burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

tv

• with Abby: Ahsoka 1.03-1.07 -- finale this week! but we won't get to watch it until Friday :/

music videos

• "Love Love Love" by Tété with Abby -- which I feel like I had maybe seen before?
• The HU - Wolf Totem [Mongolian folk metal band] & Disturbed - The Sound Of Silence [excellent cover] at Liz T's party

books

• ~read Abby ~7 picturebooks -- incl 4 big feelings picture books I'd gotten from the library because of nibling O
• [feminist sff book club] A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (recommended by reflectedeve) -- first contact novel with a Jewish polyamorous mom; aliens want to rescue humans because they've been destroying the Earth, but some humans have been doing a lot of work to repair and live in better harmony with the Earth and don't want to leave; we get at least some exposure to 3 different Earth factions (with varying degrees of interest in leaving Earth).
• We Still Belong by Christine Day -- middle-grade Upper Skagit, which manages to touch on a lot of things without feeling like it's doing too much or even feeling heavy-handed or teachy
  

movies

• started watching Fast X with Abby
  (In June, prepping for the impending 2 Trans 2 Furious zine put together by the person who does her favorite podcast, Abby started watching the Fast & Furious movies.  I've seen a few of them at bad/fannish movie night, so having seen 8 and 9, I was interested when she started watching 10 -- but god, that movie is two and a half hours, so I was okay that we stopped about 40 minutes in.)

live theatre

in the same weekend:


• ASP's Taming of the Shrew with Abby, Cate, and Allie -- which sounded interesting, but which we did not like.  (I stayed for the post-show discussion with the director, which only helped a little.)
  
  This production really leans into the opening framing device -- setting it at a 1970s nightclub, where Christopher Sly is a jerk to women and passes out drunk and the women decide to trick him into believing he's a woman.  Hi, force-femming someone as punishment (as opposed to a sexy consensual "funishment") is really uncomfortable.
  
  This is the official blurb:

  Actors’ Shakespeare Project kicks off our 2023-24 Season by tackling one of the most controversial entries in Shakespeare’s canon – The Taming of the Shrew. 
  
  After a long night of drinking, disruption, and harassing barmaids, Christopher Sly finds himself trapped in the worst of predicaments: a stage play. Thrown into the role of Katherine – the titular "Shrew” – he tumbles headfirst into a world of witty wordplay, leering suitors, and the full force of the oppressive patriarchy. As the rest of the all-female/non-binary ensemble constructs the zany world of Padua around him, will Sly learn the error of his ways?

  Everyone in the cast is female or non-binary, except Sly.
  
  I had expected that they were gonna make him believe he's literally Katherine the character in the play -- like construct the play around him as if the play is reality -- but instead they tell him he's their friend Katherine and then they put on this play and tell him they're one person short and convince him to play Katherine. At first, he's reading lines from a script, and he and sometimes others sit on the edge of the stage watching while they're not performing, but after a few scenes that fades away and it's like the play is real? Everyone except Sly (and also except Bianca, my partner noted?) wears a red clown nose, which indicates that they're acting, and they occasionally take them off to break character (but this didn't seem entirely consistent?). So I'm not entirely sure how we're supposed to think of the events of the play -- like is Sly actually being tortured when Katherine the character is tortured? And they choose to keep in that final speech where Katherine talks about womanly submissive duty -- and Sly/Kate plays it completely straight, and the other characters try to sort of stop him and clearly indicate with their body language that they didn't want this. Which, okay, you decided to do this play; did you forget about this ending? In the post-show thing, the director talked about how this is a revenge play, and trying to use patriarchy to undermine patriarchy just reinforces patriarchy, which, okay, but, this did not feel like a particularly nuanced (or even effective, tbh) way to teach audiences, "You might think that if you could make your oppressor shared your oppressed status, they would repent of their oppressive behavior, but actually that is not the way." Like, Sly becomes a somewhat tragic figure because he has accepted the message the play seems to try to teach him -- that as a woman he should be subservient to his husband; he did what the society around him told him they wanted him to do.
  
