Overture, Curtain, Lights!

I mentioned in passing on Twitter a few days ago that I'd been to the theatre many times this year-- much more than probably any other year of my life thus far. There are a couple reasons for this-- one being the obvious, that it's a hobby that provides a short escape from my own thoughts and reality and thus is therapeutic. (I wish I could say theatrical therapy is cheaper that retail therapy, but it's not. The upside is that it makes me a lot happier than a new shirt ever could... which is why I pursue my therapy at the theatre instead of the mall.) And the second reason is close on its heels-- it's cheaper now that I only have to pay for one ticket instead of two, so I can go twice as much as before.

So here you have it, a very long list of all the theatre I've been lucky enough to see this year. One caveat before I begin: I rarely have anything bad to say about anything I've seen. I'm a very easily pleased audience member, which is probably why I'll never manage a career as a theatre critic. Imagine a weekly column filled with, "This rocks! Go see it!" Yeah, I'd be fired in five minutes. So this is probably an overly-sunny list.

Once
Courtesy of a friend who won the tickets in a giveaway and didn't want to use them herself, I went to see Once knowing absolutely nothing about the show at all, except that the actors all play their own instruments on stage. I don't know that I've ever gone to see anything without at least some knowledge of the plot. So, it was a delightful surprise to me when they started playing Irish music. I shot off a text to my friend at intermission that was basically "!!! Irish music FTW OMG thank you thankyouthankyou!!!"

Love's Labour's Lost 

Love's Labour's Lost
It's been so long that I've forgotten the characters' names, but the one on
the left is the Princess of France (I think?) and the guy with the matching
turquoise scarf is the King of whatever country this is set in. I really
hope this post doesn't come up in one of their Google alerts later.

I was already planning to see this before I checked out the cast list, because I saw the same company do Much Ado About Nothing last summer and it was sensational. But when I finally saw who was in the cast, I was delighted to not only recognise a few names as people I'd seen in other things, but also to see a guy I went to UT with in the cast. I knew before that he was an actor, but had never gotten to see him in anything. He was fantastic. And so were the rest, so much so that I saw it twice. And I got a poster (unsigned, alas, because the cast were too busy running round afterwards to do the stage door thing) (not that there was a stage door, because it was the roof of Whole Foods).

Love's Labour's Lost
I was way too engrossed in watching the guy that I know that I forgot
about getting any decent pics of him. So, this blurry pic will have to do:
that's him on the far left.

Annie 
Another set of tickets courtesy of my very lucky friend who wins things. I'm going to have to pay this forward sometime soon. This was my first time seeing Annie live, and as we waited for it to start, I said to Denise, "How does this show even end? It's a happy ending, right?" She said, "Haven't you seen the movie?" Well, I have (the old one, not the new one with Quvenzhané Wallis, which I'm anxious to see but haven't yet), but apparently it wasn't that memorable. I do remember my high school drama coach being really unimpressed by the movie version, so maybe that's why I never bothered remembering it. Anyway, the tour was excellent, and as I followed all the actors on Twitter afterwards, I saw Gilgamesh Taggett (Mr. Warbucks) retweeting all the stage door photos, and that's when I decided that it's pretty dumb not to go to stage door. (I never did until I went to Broadway. It takes me a while to catch on to things that are smart.)

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch
Alison Arngrim, better known as Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie. When I was little and obsessed with Little House, my mother often suggested that I should be more like Mary Ingalls. Hahahaha. I was forever destined to be somewhere halfway between Laura and Nellie, but after reading Alison's book and now seeing her show, I'm thinking that being more like Nellie wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world. Got a signed book afterward, which is currently sitting on my shelf like a shining pink beacon. Incidentally, Alison is probably my favourite celebrity on Twitter. She's super-responsive to fans and fun to watch even when she's not interacting with strangers. And seeing her and Melissa Gilbert (Laura Ingalls, back in the day) tweet to one another is priceless. Yes, they are friends in real life, and have been since the day they met, which anyone who's read Alison's book can tell you.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
I convinced my sister to see Love's Labour's Lost with me by telling her that it was fun! And they used body language! And Austin jokes! To make it more understandable for those who don't really do Shakespeare. She is still insisting that I'm a liar. Yes, being my sister is hard work. So, we went to this one with even more promises that it was mostly in modern English, and while she was less than delighted that Romeo and Juliet was mostly Shakespeare's language, she was even madder that I didn't warn her about the audience participation.

So much free Shakespeare in this
city. I love it.

Henry IV, Part I
So after that, Denise was absolutely not going to see Henry IV, especially when she heard it has more than one part. Instead I teamed up with a slightly more like-minded friend for this one, and was delighted to recognise a bunch of the actors again. That's definitely an upside to seeing so many local shows the past few years-- I've seen nearly every actor in Austin at least once. (That may be a bit of an exaggeration.)

The Importance of Being Earnest
For someone who loves the theatre as much as I do, I seem to have been the last one of my friends to see this show. How have I missed it all this time? I don't know. And wow, how many zingers did Oscar Wilde manage to cram into this show? The only downside to this show was that since the actors had to have English accents, for some of them it seemed to get in the way of their acting. (And I've seen some of them before--they're great. The accent just seemed like it gave a couple of them too much to think about.) Still, it was very fun and kept me giggling all evening.

