The show also featured a song Palmer wrote about the Columbine killings - including a recitation of the dead kids' names - and then abandoned. Her thinking: it was too dated. Then came the shootings at Virginia Tech and she brought the song back, on the upcoming album and at Symphony. It was chilling, genuinely tear-jerking. She was joined by white-faced "dead" teenagers who slowly walked up the aisles and, later, did a death dance as the song climaxed, an orgy of despair.

     When we asked Lockhart last month, before any of this was fully shaped, what he anticipated the scenario to be like, he said,  “Dark. Cool. The arrangers have been doing all the talking with her. I heard a couple of Dresden Dolls CDs and that thing they did at the A.R.T. (Zero Arrow Theatre, 'The Onion Cellar.') I thought 'How is this gonna work with us? It’s kind of Goth.' But her solo stuff is pretty thoughtful and interesting. I definitely think it will be the furthest departure (from the norm) that we’ve ever done.”
    Said Palmer, in a separate interview: “It’s going to be a combination of Dolls songs, solo songs from the new record and a few surprises. I have a choreographer from Australia who is working on the visuals of my tour next year and he’s going to audition some local folks to do some weirdness, so expect some stage antics. I didn’t expect the Pops folks to be so into me being so out there. It’s promising.”
     Lockhart: “What’s hard to do is decide what you’re going to present of your own stuff.  I was talking to my wife’s youngest sister, who’s not too removed from the club scene, and she said, ‘Go for the wow factor. Blow the doors off.’ We’re gonna do the entirety of (Holst’s) ‘The Planets,’ paint a huge picture, show what an orchestra can do full bore, if not co-opted. Play stuff that was written for us.”
   The show starts with "The Planets" at 8. Tickets: $55-$20. There are discount tix available at www.boxtix.com.  For more on Lockhart and the Pops season check out the piece I did for www.newengland.com and click "culture."

301 Massachusetts Ave., 617-2661492  www.bostonpops.org