  On Sunday, we chatted with our friend Bridget (a theatre professional), who noted that the play is much more Bianca's play than Kate's (which is one reason she thought this production didn't work). Which made me think of my friend Cate's idea to do a production of Shrew with a trans woman as Bianca (1: it means you have lots of people talking about how beautiful and desirable a trans woman is, which is nice; and 2: it potentially does interesting things with the Bianca and Kate dynamic, since they would have grown up for at least some period of time expecting that Bianca would inherit as the son, etc.).
  
  
• Central Square Theater's Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika with Abby (having seen Part 1 in April)
  During the first intermission, Abby said, "This is the most Mormon thing I've ever seen."
  

other

• Harvard Powwow with Abby -- I've gone with my mom in years past, but she had other plans this time, so I just took Abby. We did meet up with my former coworker Meg (and I finally got to meet her partner), and also had a bonus surprise encounter with climbing/QERG-Meagan.

***

Currently reading: Dear Mothman by Robin Gow -- middle-grade autistic trans boy. reminds me in some ways of Kyle Lukoff's Too Bright to See, but it's much more ... "bittersweet" isn't quite the right word, but...

Reading next: 🤷🏻‍♀️

theatre

• [ASP] Seven Guitars (part of August Wilson's Pittsburgh/Century Cycle)
  
  I didn't like it as much as the other plays in that cycle I've seen (Gem of the Ocean live at Tufts, and the Fences film -- both back in 2016), but I do appreciate that ASP is doing the ~sequel next season ("Nearly forty years after the blues of Seven Guitars, the American Shakespeare takes on the Reagan Era."). Gonna be hella depressing, but...

books

• read Abby ~5 picturebooks
• [work book club] Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid 
  
• read on the flight to California: [feminist sci-fi book club] Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden (I liked it less than I had hoped -- though it's doing some interesting stuff, and I did enjoy a lot of it -- so I'm likely to skip its sequel, Symbiosis)
• On the return flight, I finished:
  • A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change by Dolly Chugh
  • Queer: A Graphic History written by Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele (which is more a graphic history of queer THEORY, to be clear)

movies (who's surprised we saw 2 trans movies?)

• Naomi Campbel [part of the Harvard Film Archive's program Remapping Latin American Cinema: Chilean Film/Video 1963-2013 -- "Chile’s cinema remains the least internationally known of Latin America’s major cinemas. Often overshadowed by the historically larger and more widely distributed cinemas of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the rich history of Chilean filmmaking has also been obscured, paradoxically, by the long history of political documentary to which Chilean cinema is all too often reduced."]
  
  This was okay?  I appreciate that a 2013 film treats a trans woman very matter-of-factly. She wants bottom surgery but is generally happy with her life and resists the narratives of tragedy from the gatekeepers. But the blurb about the film feels to me like it really over-states much of what it's doing (also, despite the blurb, I did not read the woman who wants plastic surgery as trans at all; I very much read her as cis).
  
  
• Framing Agnes [Emerson Bright Lights -- Co-presented with Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival and GlobeDocs; independently, Abby had heard about it on Twitter]
  
  This film was so good!  Lots of interesting stuff about the history of trans people, their interactions with the medical establishment and the media, the tradeoffs of visibility, etc.  Highly recommended.
  
  Available to rent or buy on (at least) AppleTV and KinoNow. Also Kanopy (which you can probably access through your local library).

tv

• Ted Lasso's 3rd (and final) season started, and we're currently caught up (3.01-3.03)

art exhibits

• "For The Love Of Birds, featuring original artwork with the subject of birds, real or imaginary, wild or not so wild for a juried exhibition that takes place during Chico’s 2023 Snow Goose Festival, which celebrates the glorious migration of snow geese on the Pacific Flyway." at the Museum of Northern California Art -- with Abby and Sarah, during our trip out there for Abby's dad's memorial service
• Portraits of Pride: A Celebration of Queer and Trans Lives in Boston (Abby wanted to go for date night).  It turned out to only be 3 portraits, which was disappointing -- and there was a panel we didn't know about, which we missed most of because we arrived about halfway through the 4:30-6:30pm window. (You can see some of the original portrait project here.)
  

live music

• Ezra Furman at the Sinclair with Abby (opener: Alex Walton -- the opener went on at 8! on a weeknight! I am Old ... but I love my partner, and went to this show that ended ~11pm)

***

Currently reading: Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano -- which I started reading during the week of the #TransRightsReadathon. 