It Shoulda Been You
It shouldn't have closed! Eagerly waiting for the cast album to be released next week. Read what I thought here.

Les Misérables

Ramin Karimloo's face on the marquee. If you've ever seen him on YouTube,
or on the 25th anniversary Les Mis concert, or anywhere else on the internet:
Yes, he really is even better in person.

I may have mentioned this one a couple of times. Per minute. To anyone who would listen. For the last three weeks.

Joe Spieldenner, who plays Grantaire and a couple other characters
(the ensemble for Les Mis is insanely versatile, and also magical at
changing costumes in a hurry). I'm grinning because 1) I was really
chuffed that I recognized him out of costume, and 2) he is an incredible actor
and also really sweet to barely-coherent fans at stage door.

Hairspray
I've seen the 1988 movie, but never the musical version until now. And wow, have I ever been missing out. Turns out I knew a bunch of the songs, but had never seen them in the correct order. This cast is crazy-good, and I once again feel super-lucky to live in a place where I can see lots of low-cost, high-quality theatre. The trip to New York was totally worth it, but it's not like I had to wander far away (as you can plainly tell) to see some great shows.

And that's it so far! Ten shows, eleven trips (since I saw Love's Labour's Lost twice). I have tickets to this year's Broadway in Austin series; the first one is The Little Mermaid, arriving at the end of September, and the national tour cast must be some kind of industry secret because I sure haven't been able to find it anywhere. Before that, I'm plotting to see West Side Story in San Antonio (another one I've never seen live, so I hope it works out), and a friend of mine is in Love Alone, which is also coming up in September.

It remains to be seen whether theatrical therapy works (I have moments, like during Les Mis when I turned to say to Chadwick, "Did Enjolras really just hand Grantaire a gun? Is he insane?" only Chadwick obviously wasn't there-- I have these moments when I think too much theatre may be making the grief worse), but I don't see me stopping any time soon. It makes it better for two or three hours at a time, and that's not a lot to ask.

Do you go to live theatre? What's your favourite show?

Look to the Rainbow

More crayon art! This one is a (slightly modified) quote from the musical Finian's Rainbow, not only because it's a quote I've loved for many years, but also as further proof that I do know about musicals that aren't Les Miserables. :D 

So, the proper quote is "follow the fellow who follows a dream," but I went for a more gender-neutral version for my own wall since the person following the dream may well be me, and I'm not a fellow. The sentiment remains the same.

And obviously the rainbow colours of this piece reflect the name of the show. I'm almost out of crayons, but not quite, so now I have to come up with something else.

The song the quote comes from:


What quote would you put on your wall?

Being Bookish

When Keely & I were making our must-see lists for New York, #2 on my list (after Ramin Karimloo, natch) was Strand Bookstore.

I've wanted to visit the Strand ever since the first time I read Dash and Lily's Book of Dares, in which the Strand is a major character in its own right. If I'd had 24 hours to spend in New York, as was my original plan, I'd probably have spent four of them at Les Mis, five at the Strand, and the rest just wandering around the city in awe.

Anyway! We visited the Museum of Modern Art on the Saturday in New York and I spent about 30 minutes in the room with the wall-length display of one of Monet's ginormous lily paintings (I love Monet, but haven't learned the names of basically anything he painted. Not even the one in my living room), and when we left, I thought about how I should just get a coffee table book of his works and maybe learn something.

So, this:

... is what I brought home from the Strand. (In addition to the magnet in the photo above.) It's gorgeous, it's huge, and it looks so pretty on my bookshelf. And yes, I've kept the price tag on it for no good reason, except that the price tag reads "Strand Book Store" and I'm not tired of looking at that yet. 

It was a toss-up between three books that finally came down to this one because I had already been thinking about it anyway. The other two I was torn between were a beautiful, annotated, hardcover Much Ado About Nothing that had gorgeous illustrations inside (and which I may still buy online, because it was that amazing) and a likewise illustrated, annotated, and all-around gorgeous The Hobbit.

(Edit: here's the Much Ado I'm talking about. Hard to see in the preview how beautiful it is, but trust me. It's fantastic.)

So it's a good thing I ran into Claude here when I did, because otherwise I would have been in the Strand a lot longer than I was.

Incidentally, while I was browsing the 18 miles of books, I overheard a conversation between two other patrons in which one of them denounced the practise of putting a photo from a movie on the cover of a book. Y'all, I found my people. They're at the Strand.

With apologies to our own glorious and beloved Book People here in Austin, of course. They get way more of my money than the Strand ever could.

What's your favourite bookstore?

When Good Resilience Goes Bad

A couple weeks ago, I did this: 

Don't ask me how. The penultimate night of Camp NaNo was taken up with an emergency room visit, the final night my boss asked me to stay late to finish something at work (it was a Friday as well as being the end of Camp NaNo, so I gave him 30 minutes and then headed out), and basically I'm pretty sure nothing I wrote during July is worth keeping.

Here's the thing: I wasn't expecting it to be worth keeping. In fact, I was expecting everything I write right now to be a dark and stormy mess of emotions that will have to be edited for clarity and probably lightened up a bit later. Instead, Sybil (my MC) has turned out to be impervious to pretty much everything.

