friends it's "just Botox" ) and, 10 days before Christmas, Uncle Leroy already has his Christmas drunk on . O.K., someone pass the eggnog! You'll need it to soothe your stomach after ingesting yet another play by Neil LaBute , a man who has made his career writing about men who are so horrible they're almost as bad as real men! Tonight his Fat Pig opens Off Broadway, featuring an all-star cast including everyone's favorite sidekick Jeremy Piven , Keri Russell (doomed to always be referred to as Felicity), dreamy 80's heartthrob/90's "who's he?" Andrew McCarthy and newcomer Ashlie Atkinson in the title role. Expect to overhear dark-rimmed glasses-wearing East Villagers saying "No, I would never do anything like that" at the close of the show. Next! Alfred Dunhill , purveyor of all things leathery and glass tumbler-y and who generally smells like a man, is hosting a private holiday V.I.P. shopping night that gets you 15 percent off. Meanwhile, Showroom Seven , a fashion house repping Williamsburg trust-funder favorites such as Alice Roi , Ellus Jeans , Orla Kiely and Jennifer Nicholson , is having a holiday sample sale through Dec. 17. Wear your most festive granny underwear (which has replaced the thong as the undergarment of choice for New York gals).

[ Fat Pig , MCC at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 7 p.m., www.mcctheater.org; Alfred Dunhill private sale, Alfred Dunhill, 711 Fifth Avenue, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., by invitation only; Showroom Seven sample sale, Dec. 6 through 17, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., 498 Seventh Avenue, 24th floor, www.showroomseven.com.]

Thursday 16th

Lucky Lucci? Sure to have a high quotient of tweedy suits and classy pearls today is the annual holiday luncheon and awards for New York Women in Film and Television, an organization dedicated to "helping women reach the highest levels of achievement in film, television and new media, and promoting equity for women in these industries …. " (Somebody call Bill O'Reilly!) Honored today will be actor and director Lee Grant, ABC mouse house co-chair Anne Sweeney, production designer Kristi Zea and daytime Emmy eluder Susan Lucci. "We started the Muse awards in 1980 and the first recipient was Pauline Kael," said executive director Terry Lawler. "Now, 24 years later, we expect to have up to 1,400 people attend." Hope you've got enough canapés, miss! Presiding over all that estrogen will be funny lady Sandra Bernhard (the anti–Lindsay Lohan). "It's really fun; the people are in a festive mood," Ms. Lawler promised gamely. Meanwhile-oh Mummy, it's a fancy dress party! The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's Young Collectors have a ball honoring Matthew Ritchie. Tonight's event, sponsored by Dior, promises that the museum will be "transformed into a golden couture fairytale evening illuminated with thousands of glistening lights." There will be a gold glitter dance floor and ultra-luxurious ottomans (what the hell?) for the young worthies to park their well-waxed buttocks upon. You know the drill by now: Sykes, Chanticalle, blah blah blah; plus celebrities whom one associates with indie films and leg warmers: boyfriend-snatcher Claire Danes, the ever-shrinking Christina Ricci, very tall Famke Janssen and oddly dressed Chloë Sevigny. This evening's activities include an auction, cocktails and dancing. Don't these people ever get tired of these things? Further south and west, the meatpacking district-which New York magazine and Jay McInerney tell us is a hot neighborhood in this week's issue-welcomes a brand-new lounge, Earth NYC, which has absolutely nothing to do with the environment, but which will apparently embody "the experience of India's chicest boites, where Bombay's young and beautiful go to play." We can't even muster up the strength to sigh.

[New York Women in Film and Television gala holiday luncheon, New York Hilton, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, 11:30 a.m., www.nywift.org; Young Collectors Council Artist's Ball, Guggenheim Museum, 1070 Fifth Avenue, 9 p.m., 212-423-3534; Earth NYC V.I.P. opening, 116 10th Avenue, 7 p.m. till midnight, by invitation only.]

