Beowabbit

plumtreeblossom and I have been watching a lot of really interesting stuff lately. ( This is kind of long, so click here to read a little more about The Imitation Game, the third Hobbit movie, Big Eyes, Crossing the Line, and the first episode of Ken Burns’ Baseball. )

(Only about half the photos are in thumbnails here, so you may want to go check out the set on Flickr.)

Having a wonderful weekend with plumtreeblossom. I got to see closing night of the fabulous and very funny Theatre@First production of Twelfth Night. Congratulations to director Ari and to a wonderful cast and crew (including a bunch of excellent actors new to Theatre@First). Then after strike we went to the cast party which was delightful (and yummy, which was good, because I realized on my way out of the house to go see the show that I hadn't had dinner!).

We had to leave a bit early so we could get up this morning early enough to have dim sum with bitty and bubblebabble and a bunch of their friends while they’re in town. (We were still half an hour late to that, but we got to see people, which we wouldn’t have managed if we’d stayed up like the party people we wish we were.) Was wonderful to see them!

And then we went and saw a movie. We went to the theater knowing nothing about any of the films that were playing; one was a sequel to something whose original I had at least heard of, even if I hadn’t seen it and hadn’t realized that there was a sequel, and a couple others that I’d vaguely heard of, or whose franchises I’d vaguely heard of, but then plumtreeblossom noticed that one that was about to start had James Gandolfini in it (in his last lead before he died), so we saw Enough Said, and we loved it! The acting and directing were really good — the dialogue (especially in awkward situations) was very naturalistic, and we left the theater sort of feeling like the characters were a bunch of people we knew. Highly recommended. (And I’m not just saying that because as a middle-aged fat guy I like seeing James Gandolfini as a romantic lead. :-)

Last night my beloved wuzzle took me on the Revels’ Harbor Cruise and Sing, and we had a truly fabulous time! Neither of us quite knew what we were in for; we both envisioned something like an smaller, but still concert-like, Christmas Revels performance aboard ship, but it was basically a sea-chantey singalong. It was wonderful! It really touched a chord in me (heh, heh) because I had a group of friends in college who used to get together on a fairly regular basis and sing folk songs (including some of the same sea chanteys we sang last night). It was just wonderful, and very romantic. I love being on the water. And I love my sweet honeywuzzle who knows how to make me so very happy.

(Photos to follow, BTW.)

As I posted yesterday, auditions for PMRP’s Hallowe’en special featuring “Ghost Hunt” and my adaptation of “Night of the Living Dead” are this coming Monday and Tuesday. The sides and other files (availability forms, etc.) are now up! Everything relevant is linked from the main auditions page, but in case you have trouble finding the links, here are the role descriptions (and an explanation of what being a Foley artist and performing live sound effects entails), and PDFs of the sides and other forms are available by clicking on the slightly misleading “Download PDF File” link on the “Documents & Files” page (which takes you to a page with a list of files which you can download or add to your Google Drive if you use that).

It would be great if you could print out your own copies of the forms (and either print out or have on a phone or tablet the sides) in advance if you can, but we’ll have copies if you don’t.

Hope to see a bunch of you at auditions!

Congratulations to everyone involved in The Baltimore Waltz. It was a great show, funny and poignant. plumtreeblossom and I are going back to see it next week, and I’m sure we’ll notice lots of things we missed this time around.

I can’t believe I haven’t hawked this before now, but plumtreeblossom and I are both involved in PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular² live-radio-drama event. plumtreeblossom is reprising her rôle as Billy in “Red Shift: Crisis of the Cuddlykins”, a spoof of Flash Gordon- or Buck Rogers-style serials, and I’ve been directing (in my directorial début!) audioboy’s radio adaptation of the classic 1954 movie Them!. Shows are April 5, 6 (matinée and evening show), 11, 12, and 13th in Davis Square, and a special matinée April 21st at the MIT museum. More details are on the PMRP site. My cast is awesome (and so is plumtreeblossom’s, of course; it has her in it!) and it should be a tremendously fun time.

(For the two or three of you who haven’t read me and others talk about PMRP, the concept is that we present a radio drama as if broadcast over the air in the Golden Age of Radio, but on stage in front of a live audience. Most of our shows — this one definitely included — have live Foley sound effects, and we’ve got some awesome ones. Come see us!)

Mediaeval word puzzles, courtesy of Retronaut. I can’t quite tell whether they’re actually puzzles of some sort or just passages written in a grid like Seek-and-Find. They’re not that; they’re legible Latin left-to-right, but I suspect there’s something deeper hidden in the layout. (The phrasing seems a little odd, and the lack of spaces — the letterforms are clearly from a time when spaces would have been used — and features like the consistent use of Q alone for QU suggest some kind of puzzle.) The site where I found them doesn’t have much information; anybody whose Latin (or patience) is better than mine want to take a guess at what the puzzle is?

(This is a little more retro than Retronaut’s usual fare, but they have some interesting stuff.)

I had a mild cold for some of the show two-and-three weekends ago, but I thought I was solidly over it by the end of the run. Unfortunately, it came back, with new symptoms, early last week. (Or perhaps I picked up something new to replace it in the green room — a bunch of the cast were sick, some of them pretty badly.)