When I started writing Sybil, I gave her emotional resilience on purpose--it's one of her traits that she shakes things off, at least in public, and is able to carry on instead of hiding under her covers every time something goes wrong. (Unlike her author, who quite frankly would happily carry a blankie and a teddy bear everywhere if that were socially acceptable behaviour for adults.) However, I wrote what was supposed to be a hugely emotional chapter that would finally show some cracks--taking Sybil more or less to her breaking point--and much to my alarm she bounced right back up again and zoomed off without so much as dusting herself off first. I'm not even sure she bothered hitting the ground.

So I tried again, and again, and--seriously, does nothing upset this girl? Is she dead inside? What does it take to knock her off her even keel?

So, obviously, at some point this will have to all be rewritten. But maybe writing isn't the outlet for my worst emotions that I thought it was. Which means I probably need to figure out where they've all been going.

It Shoulda Been You

Today is the last day for this beautiful show to be on Broadway, so it's just as well I don't have the kind of readership to drive a stampede to the ticket office, because it's too late. Which is a real bummer.

Posing with the sign before
the show. Me dressing like
the wedding party was
merely a happy coincidence.

So! When I bought tickets to see Les Misérables, I knew we'd have time for at least one more show, and I thought, "Hey, what's Sierra Boggess in right now?" And so it was that I bought tickets for It Shoulda Been You.

To start: the show description pretty much everywhere does not give away the massively massive plot twist, so neither will I. However, I will say that the writing in the first half was so incredible to build up to THE moment, with tons and tons of foreshadowing that gave absolutely nothing away, only for the audience to think, "Oooooohhhhh," when the moment arrived. At least, that's what it was like for me. (Mind you, I'm the sort of audience member who is always surprised. And reader, for that matter. Anyone who reads as much as me should be able to spot foreshadowing a lot faster than I can, but nope! I'm really good at being in the moment/suspending disbelief/gullibility.)

And I'm also not giving anything away here because I really really hope this show goes on tour or to regional theatres, even though it's closing early on Broadway, and I'd hate to give it away if the show comes near you.

Possibly my favourite line of
the whole show, when Tyne
Daly's character is explaining
to one of her daughters and new
sons-in-law how marriage works.
Indeed, the shoe begins to fit.
Source: It Shoulda Been You
Facebook page.

Seeing Sierra live was incredible; she's even more amazing in person than on YouTube. (No kidding, right?) And it was such a treat to also see Tyne Daly, Harriet Harris, and Edward Hibbert live. And as with Les Mis, I absolutely found more actors to be obsessed with. (Josh Grisetti and Montego Glover, for example, were both amazing, and I definitely want to see both of them live again someday!) And It Shoulda Been You was my first stage door experience, since we saw it before we saw Les Mis. I didn't fight my way to the front, because I was really only interested in getting Sierra to sign my program, but had a nice chat with the woman beside me while we waited.

David Hyde Pierce, who directed the show, has been saying, "You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll be home by 10!" which was true, except for the last bit, but that was mostly because we stopped for some NYC souvenirs on our way home. 'Twas brilliant.

Who Am I?

From Davide Guglielmo on
freeimages.com.

Identity is kinda one of those fundamental things that humans kind of need to navigate our way through the universe, yeah?

I managed to upend mine a bit in recent months, what with graduating and changing my job (and getting a car-- never realised before how much of my identity was tied up in being car-free) and, you know, that other thing that people are a bit nervous about mentioning in front of me.

It's in the back of my mind a lot, that my identity is in flux at the moment as I adjust to this new normal, but it comes into sharper focus when I run across TV shows about teenagers (Girls Meets World, for one) and discover to my horror how much I have in common with their teenage angst. I wasn't planning on doing this more than once in my life. At least this time I don't have raging hormones to go along with it.

One more thing to work through on this journey. Well, I was getting bored of all the other things, anyway.

S is for Sisterhood.

Believe it or not, I'm still thinking from time to time about that A to Z Challenge from 2014 that I never finished. (I totally blame grad school!) Almost there now...

Image from Goodreads.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, series, Ann Brashares.

Wish these books had been around when I was a teenager. I could have learned a lot from these girls then. As it is, having to read them as an adult, I enjoy their journey.



What's your favourite 'S' book?

Runner up: Spindle's End

Not Much to Look at, Nothing Posh

Many, many moons ago, I saw some Les Mis melted crayon art kicking around on Pinterest, said out loud that I'd like to try that, and someone gave me a bunch of old crayons they were wanting to get rid of anyway. Result!

As is my wont, I hung onto the crayons for ages before I finally went out this weekend to buy some canvas and finally get on with it. My first idea was a French flag that said "One Day More," but I changed my mind and went with a line from "One Day More" instead.

"There's a new world for the winning," in case it's not exactly readable.
My apologies to any French readers for what I've done to your flag.

This was not just a fan art project, although it obviously is fan art and it was a lot of fun doing. This was also an upcycling project. You'll see a lot of crayon art out there with beautiful, gleaming new crayons, but I didn't have any of those. And really, when it comes to Les Mis fan art, what better to use than broken crayons to build the little melty barricade? 