Friday 17th

The Gong Show! In a few days we will be celebrating the winter solstice ; for most of us, it's a day that simply reminds us how quickly it gets dark out. But for others, the solstice is one big chime-ringing deal. Paul Winter , pioneer of world music ( uh-oh), celebrates the 25th year of his winter-solstice celebration at the very enormous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine , from the Dec. 16 through 18 (try as we might, we could not get to the bottom of why it's not happening over the actual solstice-maybe it's some new-age voodoo thing … ). He's invited guests such as the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble (nine Russian village singers and dancers), the Forces of Nature Dance Theater Ensemble (double uh-oh) and "spectacular special effects symbolizing the sun, the earth, the solstice tree, and for the first time, the moon and planets of the solar system" ( meep!). Other things one can expect: a "Moon Gong" and giant "Earth Ball" which "travels over the audience as if through space, and then rises, spinning, into the star-lit of the Nave." Where else outside of Red Rock are you going to be able to find such Friday-night activity? "It's kind of like seeing Pink Floyd inside a cathedral, but without the rock music," a rep clarified for us. O.K.! Less hippy-dippy is the "Have Yourself a Rock N Glitter Christmas" at the Crash Mansion on Bowery. Five dollars of each ticket will be donated to City Harvest ; expect to hear ceiling-rattling cover versions of songs by the Kinks, Thin Lizzy, the Sex Pistols (and what is Christmas without the Sex Pistols?), the Ramones and the Pretenders by artists that we haven't heard of but we're confident will do a bang-up job. Fellas : Beware hipster girls on old-fashioned bicycles looking for some Christmas nog.

[Paul Winter's 25th Anniversary Winter Sostice Celebration, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, 7:30 p.m., 212-581-1212; "Have Yourself a Rock N Glitter Christmas," Crash Mansion @ BLVD, 199 Bowery at Spring Street.]

Saturday 18th

Is there anyone out there not yet suffering from tree fatigue? If the answer is no, head up to the Upper East Side, where standing a classy distance away from its tricked-out showgirl sister is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Christmas tree. Decorated as a "vivid 18th-century Neapolitian crèche scene-embellished with a profuse array of diminutive, lifelike attendant figures" (not actual real little people, we're told), this candlelit spruce makes one ashamed to ever lay eyes on that flash-in-the-pan Rockefeller nonsense. More highbrow for the holidays: Lincoln Center unleashes Anne Sofie Von Otter (a ridiculously fun name to say). The Swedish mezzo-soprano brings a "gift from the North in a program mixing traditional Scandinavian songs" backed by folk singers including Anders Åstrand on percussion, Bengt Forsberg on piano, Bengan Janson on accordian and Pär Näsbom on viola. Bring extra umlauts.

[The Metropolitan Museum of Art Christmas Tree, 1000 Fifth Avenue, lighting ceremony at 7 p.m., www.metmuseum.org; Annie Sofie Von Otter's Home for the Holidays , Alice Tully Hall, Broadway and 65th Street, 8 p.m., www.lincolncenter.org.]

Sunday 19th

The actor who dareth not speak his name? The Chelsea Community church , a nondenominational Christian church, is holding their 30th annual candlelight carol service this evening in St. Peter's church. There will be Bach, Brahms and Mendelssohn and a reading by a certain neighborhood actor of Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas." We can't tell you the name of the actor , since he does not wish to publicize his name for the event; however, we can give you a couple of hints: He is often spotted outside the storied Chelsea Hotel, he has written a couple of novels, and he used to be married to one of the blond actresses in Kill Bill! In other actorly news, Martin Scorsese's new movie, The Aviator , opened on Friday, starring the secretly fat Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes , whom The Observer's Rex Reed described as a "handsome weirdo" ( would we?!?). The film tackles the life of Hughes during the golden age of Hollywood with lots of airplanes and a bevy of contemporary beauties including Jude Law (as Errol Flynn), Cate Blanchett (Katherine Hepburn) and the No Doubt front woman with the killer abs, Gwen Stefani, in her screen debut as Jean Harlow. Quick question: Has anyone else recognized the trailer music as being the exact same as last year's soppy and wonderful romantic comedy, Love, Actually?

[30th Annual Chelsea Community Church Candlelight Carol Service, 346 West 20th Street, 6 p.m., www.chelseachurch.org; The Aviator , check www.moviefone.com for show times and theater locations.]

Monday 20th

What would this season be without riding the loop-de-loop on your credit card? ABC Carpet and Home , our favorite overstuffed and overpriced store, is having an end-of-the-year sample sale on the rugs and carpets (which until today we thought were the same thing) that have been on display throughout the store. Highlights include knotted Nepalese rugs, Indian wool flat weaves and vintage Persian Gabbeh rugs. Even if you can't afford one on sale, drop by and pull up an overstuffed chair to watch young pregnant couples plunk down $8,000 for a carpet which will last about a day after Junior starts crawling ….

[ABC Carpet and Home holiday rug and carpet end-of-the-year sale, Dec. 13 though Dec. 31, 881 Broadway, lower level, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., www.abchome.com.]

