SLAG RAG BAGS ZINE QUEEN

Wait, what?? Parterre Box editor James Jorden is writing opera reviews for the New York Post?? The bad news: The word-count seems smaller than at JJ's gig with the Gay City News. And now all discerning opera lovers will have to [shudder] patronize the Post. The good news: JJ's prose is, I say, more potent in small doses. His GCN reviews were never anywhere near as flabby as those Times scribes', but if you've read the blog, you know that he was born to deliver a single devastating line and walk away—and somehow, maybe I'm getting a little romantic here, his sordid, old-New York sensibility fits in marvelously with the sort of thing the Post always wished it was. They need somebody classy, for God's sake, now that Liz Smith's given her notice, and maybe JJ can show that sack of shit Sean Delonas that not all gay people are a bunch of stubbly, cross-dressing weirdos. Oh, wait. Well, anyway, the New York opera scene is better off with a bona fide expert covering it for one of the city's most-read papers. And that damned paper is better off for having landed one of the world's finest opera journalists. So, everybody wins. Bravo, JJ!