While choosing the red crayons, I noticed I had a lot left over, so I went ahead and worked up a "Red and Black" version, too. Once again, I backed away from the original lines I was going to use ("The blood of angry men/the dark of ages past") and went for the slightly more hopeful second half of the verse. I need hope more than despair right now.

This one obviously did not turn out so well with the letters. Not sure how or if I'll fix it. Messy, remember?
"World about to dawn" and "Night that ends at last."

 I have one more plotted for myself that's not Les Misérables themed: a rainbow background with the line "Follow the person who follows a dream" from Finian's Rainbow. That's slightly edited from the line in the actual song, where "person" is "fellow," but I'm opting for inclusiveness over fidelity to the text, being as I'm not a fellow and I may well be the one following a dream.

And I'm waiting to see if Denise wants to do a Stargate or Doctor Who melty art. Or both. Oooh--crossover!

Sticky Situation

I came home from New York with sore legs and feet from so much walking and standing around, and it resolved itself pretty quickly-- in my right leg. I waited to see if my left leg would get better, and when it was still sore and started swelling on Thursday, I gave in and started looking for a doctor.

Why? Because I had a blood clot in one of the deep veins of my leg many years ago, I recognize the symptoms, and I was really anxious to avoid another three-day hospitalization like last time. Ugh.

Here's the culprit! By some miracle,
I didn't take a selfie in the ER.
From sanja gjeneroon freeimages.com.

Here's my problem: Like many people on a fairly tight budget, medical care is for emergencies for me. I don't have a PCP right now, and didn't even have health insurance for the first couple of years I lived here. Unfortunately, not having a PCP means there's no one to order the test that would rule out a blood clot, so I was stuck with walk-in clinics. The first clinic turned me away because it was overcrowded, the second one because they didn't have the equipment to check, which left me with the oh-so-exciting option of heading to the ER. Ugh. 

To keep myself amused and upbeat, I started tweeting the experience, so I will refrain from a play-by-play here--but I finally left the ER at 10 PM with a confirmed diagnosis of a blood clot, in a shallow vein this time (translation: not the kind that's likely to send a clot to my lungs), and a prescription that I still haven't been able to have filled because I don't have a PCP. (I plan to fix that tomorrow, so no worries.) But at least I know what's wrong, and the medication should sort everything right out so I can be back to my usual walking/riding/running all over the place that I've had to put a slight hold on for now.

Not exactly the homecoming I was hoping for.

NYC, What Is It About You?

See, from time to time I can quote musicals that aren't Les Misérables!

When I first started scheming this little adventure and I was thinking I would be going alone, my plan was to get an Airbnb somewhere for a night or two, see Les Mis, visit the Strand Bookstore, and then take in whatever I could of New York in whatever time I had left. (MoMA & FAO Schwarz were high on the list, until FAO closed the week before we went. I'm still mad.) And while I agree that's a crazy way to attempt one's first trip to New York, my only reason for this trip was to see Ramin Karimloo as Valjean while I still could, so the rest could wait.

Of course, that turned out to be not quite what happened, because Keely was able to come along and "a day or two" in NYC quickly turned into a long weekend in NYC, which meant we could add a second show (It Shoulda Been You, recap of which is coming eventually, I promise!) and add a few more things to our list.

We ran across the New York City Pass and ultimately decided that it was a good way to see a whole bunch of things in a short period of time. We were able to hop from one attraction to another without feeling like we were wasting money on entrance fees to only be places for an hour or two. (And while we could have spent an entire day in places like the Met or MoMA, other things like Top of the Rock or the Empire State Building are really not places where you'd spend a whole day, no matter how much money you hand over to get in.)

So, here's what we did with our five days (I am so not looking up the links to all of these, so you're on your own for Googling):

Grand Central Station

Rockefeller Center

Top of the Rock

Central Park

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Guggenheim Museum

Times Square

It Shoulda Been You at Brooks Atkinson Theatre

The Museum of Modern Art

Les Misérables at Imperial Theatre

Discovery Times Square

Madame Tussauds

Chelsea Market

A Chelsea Market bookstore's
plea for people to stop stealing.

The High Line

City Sightseeing Cruise

Brooklyn Bridge Park

Bryant Park
Went by the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (New York Public Library), but had just missed closing time

Empire State Building

Strand Bookstore

Forbidden Planet
And Strawberry Fields in Central Park before we headed out on Monday

This is actually the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, but we
walked through Strawberry Fields to get here.

Obviously, with packing this much stuff into so short a time, I am probably the wrong person to ask for recommendations on anything. But if you do want my thoughts on what I did see, ask away & I'll do my best to answer.

But Tomorrow Never Came

Yeah, I know, I promised you other New York things. And you believed me? That was just silly. It's still coming, but I'm trying to get my photos off my phone and into a more usable spot, and in the meantime it's always a good day for more Les Misérables. Yes, believe it or not, I left things out yesterday and still have more to say.