It first came out in 2007 and I read it in, idk, 2008? 2013?  A second edition came out in 2016, which I learned about maybe a few years ago?  It turns out to be basically the first edition with an added Preface, but since I remember very little from the first time I read it, that's not too bad.

Reading next: Microcosm Publishing's The Autism Relationships Handbook by Faith Harper and Joe Biel.

After sending my partner various Twitter threads, saying, "I'm not autistic, but this resonated with me," we've leaned in to, "An actual diagnosis doesn't matter; but if there's stuff that autistic people find helpful that you also find helpful..."

So (at my ~suggestion) she recently Kickstarted The Autism Partner Handbook and backed the tier that comes with: "The Autism Relationships Handbook - The counterpart of the Partner Handbook, this book guides autistic people through how to succeed in relationships." So she's gonna read the former and I'll read the latter and then we'll swap. Or maybe we'll totally bounce off them like we have other Faith Harper productions. Who can say? The future is vague and uncertain.

Last night, Cate and I went to one of the broadcasts of the RSC's Love's Labour's Lost. It was one of the few Shakespeare plays that I had never seen or read (literally, I think at this point we're down to Henry 6, parts 1-3).

( Read more... )

Someone posted to LJ:

I'm directing a gender swapped production of Taming of the Shrew being done in Arlington on March 22, 28 and 29. We've got the men playing the women's parts and vice versa. Some people view Shrew as a misogynistic, outdated play. The experiment I wanted to try was whether by swapping the roles it becomes simply a love story between two socially maladjusted people. While I expected this to be interesting, I have been fascinated at what swapping the genders has done. In the hope that some of you will come see it, I won't say more so your own experience won't be tainted one way or the other.

I was really intrigued, so Cate and I went last night. [Verse and Vodka's website; tickets to this show via Brown Paper Tickets]

However, (a) they didn't genderswap the opening frame story (which confused me because I was expecting gender-swap); and (b) they kept all the language intact (so it's all, "your sister Bianca," etc.), which I think lessened a lot of the impact of the gender swap.

Given the LJ post, I was expecting the gender swap to do more than I experienced it actually doing. Petruchio was great -- and the genderswap enables some stuff one couldn't do in standard productions (like, I think it was the first wooing scene, Kate is sitting down and Petruchio sits on her lap, straddling her, which I think would have read much differently if it were a male-presenting person on top of a female-presenting person) -- but mostly I felt like I was just watching any other production of Shakespeare (possibly in part because my brain has gotten somewhat used to parsing people as their character even when that is ostensibly at odds with the gender I'm reading them as).

In the frame story (which I always forget exists), they put a guy in a dress, and when the drunk !lord was wanting to hook up with the "woman" and "she" was putting him off, I felt super-uncomfortable because the expectation is that the audience is laughing because they know that if the guy does get under "her" skirt he'll realize she has a penis and won't that be a terrible shock and ha ha ha -- and hey, that's a very real fear that lots and lots of trans women live with every day. I've read lots of trans women pushing back about the "guy in a dress as humor" trope, but I don't think I actually internalized it until that moment.

When I think about this play, I so want to read Petruchio/Kate as a consensual BDSM relationship, and in the first "wooing" scene it feels plausible; but then when Petruchio is keeping her from eating or sleeping it's clear that Kate hasn't consented to this dynamic and while I understand how we're supposed to parse Petruchio's plan, it makes me uncomfortable -- and as it continues with the sun/moon etc. thing on the way back, to think of it as leading up to a consensual BDSM relationship makes me think of lots of sketchy narratives wherein the guy dominates the woman without her consent and she ends up liking it (despite her expectations) and that somehow retroactively makes his boundary-crossing behavior okay.

I also didn't get much sense in this production of Kate herself coming to be sort of in on the joke -- she does during the encounter with the old man after the sun/moon bit, and Petruchio's whispering to her at some point (I forget if it was during that scene or the closing scene), but while I want to read Kate's final speech as her being super over-the-top saying shit she doesn't believe to just piss off all these other women, I didn't really get that sense from this scene.

