Playing

On Friday night Beth came over to hang out for the evening. We cooked a dinner using ingredients that each of us had on hand. We roasted a bunch of veggies (butternut squash, turnip, carrots, potatoes, beets), simmered some wild rice, chopped up a little salad and munched on cheese and crackers and grapes to tide us over while everything cooked. It was fantastic, if we do say so ourselves!

Beth and I are each sporting an apron in this photo. Beth is wearing a vintage Little Ceasar's Pizza apron that was purchased when we visited her, Mark and Jerri in Chicago. Their neighborhood had some good stoop sales. I am wearing my new apron that I got from Etsy. It arrived in the mail on Friday so of course I had wear it for our evening of cooking. Perdoozy made it.

Beth came over at an exciting time in our house. After dinner we played Cribbage and Wordsearch, but our game kept being interrupted by pets. This is our first weekend with Fanny. Friday night was her first chance to spend time in the house with the dogs out of their crates. She was a pretty brave little kitty. I had been worried that she was going to spend all her time under the bed, so it was great to see her showing some of that curiousity that cats are famous for.

On Saturday morning Paul and I got ourselves out of bed early to meet up with Jen and Jamie for breakfast at the Neighborhood Restaurant. No photos, but if I had taken a photo it would have been of a review they have framed on their wall. It said something to the effect of "the quality never rises above standard but what they lack in quality they make up for in quantity." Now if that doesn't warrant bragging, what does?!

Saturday evening we had tickets to see the Bread and Puppet Theater's show called the Divine Reality Comedy (the photo above is of the artwork they had displayed before the play started). I have been wanting to see them perform for quite a while as their shows always sound interesting and I love puppet shows for adults. So, when I heard about this show, I got tickets right away. It ended up being a sold out show, but truth be told, I wish I hadn't gotten tickets!

I don't generally like to use my blog to say negative things but every now and then I gotta let it out. This play was such a let down. It was held in the Cyclorama, which is an amazing space but they didn't take the space into account when staging the show. All of the seating was on the same level as the actors. A lot of the time the action was lost to everyone but the people in the first few rows because it wasn't possible to see what was going on. Also, I just didn't get most of the play. It was so out there and so symbolic at times and then they would throw in something so literal that it was ridiculous.

Towards the end I was so ready for it to be over but it just went on and on and on with all of the actors moving in slow motion (literally moving in slow motion!). At this point in the play I heard a kid near me ask his mom, "What's going on?" and not surprisingly his mom couldn't answer the question. Through the play I kept thinking, "this has to get better." I looked at Paul a few times throughout the play to see if I was the only one who felt clueless about what we were watching. He was sitting there all straightfaced looking engaged. Turns out that after watching the first few minutes of the play, he decided he'd rather spend the time daydreaming about superpowers.

Let this be a lesson to me. Always bring your knitting! If I had had my knitting I think it would have been so much easier to get through. Paul would say that the lesson is that we need to have an agreed upon signal so that if something sucks this bad, we can let each other know that we want to walk out. I might be too polite to walk out on a performance, but I will definitely knit through one.