Saturday night, Keely was reading Broadway news or something and mentioned that Kyle Jean-Baptiste had been Valjean just a couple of nights before (making Broadway history as both the youngest and the first African-American man to play Valjean). And to think of all the times that I've wondered if Ramin Karimloo wasn't a bit of a young Valjean... never mind about that, then. (Since the character ages 20 years in the course of the show, I suppose there's a wide range of right ages to be to play Valjean, after all.)

Incidentally, the people next to us in the theatre had tickets for Saturday's show without knowing anything about the cast, they didn't know Ramin is leaving soon and Alfie Boe is joining the cast--they just love Les Misérables and were able to enjoy the show without all the obsessive whatever it is that I do. While we were chatting, the guy said, "I really wasn't expecting to see a 30-year-old playing Valjean," and it took everything in me not to correct him with Ramin's actual age. (I swear, I only know it because he and I were born in the same year. I've no idea how old anyone else on Broadway is.) (Except Kyle Jean-Baptiste, but that's because it's been in the news for a couple days. I'll forget soon.) Instead, I just agreed that Ramin is young and we moved on to talking about other stuff.

Anyway, Keely said it was a good thing we hadn't gotten tickets for Thursday, I said I wouldn't have done anyway since I knew Ramin always has Thursdays off, Keely might have said something about me being a weirdo stalker. (Just kidding, I'm the one who says that. But she wasn't surprised that I was so well informed.)

After the 25th anniversary of Les Mis in 2010, the show has been re-orchestrated, re-imagined, and re-whatevered so that there are significant differences from what the show is now versus what it was the first couple of times I saw it--the characteristic turntable, for example, is gone. (See more changes through the years in this article.) I noticed the Broadway version also has a couple lines from the 2012 movie that I've never heard on stage before. Every show is in a constant state of tweaking, obviously, because that's how you get an amazing product night after night-- by refining what's not working, changing things as needed, etc. But the changes as the show gets older are one reason I keep going back to see it every couple of years--it's literally never been the same show twice.

One final thought before I really do leave this alone for a while. In the 2012 movie, as well as the book, Courfeyrac is Gavroche's big brother among Les Amis. In the stage version, it's usually Grantaire who looks after Gavroche. I don't know if this is a change from before-- the first couple of Grantaires I saw were comic relief, with hardly any emotional swings (although "Drink With Me" was always a low point). At least one of them sat at a table drinking throughout the barricade scene, and that's where he was shot, so there wasn't a lot of time for noticing whether he interacted with the smallest Ami. For that matter, there's not a lot to distinguish movie Grantaire from the other Amis, except that he climbs the stairs at the end to be killed alongside Enjolras. (Sob!) So for Grantaire and Gavroche to have that connection on the stage does make Grantaire more interesting, more emotional and less comic, even if it does leave Courfeyrac without a lot to do except take the watch since they might attack before it's light. (And by the way, it was in part Grantaire's interactions with Gavroche at Saturday's show that made me go looking to see if this was the same actor I'd seen before.)

And with that, I really am done. Other New York adventures still coming, once my phone starts to cooperate.

Here They Sang About Tomorrow

This post is going to be long. Here's the short version: I went to see Les Misérables on Broadway over the weekend, was completely blown away, as I so often am, and am now here to tell you about it. Feel free to skip to the end if you're not into the details, of which there are many.

Outside the Imperial
Theatre. Yes, he does
rip his shirt open during
the show. Yes, he does
work out a lot.

So! It all started when Ramin Karimloo, who is currently playing Valjean, announced that he's leaving the show at the end of August and he has no plans to play Valjean again. So I called up my friend Keely, we started plotting, and the upshot was that we planned a fun weekend in New York that would include watching Les Misérables, and for good measure, we threw in a trip to It Shoulda Been You. (Yes, I absolutely should have known better than see two plays in a single weekend. My brain is more addled than usual.)

Here we go, all the stuff I loved:

Earl Carpenter (Javert): I had already bought our tickets before he joined the cast, but was pretty excited to see him. He was one of Chadwick's favourite actors, and sometime a few weeks ago I thought, "Oh, I haven't told Chad yet that I'm going to see Earl Carpenter! Oh..." So it was special for me to see him, even though, and perhaps especially because, Chadwick couldn't.

Brennyn Lark (Éponine): Holy smokes, what a gorgeous voice. And she came to stage door, so I have her autograph on my playbill.

I've never been to stage
door before this weekend.
Definitely going to do that
more often.

Chris McCarrell (Marius): Early on in my Les-Mis-loving days, all I cared about was Marius and Cosette, but once I started paying attention to other characters (i.e., Enjolras), I realised that Marius can be kind of annoying, a perception that was not helped by reading the book, where he's even worse. This Marius, however, is delightful and not annoying. He sings a phenomenal "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables." Also, he's quite possibly the prettiest Marius I've ever seen.

Wallace Smith (Enjolras): Enjolras will always be my favourite. Wallace Smith has a beautiful voice, fantastic stage presence, and is altogether awesome.