They don't close out the frame story, and I was thinking about what the (existence of the) frame story suggests about the main play (reversals, illusions, etc.), but I wasn't really coming up with anything -- so I went to Wikipedia, as one does.

Which wasn't helpful for this specifically, but which did quote [RSC] director Conall Morrison:

By the time you get to the last scene all of the men – including her father are saying – it's amazing how you crushed that person. It's amazing how you lobotomised her. And they're betting on the women as though they are dogs in a race or horses. It's reduced to that. And it's all about money and the level of power. [...] It is so self-evidently repellent that I don't believe for a second that Shakespeare is espousing this. And I don't believe for a second that the man who would be interested in Benedict and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet and all these strong lovers would have some misogynist aberration. It's very obviously a satire on this male behaviour and a cautionary tale

I found this interesting because I know I didn't even think about the contest from that one-level-back perspective or about the implications of everyone's glee at Kate's having been tamed.

My Riverside Shakespeare (2nd Edition) says:

Northrop Frye once remarked that the Katherina of Act I is not really dissimilar from the Katherina of Act V; at the beginning of the comedy she is persecuting her sister Bianca, and at the end she is engaged in precisely the same activity---except that now she has learned how to do it with social approval on her side. (Anne Barton, p. 139)

and

the stage convention which allows the actress playing the part to show plainluy in her face that she falls in love with Petruchio the moment she sets eyes on him has much to recommend it. Heartily sick of a single life, not to mention all the adulation showered on Bianca, she is really more than ready to give herself to a man but, imprisoned within a set of aggressive attitudes which have become habitual, has not the fainest idea how to do so. (Ibid)

I think one of my difficulties with Kate's trajectory through the play is that I know so little about her pre-Petruchio. We see her fighting with Bianca, but we know almost nothing about either of them. We're told that Kate is shrewish bladdy blah in a way that suggests she acts like that to everyone and has for a while. Offstage she breaks the lute (of the tutor who's just there to woo her sister, so possibly she's not just being peevish for the sake of being peevish...). We don't really know why she's so upset at Bianca -- when she's asking Bianca which suitor Bianca wants to marry and Bianca's all, "Whichever you want to marry you can have," there's lots of room for Bianca to play that in various ways (is she refusing to answer Kate's question to provoke her? does she really desire Kate's happiness, as a plain reading of the text would suggest?) and this production just played it as a plan reading of the text, so we get no insight into why Kate is so upset with Bianca, and Bianca herself remains flat and uninteresting. (Not that I'm saying you have to stage this scene against the plain reading of the text in order to make sense of Kate's crankiness at Bianca or in order to make Bianca and interesting and/or complex character, just that this scene is one of your only opportunities to do so -- well certainly for the former; admittedly we do see Bianca with the tutors picking a favorite and participating in a ruse, so she's not entirely the flat paragon of passive virtue that the early scenes might suggest.)

My Riverside also says of Petruchio's "taming" of Kate:

he goes on assuring her, despite everything she can do and say to prove the contrary, that she herself is gentle, rational, and loving: exactly the hidden qualities in her that he needs to foster and encourage. Petruchio wins in the end not because of superior force but because he succeeds in showing Katherina both the unloveliness of the false personality she has adopted and the emotional truth of the self she has submerged. (139)

I don't buy that, because whatever he actually believes about her (and I do think he genuinely likes/cares about her), all this rhapsodizing about her is entirely enmeshed with the "taming" such that everything he says to her feels false or cheap or insincere or IDK the exact adjective I'm looking for here.

The Riverside also says of Bianca: "Once married to Lucentio, she ceases to be 'sweet Bianca.' At the wedding feast itself she reveals an unexpected streak of bawdry, willfulness, and arrogance" (140), which I thought was interesting -- I think we tend to have a fairly flat impression of Bianca (because there's not much there there), and we interrogate Kate's closing speech to the exclusion of interrogating anything else about that closing scene (and I include myself in that "we").

( more details about the performance )

So, classes started in earnest last week. Tuesday I came close to feeling like I was treading water. All 3 of my professors had stuff for me to do. Yes, summer is over. Each day of the week was progressively calmer, though.

