“Turn on your television right now, you’re going to see scenes of children running for their lives.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) castigated his Senate colleagues for having failed to legislate stricter gun laws as reports emerged of a mass school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Murphy, who dealt with the Newtown massacre firsthand, said, “What looks to be the 19th school shooting in this country and we have not even hit March. Let me just note once again for my colleagues: this happens nowhere else other than the United States of America. This epidemic of mass slaughter. This scourge of school shooting after school shooting. It only happens here, not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.”

The Frick Sunday concert featured Julius Berger, cello and Christoph Hammer, piano. They played four chorale preludes by Johann Sebastian Bach, fine examples of German protestant liturgy. We were also teated to Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 5 in D Major. A very heady evening.

Graphic Lessons: Recent thirty-five-year-old widow Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a stabbed and dying man in the school kitchen, deals with the only witness to the stabbing – a troubled nine-year-old, develops a crush on a NYPD detective and her dog dies.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie.

Graphic Lessons: Something’s eating at NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek: a failed marriage? surviving a car bomb? his girlfriend marrying his corrupt boss? screwing up an important case? It doesn’t matter because he’s relentless.