So, a quick note: in 2012, the national tour of Les Misérables came through Austin, and Chadwick and I went to go see it. Back then, inexplicably, I hadn't yet started my current tradition of following cast members on Twitter right after seeing the show... which is a pity, because if I had, I'd have been a lot more familiar with a lot more of the cast that I got to see this weekend. Also inexplicably, the 2012 Les Mis is the only show that I've seen in the last 15 years that I don't still have the playbill for (or if I do, it's hidden deep in the bottom of goodness-knows-what). Based on some intense Googling the last couple of days, at least four people I saw in that cast in 2012 are on Broadway now. (And yes, I really am that obsessive. If it helps, I'm like this with all my hobbies.) And with that in mind...

My new favourite Grantaire.
One result of all this intense
Googling is that I've been
reminded that I of all people
shouldn't make assumptions
about someone else's age.

Joseph Spieldenner (Grantaire): is one of the people I'm almost positive I saw in 2012, also as Grantaire. Why am I so sure of this? Chadwick and I were up in the rafters for that show, so we couldn't see faces, just body language, but I was so impressed by that Grantaire's acting choices (which were significantly different than any other Grantaire we'd seen up to that point) that I talked about him most of the way home. On Saturday, it started kicking against my attention that this Grantaire was acting in similar ways, but since I was close enough to see his face, my first impression was more about how emotional he was. (What I actually thought to myself was, "Wow, this is a really weepy Grantaire.") It wasn't until I got back to the hotel and Googled a few of the cast that I saw that he was in the touring company about that time--and the other shoe dropped. I was so curious that I even tweeted him to ask, which I normally don't like to do, because that's one step too close to creepy stalker fandom for me. (Although given the length of this paragraph, that ship may have sailed.)

Anyway, after seeing some 2012 tour press and one magical cast list, I'm almost positive it's the same guy. I spent some time searching for the old playbill, with no luck, and finally had to stop to wonder why this is so important. This weekend, this experience of my first Broadway musical(s), were more things that Chadwick and I should have had together but didn't. But since we were both impressed by Grantaire in 2012, if it was Joseph Spieldenner we saw together, that's one less thing he missed and one more thing we shared. And that's why it matters. It's a small thing, but I'm hanging on to small things right now.

And speaking of... "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables": It was one of Chadwick's favourite songs, and that alone was enough to make me pay extra attention and already be a bit emotional before it started. At the end of "Turning," the women all left candles sitting on the stage, which had me wondering what was happening next. All the students who died on the barricade come on stage during "Empty Chairs", and each one took one of the candles and blew it out before leaving the stage again. My description can't possibly do it justice, so let's just say it's a good thing I had a hankie. It was a powerful moment.

"Lovely Ladies": This has always been the saddest part of the show for me, ever since the first time the line, "Only joking, dearie knows her place," first registered in my brain during a show (it's not in the soundtrack I own). Incidentally, you know Bamatabois, the guy who gets Fantine arrested after this song? Also played by Joseph Spieldenner. I was in awe when I re-read the program and saw that-- I mean, I get that the audience isn't supposed to catch on to who all each member of the ensemble plays, but I try to keep track of them on purpose because I like being awed by the range of abilities Les Mis actors have. In this case? I did not even notice, because the characters were so different. (And Bamatabois was standing right in front of me, close enough for me to see all the blood on his face.) I'm still both blown away and heartbroken at the same time that such a captivating Grantaire is also such a vile bad guy.

I was cool with just getting a pic with
the poster instead of getting one
with Ramin at stage door. His
autograph is one of the ones on my
playbill, but no live pic. 

And finally... Ramin Karimloo (Jean Valjean): He's the reason I went, so naturally I was not surprised at how amazing his performance was. I saw him in concert a couple of years ago on his Broadgrass tour, which was delightful, but seeing him live and in character is something else altogether. Three hours is just not long enough, which is probably why I've spent the last three days in a fog thinking about this show. I'm definitely grabbing any chance I get to see him live again.

So, if you're still with me, you deserve a medal! Unfortunately, Thénardier stole them all. Anyway, that was my experience at Les Misérables on Broadway. Totally worth it, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

And since Jenni asked so nicely, other highlights of my New York trip are coming soon. I did see a few things in between trips to the theatre.

Perchance to Dream

I have dozens of pictures of my
grandmother and I together. Can I find
any of them? Of course not. So, my
granny is on the left and her mother
(who passed away a few years ago) is
on the right. Did I inherit the genes to
have such nice dark hair well into my
70s? I did not. 

I don't know if I ever mentioned this on the blog, but my paternal grandmother passed away two weeks before Chadwick did. Denise & I made a mad dash up to Indiana when the docs said she had less than a week left, only to arrive a few hours too late to see her alive. Of course, we knew when we saw her last September that we were probably saying good-bye, and that this is one of the life choices we made when we decided that a couple states' distance never hurt anybody, but that doesn't make it any easier.

But of course, that loss was overshadowed by the much closer and much less expected loss a couple of weeks later, so much so that I have a hard time remembering that she's gone. When I ordered Mother's Day flowers this year, I was halfway through typing in her address before I remembered that no one was there to receive them. I've lost count of how many times I've thought about calling her, only to realise that hers is one of the phantom numbers in my phone. And, just this week, I've started dreaming about her again.

For years and years, this has been my favourite pic of my
paternal grandparents. My granddad died when I was five
months old. He & I shared a birthday, and I get physically
ill when I think about all the joint birthday parties we missed
out on and all the fun we could have had. So I try not to think
about it a lot. (My dad is the kid on the far left that Grandpa
has such a tight hold on. If you know my dad, you know that
was probably out of necessity.) 