Friday night I went to Wicked at the Opera House with Allie because a friend of mine had a conflict come up and couldn't go (and so gave me the tickets he and his girlfriend were going to use). We went to My Thai Vegan Cafe (famed for its fake meat, apparently), and I was sort of overwhelmed by the fact that I could eat everything on the menu.

I am unimpressed by my Jesus and the Gospels class, but we shall see.

On Saturday I took another trip to the Fells.

Sunday morning, Ian H. preached on the 1 Timothy reading ("Even Me! Even You...."). He opened with reminding us what a bad guy Paul was before his conversion and then talked about his own faith journey and said that often God asks us to do something and we think, "No, I'm not good enough," but God meets us right where we are.

At CWM, Anthony Z. from Interfaith Worker Justice preached on Psalm 14 ("No Not One"). Eh, "worker justice" memes make me somewhat uncomfortable, and I felt a little like it was trying too hard to fit exegesis into what was really a worker justice speech -- though the sermon I have currently tabled for that lectionary set is the least sermon-y sermon I've written, I think, so I feel a little hypocritical lodging that criticism (and as I learned in trying to write that sermon for yesterday, I don't have a good solid definition of what a sermon "is").

(Our closing hymn was "Solidarity Forever" -- which is to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and Pr. Lisa joked that hey great, she could offer this to all the churches in the South that don't like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic.")

***

After morning church was Rooftop People. I didn't really know what to expect, and it was more discussion than support group, which isn't exactly what I was expecting, but it was good.

We read Mark 2:1-12 (from whence the name of the group) and had a bunch of good conversations about it.

Think outside the box. Easier said than done when constrained by needing to not get fired, etc. The friends didn't know how Jesus would react -- they had a strong sense of what needed to be done to help their friend and so they did whatever they could to get their friend to a place where that could happen.

Were they cutting in line? Story implies that the crowds were listening to Jesus preach, not necessarily there for healing.

We talked about the fact that Jesus first says, "Your sins are forgiven," and only does the physical healing after the lawyers complain -- if the lawyers had just said, "That's interesting," would Jesus have not done the physical healing at all? I said that one of the things I was thinking about was all the disability politics I've encountered, about how physical limitations aren't necessarily inherently problematic, it's society that's the problem (people who are in wheelchairs, if buildings are wheelchair-accessible, then they're not at a disadvantage), so one way of understanding the story is Jesus recognizing that physical healing wasn't what was most needed, but that what was most needed was for the person to know, "You are right with God."
Someone else commented that in that socio-historical moment, physical infirmity was often understood to be a result of sin, so Jesus could have been understood as going to the root of the problem rather than just treating the symptoms. (I thought about mentioning the "Who sinned that this person was born blind?" story to emphasize that Jesus didn't believe in that causation model, but partly there wasn't opportunity to, and partly I felt like we all understood that and so it didn't necessarily need to be said.) Someone else commented on it as a holistic model of healing rather than focusing solely on bodily healing.
Someone else (who works in social work) commented that although we don't tell people, "Your sins are forgiven," but we do try to help people (e.g., abuse survivors) internalize the fact that it was not their fault. Someone who works as a nurse practitioner commented that yeah, we say, "It's not your fault," to people with cancer and etc., too -- and sometimes it is their fault (e.g., smokers who get lung cancer), but really, it's not our place to judge.
* cure vs. healing *
Folks who work in medicine can't necessarily "cure" people, but healing can be instantaneous. Healing is also a long process -- a lot of people self-sabotage, because okay you're gonna have this different life but "What will it be like?" Also, "What will be expected of me?"

Who are our Rooftop People? We know (from our jobs/roles as caregives) that people need help/ers, so why is it so hard for us to ask for help ourselves?

***

Autumn weather has hit!

I am considering investing in leggings to wear under my denim skirt, because finding dress pants (or even nice jeans) that fit and that I like has been fairly fruitless, plus I am not a fan of not having pockets, and women's dress pants are faily at pockets.

Future-sister-in-law sent me the final decision on bridesmaid dress -- this dress (in Wisteria -- a light purple). I'm not a big fan, but we'll see. Must hie myself to a David's Bridal and actually try one on.