Tuesday 21st

If you can still see your feet, you're not eating enough Bouche de Noel! Today is the winter solstice, the start of the solar year and a measure of whether you're a glass-is-half-empty or -half-full type of person. To wit: Do you think of today as the day where the sun starts to set at lunch time? Or are you telling your friends that now the nights will start getting longer? Either way, celebrate by throwing out your useless, jobless boyfriend and adorning your apartment with holly, ivy, evergreen boughs, pin combs and wreaths to symbolize the continuity of life and the wheel of the year. Or go to the Garden tonight and watch the Knicks attempt to take on the Dallas Mavericks and think about the lessons learned from profound disappointment. [New York Knicks versus the Dallas Mavericks, Madison Square Garden, Seventh Avenue at 32nd Street, 7:30 p.m., www.thegarden.com.]

Wednesday 22nd

Without America's Next Top Model, we find ourselves looking for reasons to leave the fortress of solitude that is our apartment. Luckily the Museum of Television and Radio is screening A Charlie Brown Christmas, whose title character's angst-ridden state we can deeply relate to. In this inaugural Peanuts special from 1965-shown at lunch time today, so take your children (that is if you want to risk exposing them to 38-year-old males in muttonchops searching for an "ironic moment")-Charlie Brown is turned on as usual by the rest of the gang when he picks a scraggly Christmas tree. It's really not easy being Charlie Brown. Or Dwight Yoakam.

[ A Charlie Brown Christmas , the Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52nd Street, 12:30 p.m., 212-621-6800.]

The only reason I bring up my Englishness is to explain why I know absolutely nothing about Peanuts . It leaves my American friends astonished, but it's true. Charles M. Schulz's fabled Peanuts comic strip that inspired You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown , which has opened on Broadway, reaches a daily readership of 350 million round the world. But it didn't reach me.

I'd heard of Charlie Brown. The dazzling literary salons of London I inhabited are not so cut off from real life. We'd hear from time to time of this 6-year-old misery who was worshiped by adult America. But I hadn't a clue who-or what-he was.

Well, do you know who Bill and Ben, the flowerpot men, are? I forgive you for not knowing. Bill and Ben, cartoonesque TV heroes of my childhood, were little flower men who lived in flowerpots. They were certifiably insane. They spoke a peculiar language. (See also the invented language of today's Teletubbies, as well as the experimental use of language in Caryl Churchill's Blue Kettle , which I'll be discussing later.) Unlike Charlie Brown, a lucid loser, there's clearly more to dopey Bill and Ben than meets the eye-including linguistic daring, highly experimental methods of communication and the mysterious psychology of eternal life in a flowerpot.

As I say, I was raised on Bill and Ben, the flowerpot men. I shared the convention. But for at least 20 minutes of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown , I hadn't a clue what was really going on. Because I didn't share the convention. I knew that it was a cartoon. (Another cartoon on Broadway!) But why were these stage midgets singing about Beethoven, comfort blankets and kites? And what was it to me?

"All I need is one more try/ Gotta get that kite to fly/ And I'm not a guy/ Who gives up easily." The audience sees poor old lovable Charlie Brown, who would like to fly a kite but can't. Well, obviously, this gives us an invaluable insight into the meaning of life. Life is a kite. The audience identifies and is charmed. This is what I'm told: Charlie Brown reminds us of ourselves. It's O.K. to be depressed!

But wait! What I see-in my innocence, I assure you-is very different. I see an adult actor (Anthony Rapp, late of Rent ) who is playing a child, Charlie Brown. The adult actor wants to be loved, confusing his role with the child. I cannot help but think, perhaps unfairly: Is there anything obnoxiously cuter than adults playing children, unless it's children playing adults? But let it pass. The Charlie Brown I see isn't charming or amusing, he's a mess. He's even rejected by his own dog, Snoopy. He's a misery in need of a shrink; a failure mocked by his friends as stupid; the butt of everyone's jokes; can't get the girl; and will never fly a kite. He's one of life's great neurotic losers.

Now, why generations of Americans have identified with that particular child within is troubling. But my point is that I'm not seeing "lovable" Charlie Brown who-in the words of director Michael Mayer-"has to believe the world is a good and just place." Because the world as actually presented in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown isn't a good and just place. It's a cute, inconsequential place full of existential angst.

When, in another life, I accompanied Peter Brook and his international troupe on a half-mad theater safari through the Sahara and central west Africa, audiences often couldn't understand what on earth was going on. We couldn't speak the same language.