I've started dreaming about Chadwick, too, which has led to a bout of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. I only see him when I'm sleeping, I can only talk to him then-- or rather, that's the only time he can answer me. And that being the case, why on earth would I ever want to wake up?

I'm not really surprised I'd start dreaming about Grandma and Chadwick at about the same time, considering how close together their deaths were. My grandmother and I don't really talk in my dreams; she's just there, the same presence she's been all my life. The reality that I'll never again open my mailbox and find one of her letters is starting to settle over me. Even into her 80s, she had beautiful handwriting, the kind that's so pretty it's almost unreadable. :) Even into her 80s, she wrote long letters full of the kind of insider information about various family members that none of them would ever tell me themselves. Now my only news source is what they're willing to tell me on Facebook.

No dreams can bring back what we've lost.

Wow, July 1?

I'm 14 hours into Camp NaNoWriMo and I still haven't decided what I'm writing. Thank goodness for the variable word count goals during Camp NaNo. Missing a couple days won't hurt too much!

(Yes, I know, blog posts from me four days in a row. There must be some sort of apocalypse happening.)

I just dug this up off my blog archives.
I don't remember where I found it.
I can't narrow it down in Google images.
Basically, this is not my pic, so thanks
to whoever made it.
At least there's a copyright on it.

My real reason to post today, though, isn't to be frantic about Camp NaNo. Rather, I'm here to say HAPPY CANADA DAY!! to all my bloggy friends from the north. I hope you're having a fantastic holiday. If you're Canadian and Camp NaNo-ing, then may your celebrations inspire you to write like you've never written before.

So, my narrowed-down choices for Camp NaNo? Either carry on with my thing about a professional knitter that I abandoned during NaNoWriMo last year, or pick up my favourite set of characters who will never see the light of day but who are so much fun to write and see what I can do with them. I may have to flip a coin.

One Last Thing...

... and then I'll be back to blogging about whatever comes to mind instead of Supreme Court cases.

The positive comments I've gotten from Christians have well outnumbered the negative ones. Some of them from surprising people. Most of them have been shared privately, because not everyone is in a position where they can rock the boat without losing the influence they have, so they have to be more subtle. I get that and totally respect those who can do subtlety.

I speak what I do, at least this time, because I can. I'm not going to lose my job over this. I may lose friends, and while I'm willing to fight to keep friendships intact, my best friend in the whole world is already gone beyond reach, so it's not like I have to be scared of the worst that can happen there. A bunch of strangers have suddenly found out how disjointed and nonsensical my writing can be when I'm trying to get a lot of thoughts out in a hurry, but hey, better I hear that now than after I've self-pubbed something awful, yes?

But here's something: I'm not brave. I'm frustrated. I'm not a good ally. I came along late in the game to ask people to find something else to complain about for a while. I haven't even bothered reading the comments I've gotten on Facebook past the first few, because the private messages I was getting were a lot more interesting. These are not the actions of a brave person. It's just me, and I'm pretty boring.

Anyway. So Camp NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. I've never done any kind of NaNoWriMo without also having background homework. I don't know how one does just NaNo, but I'm about to find out.

Disappointment

It took me a day and a half to change my Facebook photo after I first thought about it, and that's because it takes me a little bit of time to decide whether it's worth it to upset people that I care about.

From lusi on freeimages.com.

Goodness knows I know what it's like to be disappointed by friends. After years of treating friendship far too lightly, I finally learned to give more gravity to how I approach other people. Gravity can hurt when things go in an unexpected direction. The people I care about are only human, after all.

Which leads me to now, and considering who among my dearest friends, people whose friendship is well worth fighting for, would be surprised by me taking a stand they disagreed with. Who would have a hard time with this. Who might need to step back from our online friendship for a while.

So yesterday's post was in part the beginning of a conversation. A conversation about whether friendship can survive disagreement. An acknowledgment that people may want to stop talking to me for a while. A chance for them to see that I don't do things that I know might cause a rift without putting some thought into it first.

I mostly haven't heard from those friends yet. Maybe they didn't notice (I don't really think their worlds revolve around me, after all), maybe they're less surprised than I thought they would be, or maybe they just need time to think things over, too.

Because friendship, when you agree AND when you disagree, is worth fighting for.

Why I Changed My Facebook Photo

Like many others, I've changed my Facebook and Twitter photo to this:

Want one like it? Get yours here.

... to the shock and dismay of many who know me and apparently thought they had me pegged.

I knew people would be shocked. I knew some would be downright angry and disappointed. And I know some people will probably put this down to my grieving and being really confused right now, etc. etc.

The thing is, my position is actually that the government should get out of marriage altogether. We've built so many systems around whether people are married or not (I've spent years checking that box on oh-so-many forms), but I remain unconvinced that it's the government's business who I'm spending my life with.

So much for what I think about that. Why change my public photo and upset so many friends and family members?

1. I have a lot of good friends who get a lot of ugliness from people who call themselves Christians. It's time for me to stand with them for a while.

