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CATCHING UP30 April, 2018Today was definitely low key. I called Atria in the morning and learned that my mother is still coughing a lot, but she is taking her Tamiflu and that the facility is still on lockdown, so I couldn't go to visit her. They may be free tomorrow, we'll see. With the day stretched out in front of me, I decided to catch up on Homeland. I watched the show for the first 3 or 4 seasons, but soon got tired of the intrigue (necessitating dialog I couldn't understand) and gave up. But I recently watched Mandy Patinkin on Morning Joe and he and Mika got into an animated discussion about the series and she kept saying it was the only show she watched and that this season was the best ever. I normally hate picking up a multi-season show late in its run, but I decided to check out episode 1 of season 7 and was hooked.
Finally the action is on our own shores and concerns Russia's attempts to mess things up. It was all depressingly familiar, but the thing that's interesting, Patinkin said, was that all the things you'd assume were coming from the newspapers of the day, were actually written long before and filmed before they made headline news. I watched 2 episodes in the morning and then we went to check all the work that Ned and Marta and Marta's nieces have been doing on the house Marta's mother owns in Davis, where Marta grew up. Her mother hasn't lived there for many years and it has been rented, but she's decided to renovate it and put it on the market, so Ned has been overseeing things and doing a lot of the work himself. I'm very impressed with what a "house guy" our son has become and all the tricks of the trade he has learned doing house work, like building my office and some other projects he has helped friends with. We came back home and I spent the next 3 hours watching Homeland and I am now caught up to this week's episode which is the next-to-last in the season. And yes, it has been a very good season. Last night we went to review a show called Gutenberg! the Musical! which is by a brand new theater group in town, Bike City Theatre Company. Problem is that they have no theater, so they are performing in several different venues for each performance -- 2 different breweries, a music store, and an art gallery. We saw them at Root of Happiness Kava Bar. I don't know what Kava is, but apparently it's a new "in" thing in Davis. Fortunately we did not have to buy anything to see the show! They are also trying to be ecologically correct, so there are no printed programs, but a QR code you can scan which will bring the program to your cell phone (I found this is a real pain in the butt when you are trying to write a review). But the show itself was hilariously funny, madcap zaniness for 90 minutes (including an intermission). It's about two playwrights who have written what they think is going to be the next big Broadway show and they are showing it at a backer's audition (us) to see if anyone might be interested in funding the show. There are only two actors and about 20 characters, all of whom are delineated by different hats which have the character's ID on it There is even a hat labeled "dead baby" for the child who died because his mother couldn't read that there were jelly beans, not medicine, in the bottle she had. Crowd scenes are indicated when the actors pile all the hats on their heads, removing one at a time, while saying a line as that character. (And the 5-man "kick line" was hilarious!) There are forgettable, but very funny-at-the-time songs and terrible groaners like when Gutenberg tells his girlfriend Helvetica (it is just assumed the audience will realize that is a font name) that he likes lamb stew by saying "I love ewe" and she thinks he is professing his love for her. The guys explain at the start of the play (which was nominated to lots of awards in NY back in the early 2000s) that they did a thorough Google search and found very little about the inventor of the printing press, so they had to resort to alternative facts to write the play (actually they called them fictitious facts, but that was in 2007 before anybody had heard of alternative facts!)
Anyway, we laughed all evening and I had fun writing the
review. I even mentioned that the two actors had "good dentition"
since I was about 2 feet from them throughout the show and they projected so
well that by the end of the show I felt like at least a dental assistant, I
spent so much time looking into the mouth of both of them! |
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
Gutenberg! the Musical! |
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