Friday

At South Station, on the phone with Ari while waiting for my train, I gave money to a woman claiming to need bus fare up to Laconia.  I walk by people begging for change all over Harvard Square all the time and don't engage them AT ALL except for like a nod of the head or a "Sorry," even though I know I SHOULD, but sometimes I'll get approached by someone with some story I don't believe (though I believe the person is IN NEED -- because you don't go up to random people on the street and tell them some pathetic story unless there is something Not Okay in your life) and practice an act of radical generosity.

    When I got off the train at Norwood, I was still on the phone (duh) and my mom hugged me and (taking a wild guess) said, "Hi, Ari."
    My dad met us at the train station so he could take my mom's stuff home.  She had to pee, so she asked my dad to drive us to the coffeehouse so we'd get there sooner.  I was still on the phone when we got there (attempting to wrap up conversation while at the same time keeping an ear out in case I was supposed to be engaged with my parents' conversation).  When we got out, my dad said, "Bye, Ari."
    My mom said: "We all love Ari, even though we haven't actually met her."  ♥

The last time I saw Carrie Cheron perform, she recognized me from our conversations when she was busking in Davis Square and said that she's bad with names but remembers faces.  Before this concert I was sitting and talking with my mom over dinner, and during the intermission we were talking with the mother of one of my brother's classmates (I also got a slice of white&chocolate cake -- thumbs up).  So I wasn't ENTIRELY surprised when, when we were leaving after the concert, she said hi to me and said she'd seen me earlier.  I said I hadn't seen her in like two years.  Checking my tag, it's actually more like 3 years (almost exactly -- Nov. 13, 2006 to Nov. 20, 2009).  We talked about how I haven't seen her 'cause she doesn't so many of her shows are private shows or out in Western Mass. or something and how I didn't know a lot of the songs she played because I only know the stuff on her album.

During the show, someone in the audience asked at one point where her CD release party back in 2006 was (The Burren).  Someone (same person?) asked when she was releasing her next CD.
Carrie: "When I get some grant money."
audience member: "I know a guy named Grant."

While we were chatting, I told her that I had grown up in this town and blah blah blah.

me: "This is my mom."
CC: "Hi, mom."
me: "Sorry -- Barbara."
CC: "Hi, Barbara, I'm Carrie."

We chatted a bunch, and she hugged me goodbye.  Yes, ladyvivien, I know you're jealous :)

Edit: I forgot to mention that she played a cover at one point and from the very beginning I knew I knew it, though it took me until about the time the title was sung to remember the title -- "Angel from Montgomery" (John Prine).  Wow that brought me back to college (and made me think of anniesj, though I don't know if she's actually the person I got the mp3 from). /edit

Saturday

Scott and I had brunch at Toscanini's.  We both got the fried egg sandwich :)

He kept seeing people he knew or thought he knew from MIT, and I commented that I sometimes I feel like I expect to see people I know and then I remember that I don't know that many people in Boston and anyway in this area (off Mass. Ave. between Central and MIT) I wasn't likely to see anyone I knew.
And then jadasc and eisa walked in.  They sat with us for a bit until Scott had to leave to prep for SPLASH.
I went with him, met his brother, and then made my way back to Central Square T.  Where I saw them AGAIN.  And M-E and Nathan.

I was home for a few hours and then spent ~6hrs with Allie!

I had seen a flyer at Mr. Crepe for Hedwig and the Angry Inch @ the Arsenal and thought of Allie, so we made plans to go see it.

We had dinner at Porcini's.  Which was probably the fanciest restaurant in the area.  It wasn't bad, but I wasn't particularly blown away.
I've seen the Hedwig movie once (and wasn't in love with it) and had never seen the (a?) stage version.  I forget sometimes what a dark dark story it is.
After the show we got hot chocolate at Algiers in Harvard Square.  (I got hot orange mint chocolate, with whipped cream, because I could.)

Sunday

I got up an hour early to finish my sermon.  \o/  (Okay, I went to bed a little before 1am and got up a little before 6:30am, so I was totally not prayerful during prayertime at morning church and slept through the sermon, but...)

My mom's half-sister dragged her onto being on facebook, so she friended me and so I accepted and friended my dad (and my aunt Marian).  I've been somewhat resistant to being facebook friend with family, but given the way I use facebook these days, it really isn't a problem for me to be facebook friends with family.

