"A NIght At The Opera"

Spent a good part of the weekend attending plays. Friday night, Wendy, Tim, and I went to DC to see a friend of ours from the church choir in The Mikado, a Gilbert & Sullivan opera that was pretty damn impressive. Musically, you really couldn't beat it; our one complaint was that the director decided to "augment" the original script with some jokes about current US politics. As a result, several moments were like a musical version of Jay Leno. The real problem was that the contemporary jokes didn't gel well with the stuff Gilbert and Sullivan wrote, so they fell kinda flat. Honestly, it wasn't necessary to bring those in. But overall, the play was quite entertaining, especially since it only cost us ten bucks apiece (which is about what you'd pay for a movie anymore, so it was a pretty good deal).

We almost didn't get to see the play, though. When I went online to look up directions to the place, I used the address from a little e-flyer that Felicity (the friend we were there to see) sent me. Unfortunately, the address on there was for an office the group putting on the show had, so we were on the wrong side of the city. What's more, I paid $15 for parking at this wrong location. Luckily, we ran into some good fortune: a girl who worked in the office next door to where we went looked up the correct address for us, and the guys in the parking garage refunded us our total fee. We ended up missing the first 20 minutes or so of the play, but we were still able to follow what was happening.

Saturday afternoon, I wandered around DC (again) with Michelle and a couple of her friends. We mostly went up there to visit the Corcoran Museum to see the big Andy Warhol exhibit they had going. My string of bizarrely good luck held true: we got in for free because it was family weekend. We ended up making a small donation anyway, though, just for the sake of it. The exhibit was interesting, though I'm still not entirely convinced that I really care much for Warhol's work. I think he was mostly just a bullshit artist, pulling different stunts and trying different weird things to see how long it would be before someone just said, "Okay, enough is enough, that's just absurd," and no one ever got around to calling him on it. I won't deny his impact on art or popular culture, because to do so would be rather stupid, but I don't necessarily care for most of his stuff and I don't really fully understand most of it. If taking a couple of Polaroids of knives sitting on a white countertop is art, then let me go buy film for my old Polaroid camera right now.

Saturday night, Wen, Tim, and I went to see a local high school perform a play called Urinetown. We ended up getting into this show for free because of some pass thing Wendy has and because no one stops you when you act like you have every right to be where you are. The show sold out as we were standing in line to get tickets, so instead of leaving with everyone else in line, we marched up, Wendy showed the usher at the door her pass, and we walked right in unhindered. The show itself was interesting for several reasons: the set design and execution was spectacular, the chroreography was top-notch, and the play itself was fairly original and had a couple of nice twists (like the hero dying and the good guys losing in the end, but as the narrator commented a couple of times, "this isn't a nice show"). It was billed as something very edgy, but having seen it, I don't know that it was particularly provacative. Sure, it had a bit of language and some sexually suggestive lines, but the songs were pretty standard musical fare and the play itself was pretty straight forward. Entertaining, most assuredly, but not without flaws (the singers, while good, weren't particularly strong).

Sunday's itenerary is pretty full. We're going to church in the morning and then heading directly to Wendy's school to build on the set. At some point, we'll come back to the apartment and I'll hopefully wash the rest of my laundry and call my grandmother to wish her a happy birthday.

So yeah, full weekend. Monday is a teacher workday at school, so I'll be doing a few parent-teacher conferences and getting my grades figured out (and a lot of other administrative paperwork-type things). Tuesday is some sort of workshop/conference thing that I really don't want to attend, but I don't really have a choice.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Blue Mountain, "Generic America"