2. I see so much nonsense, from all ranges of the ideological spectrum, on my feed every day. And while I'm chuffed to have such diverse friends, it's also wearing on me. I have an "unfollow without remorse" policy, meaning that if I'm just getting tired of what someone is saying and can't read another word, I click the button to get them out of my newsfeed. But I'm tired of doing all the work, so I'm using this to weed out the friends list a bit.

3. I think it's well past time for Christians to stop spending so much energy on this and redirect that energy into other things instead of acting like the whole Bible is about gay marriage and abortion. Let's go picket outside the Golden Corral for a while (gluttony). Let's protest at the Lexus dealership and the Neiman Marcus (materialism). Let's stop being okay with people driving to our churches in cars that cost more than some of our neighbours make in a year, and walking into our sanctuaries wearing clothes so expensive that the money spent could have fed a family of four for two weeks. Let's go after the very real problems of poverty and homelessness, to name only two, in our cities instead of thinking it's their own fault for getting into that mess (loving your neighbour, doing for the least of these... I seem to recall Jesus saying something about that).

Do I believe that changing my Facebook and Twitter photo and shocking a few of my friends (some of them in a good way, btw-- there are people who didn't know I had it in me to take a stand!) will accomplish this? Of course not. I'm a lot more likely to get result #2 than result #3. But my silence is not always golden, and in this, I'll risk having fewer friends for the sake of using my voice.

(FYI, I won't delete comments for disagreement, but I will for ugliness. And if you leave me a long rant, I'm probably not going to read it, because I have other things to do. To paraphrase Javert, "Save your breath and save your keystrokes.")

A Small Forest

It would probably be easier
to just have a bonfire.
Image from mordoc on
freeimages.com.

You hear stories, especially on cable TV, about people who manage to live completely off the grid with no paper trail documenting their life. I suppose there are many reasons that kind of lifestyle would be attractive, but right now, there's just one that is calling out to me: No paperwork.

Seriously, why does life take so much paperwork? Even death takes a ton of paperwork. I have days when I feel like Chadwick's life has been reduced to a file drawer full of paper. This human with a huge personality and a capacity to care so much about so many things is now a never-ending series of pages with the "Deceased" box checked and my name on the "Surviving Spouse" line. Except it will end, one of these days, and I'll be left with memories and a file folder. 

And even though all my bills are paperless, in my attempt to stop this single-handed deforestation, I have a box of notices that needs to be shredded and recycled. A project that I need to finish soon, mind you, because I'm going to need a place to store that file folder.

If that's all I have left, I'm hanging on to it as tightly as I can.

Library Love

Image from Goodreads.

I just finished reading This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians can Save Us All, by Marilyn Johnson. And it's fantastic. Biggest takeaway: Learn more about the Connecticut Four, who are the subject of Chapter Five of this book. They fought back when the FBI demanded information about who'd been using the library computers. Learn about them-- this is the kind of thing we need to know.

If you read the Goodreads reviews, you'll see the responses are mixed. The points about the book being disjointed and not having a clear idea of what it's about are fair enough. Especially interesting, IMO, are the reviews from librarians, since this book is about their field.

However! I loved it, in no small part because libraries have kept me reading my entire life. I just dashed off a Goodreads review of Full House, a book I read as a freshman in high school that was solidly among my list of books to never, ever take home, because my parents would have freaked out. Our fantastic little library in my hometown kept me sane as a teen, allowing me to escape from the weird that is high school and my parents' insistence on keeping the TV running all the time. (Sidebar: when my family raced to my side after Chadwick passed away, they went something like 36 hours without the TV on because we just don't watch it that much, until my father finally couldn't take it any longer and turned it on. And that's what happens to people who don't spend enough time in a library.)

As much as I would love to own many of the books that I read, as much as I want to support authors, my book buying budget is sadly limited to buying just a handful of books a year, and in recent years that budget has been entirely spent on textbooks. So I use the library as my second bookshelf, so to speak, until such time as I'm independently wealthy and can build my own library with a small bedroom and kitchen attached.

Do you use your local library? What's your favorite thing about it? If you don't use the library-- why not?

Whether There Will Be Weather

Tomorrow is a "one water bottle, two layers of
sunscreen" day,  for those keeping score at home.

The last few days have been bad ones, in terms of getting through the day still standing. In terms of diving deeper into the soul-crushing side of grief. In terms of, I just don't want to do this anymore.

So when I checked the weather a few minutes ago, my second thought after, "Ugh, hot," was "Ugh, what does it matter?" It's something that seems so important, what the skies are doing to us at any moment, but checking it right now just looks like another weirdo human thing I do out of habit, a weirdo human thing Chad will never do again.

And of course, my more rational side knows that truthfully it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, what the weather is like in Austin one day in June, but tomorrow morning at 8 AM when I'm on a bike to ride to work, it's kind of something I need to know. And even more so at 5 PM when I'm headed back, so I know how many bottles of water I should take and how many layers of sunblock I'll need to apply.

But then I get home, and he's not here, and the 5 PM things pale in comparison to the overnight emptiness in my room. When will I get off this sad-go-round, I wonder?

Post title is a quote from The Whether Man in The Phantom Tollbooth: "It's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be." Indeed.