On my dad's profile:

RECENT ACTIVITY
[my dad] and [my mom] are now friends.
[my mom] I thought we were more than friends ;)

Also, earlier this month my brother commented on my dad's Wall:

just curious, why doesn't your relationship status say "married"?

[my dad]: Originally, it was going to say, "In a Relationship with Golden Lion Tamarin" cause it worked with the silverback gorilla picture, but after I'd put in "In a Relationship," I found I could only end with someone already on facebook. So I just left it.

Today is the last Sunday of Year B.  Happy New Year's Eve, Church.

I haven't posted church writeups since the beginning of September.  /o\  I private-posted the backlog to to be finished in some mythical "later."  I'm not really optimistic about being any more on top of writeups in Year C, but I feel better starting with a clean slate.

Last night I went to The Donkey Show ("disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream") at the A.R.T. with L.

( Read more... )

Pirates! (Or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plunder'd)
by Gilbert and Sullivan
Directed by Gordon Greenberg
5/15/2009 – 6/14/2009
BU Theatre - Mainstage

I knew almost nothing about Pirates of Penzance going into this (Gilbert and Sullivan isn't really my thing, so I haven't seen any of their stuff -- assuming we don't count the 8th grade chorus having done Mikado, Penzance, and Pinafore, so you saw all 3 by the time you got through junior high, but which I barely remember), but my impression in watching the show was that they basically kept the original plot and just bawdied it up with the way it was performed.

Reading the Wiki article, however, apparently there were at least a couple major plot changes.  ( spoilers for both versions )

Friday, Cate and Allie and I went to Theatre @ First's production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.  We got dinner at Blue Shirt Cafe and people were making noises about dessert, so we went to Harvard Square to get cupcakes at Sweet [website -- warning: sound], but I wasn't particularly moved, so then we went to Hrerell's and I got an "Elvis' Favorite," which unfortunately I wasn't that taken with (though I did get a coupon for $1 off my next ice cream purchase there).

Over dinner, I mentioned that Ian had said it's Shakespeare's best play.  Allie (the only one of us who has actually read the play) looked at me disbelievingly.  I shrugged, since the only thing I knew about the play was that it contained the stage direction "Exeunt, pursued by a bear."  Watching the play, once the BATSHIT CRAZY hit I understood why she had reacted as she did.

It's a well-done production (see bard_in_boston review, for example), but, yeah.  ( Read more... )

***

This was the first time I'd been in Unity Church (inroite?).

In the room the play was in, on the wall was:

...it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
-Luke 12:32

I looked it up when I got home and yeah, not quite as universal salvation-y when you fill in the ellipsis.  Oh well.

In browsing some of the literature outside the sanctuary, I learned that Unity is an actual denomination, though it sounded a lot like Unitarian Universalism (though definitively monotheistic, and they seemed to use some Christian liturgy and do Communion and stuff).

***

We talked about various theatre goings-on, so for reference:

Spring Awakening
Through May 9
The Boston Center for the Arts (539 Tremont St., Boston)
Through May 24
The Colonial Theatre (106 Boylston St., Boston)

Looking at the Zeitgeist Stage page, apparently Zeitgeist is doing the play that was the inspiration for the musical that's playing at the Colonial (which Jessie saw and hated).

'Tis Pity She's a Whore @ the Loeb Experimental Theater
Show Times:
May 1-3 at 7:30 pm
May 7-9 at 7:30 pm

NYC's Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park is doing Twelfth Night this summer (June 10 - July 12), but Google is not turning up anything for Boston's Shakespeare in the Park for this summer.

Pirates! (Or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plunder'd)
by Gilbert and Sullivan
Directed by Gordon Greenberg
BU Theatre - Mainstage
5/15/2009 – 6/14/2009

Opening Weekend (January 8 - February 1) of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi at ASP.

Some months ago, Cate's coworker Kate was talking about something and said, "When's the last time anyone did a production of The Duchess of Malfi?"  To which Cate replied, "Well..."

It's ASP's first non-Shakespeare production, and I hope they make a habit of having one non-Shakespeare show each season, 'cause no one does Jonson or Marlowe or any of that ... plus it allows them to go more seasons before they have to start repeating Shakespeare plays.

( spoilers )