We invented a language. And in one of the little improvisations that took place in village squares, a young actor in the troupe entered the carpet, which served as a stage, to play an old man. But the African villagers, who had crowded excitedly round the carpet to see the show, were mystified. The actor coughed, as old men do, and became a bit hunched and decrepit, playing old. But the African villager didn't see an old man. He saw a young actor who was taken ill, or he saw something strange and unnatural. He didn't share the convention.

The African saw a young actor pretending to be old badly. The Englishman saw an adult actor pretending to be a neurotic Charlie Brown cutely. So, in all theater, even in Peanuts cartoon theater, nothing can be taken for granted, nothing can be presumed. The director Michael Mayer, who has done such fine work with Side Man and A View From the Bridge , presumes, for example, that the message of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is "Happiness is anyone or anything at all that is loved by you."

What's that again?

"Happiness is anyone or anything at all that is loved by you." This, he says, is "a radical idea." It's all very odd. In "Happiness," the closing number of the show, which is sung by the entire cast beaming in their jammies, we learn that happiness is having a sister. Or, as the lisping B.D. Wong, who plays Linus, sings it: "Happineth ith having a thithter."

Ith it? Well, it's not too important either way, whatever Mr. Mayer may say. The original 1967 production ran for almost five years in a tiny Off-Broadway theater. Its message then must have been "smaller"-more in tune with the modest, wry sketches of the Schulz comic strip. There are two sparkling, uncute performances from Roger Bart as Snoopy, and from Kristin Chenoweth as Sally. It's hard for adult performers to work miracles as an agitated 5-year-old with Shirley Temple curls, or as an extroverted beagle. But they do.

Blue Heart , Caryl Churchill's acclaimed double-bill at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is a genuine experiment in what this daring, cultvated British dramatist calls "anti-plays." Ms. Churchill, of Top Girls , Serious Money and The Skriker , among other boldly imaginative, risky dramas, has now questioned the very point of theater itself.

I am pro her anti-plays, though not as feverishly as some. The first, the darkish comedy or farce, Heart's Desire , explodes and fractures conventional narrative and is the more enjoyably accessible of the two short dramas.

A longtime married couple await, with the husband's sister, the return of their daughter from Australia. But each time the action starts, Ms. Churchill stops the narrative and replays it with absurd variations. The characters are trapped forever in the anti-play, locked in timelessness and wild imaginings, with no exit.

The form itself isn't new. Remember Bill Murray in Groundhog Day ? I saw that film when I had jet lag and kept nodding off. Whenever I awoke, the film had begun again. I was trapped in the film! Ms. Churchill's Heart's Desire owes more of a debt to Eugene Ionesco and the Theater of the Absurd. (Unusually among contemporary British dramatists, she relishes absurdity.) As we await the daughter's return from Australia, anything could come through the door. Anything does, including a huge ostrich.

At the same time, I recognize a North Country English farce when I see one. (The characters also speak in North Country accents.) The narrative experiment, and even the "anti-play," aren't as boldly anti-convention as we're led to believe. The piece is rooted in traditional farce, with weirdly surreal interludes (a monologue on self-cannibalism; a wonderful invasion of the stage by a swarm of children). The breakdown of the narrative mirrors the melancholy breakdown of the family. Death is awaited at the door, a little obviously. The piece, nevertheless, is wildly funny.

The second anti-play, Blue Kettle , is more problematic. The story holds fascinating promise: A 40-year-old con man dupes elderly women into believing he's the son they gave up for adoption long ago. Perhaps they'll leave him a legacy; more likely, he needs their protection and love.

I found myself wishing that Ms. Churchill had written the play ; though, of course, she's entitled to be the author of her own malfunction. The dramatist prefers an experiment in language and feeling, as if a computer virus had taken over. About halfway through the piece, the words "blue" and "kettle" gradually take over the language.

Why? I haven't a blue.

It seems to me that if it's Ms. Churchill's intention to show that emotion exists independent of words, she has succeeded. But that isn't new, either. What is the mysterious power of great music, but the power beyond words?

The outcome of Ms. Churchill's word experiment seems merely strange or eccentric:

"Don't try to be the kettle of attention, Enid."

"What's the kettle? Blue the kettle with her, Derek?"

Or: "I don't remember blue. Is that kettle? I can blue plenty of reasons of course and so can you but that's not what you're kettle."

Or this: "T-b-k-k-k-k-l?"

To which that answer is: "B.K."

Which, I'm told, is another way of saying: "Would you like a cup of tea?" Answer: "Yes, please."

It says a lot for the entire skilled ensemble, directed impeccably by Max Stafford-Clark, that they make it all seem completely natural.

Well, see blue all next kettle.