Anyway, that got worse over the course of the week, and I ended up going home early on Thursday, and staying home on Friday.

Friday night plumtreeblossom came over to take care of me. (We’d already had a date planned, but we decided that with my hacking cough a nice dinner at a restaurant with lots of other diners was maybe not the best idea, so we picked up some take-out.)

After eating, we looked for something to watch on Netflix. plumtreeblossom said she was interested in something historical, and I asked if Shakespeare counted as historical. She said it did, and we ended up watching Great Performances’ 2010 production of Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart as Macbeth. The text was all Shakespeare, but the setting evoked a mid-20th-century fascist state with Macbeth as mad dictator. It was just spectacular. Although clearly done on a pretty low budget, it was visually stunning. The cinematography was wonderful. The acting was amazing — Stewart’s, of course, but also that of the other actors, none of whom we recognized. I felt like you could subtract the Shakespeare play and still be left with a great work of art. plumtreeblossom posted her own review of it here. See it if you can. It’s available on Netflix streaming and Amazon Instant Video.

This morning, we had a social event planned that we were supposed to be hosting, but I was clearly too sick, and unfortunately it was clear that plumtreeblossom was coming down with this too. :-/ So we scrambled in the morning to get in touch with some of the other attendees, and we hope it went off all right without us. plumtreeblossom went home, and I’ve had a quiet day at home watching more Netflix with my kitty and puttering around on the internet. I’m generally feeling better, but the coughing fits have gotten more violent (although less frequent). I really want to just wash my lungs out with warm water. (The vaporizer seems to be helping quite a bit.)

It’s been so long since I posted what was going on in my life that I’ve got a lot to catch up on. Apologies for filling up your F’list. If you’re lucky, I’ll run out of steam and you won’t have to plow through all of it.

But before I start trying to catch up, I have to at least put my fabulous weekend of food, arts, and love with my honeywuzzle into (metaphorical) bullet points.

Food: Saturday dinner was beef, carrots, and potatoes in the crockpot. (Also a sliced onion, but that didn’t come out very well the way I cooked it; next time I might go back to French onion soup.) The base was (originally alcoholic) apple cider.

Sunday morning my wuzzle made me something amazing that had just popped into her head the other day: pineapple upside-down pancakes! They were awesome. There’s a photo and some description in her journal.

Arts: On Saturday we saw Cirque du Soleil: Totem, which is currently touring in Boston. It was spectacular and lavish and stunning and impressive, but it also had some race and gender/power stuff in it that made me very uncomfortable. And unfortunately the acts that were technically most spectacular happened to be the ones that bugged me the most in that way. I had read a little bit about that before I went, and through the first part (before the intermission) I was thinking to myself, well, yeah, there’s some weird ethnic fetishization here and there, but all in all it’s not as bad as I’d feared. But oh, my, the second half made up for it! I hope to get time and mental energy to write more about this at some point, but given how unlikely that is, for now I’ll just point you to— oh, wait, I can’t; that’s a locked entry. Well, this YouTube video will give you a notion of what I’m talking about, although I don’t think you can see enough of the costumes in that to get a full sense of the spectacular wrongness. And one of the trapeze acts involved a woman being led blindfolded to a man on a trapeze, and then finding herself lifted into the air with him. She resists his advances for a while, but it’s all OK in the end because no means maybe and maybe means yes and she ends up happily acquiescing. OK, circus (like opera) is not where I would go for originality or emotional truth or serious discourse about power and consent, but really? In 2012? (That was another one of the ones that was just stunning and beautiful and impressive as a piece of circus art — lots of instances of her dropping and him catching her by an ankle or a wrist, for instance — that was marred for me by the politics of the thin veneer of narrative.) And I found it more frustrating because so many of the acts didn’t have stuff like that that bothered me, and I wish I’d been able to just revel in the spectacle and enjoy all of them. All that said, I am still very glad we went and had a fabulous time. EDIT: This YouTube video gives a bit of a flavour of the show. (The Sioux hoop dance you see a bit of in that video was apparently actually done by Sioux hoop dancers and done in consultation with some office of the Sioux Nation; that’s not the horribly wrong roller-skating bit I’m talking about above.)

On Sunday we saw the Randolph Theater Company’s performance of Avenue Q, which was spectacular and hilarious and a great demonstration of the fact that racism in art doesn’t bother me nearly as much, if at all, when it’s consciously (even if frivolously) being addressed as a topic of the work.

Love: See above about the pineapple upside-down pancakes. While she was cooking me sweet love in a frying pan, I was doing her laundry. (The dryer at her house is busted, and three flights down from her apartment anyway.) And the first cosmos of the season blossomed this weekend while she was here; my flowers date from her giving me some wildflower seeds (notably cosmos) as a gift early in our relationship so they have a bit of a special meaning for us.

There was also a conversation in the car about cannibalism (with a detour into black pudding) which reminded me how well suited we are to one another. I love this wuzzle!

Um, I guess that was a bit longer than bullet points. Sorry!