Not Exactly a Drive-By Update
Friday night we went to see Kiss of the Spider Woman at the Baldwin Theatre in Royal Oak. This was a musical and was, apparently, not nearly as dire as jebra anticipated. Having read the storyline on wikipedia, I knew how it would end and was prepared. And honestly, watching KotSW wasn't much worse than watching MSNBC's Lockup Raw.
Overall, Stagecrafters did a good job with the production. There were a problems with one of the microphones but fortunately that was early in the show and was resolved before the end of the scene. I was quite impressed with the skill of the dancers, although I was puzzled by them as well. In the year that I've been dancing I've only seen three men take part, and none of them regularly. I asked Jean (who taught class Saturday morning and who spent her childhood and adolescence taking ballet classes) if any boys took part. She said there was only one, and he was there because his mother was a teacher and made him. She also said that when Wayne State put on The Full Monty, they had to teach all of the actors how to dance, so it is possible to put on a show with actors who do not have a dance background. These guys were really good, however, so I wonder if some of them had prior experience.
The storyline was exactly as wikipedia described, and (going by what Jean told me) less confusing than the non-musical version (which she saw).
My favorite part was Molina's hallucinated conversation with his mother, during which she says she'd never be ashamed of him unless he was cruel or uncaring. My second favorite part was near the end, when the Spider Woman performs her solo, as it was visually interesting the way she was moved about the stage (she was on a rolling platform) against the projected shadowy spider's web.
Saturday morning, after Nia, I came home long enough to take a shower & change clothes, design a birthday card, and kiss jebra good bye. Then I was off for Knitting Club, where I spent the entire afternoon, most of it working on a shoulder bag for Brooke, the woman who usually teaches the Nia classes I attend. I was excited to finish knitting the bagand eager to start the felting process, but I was so tired when I arrived back at the house that I couldn't stay awake. After falling asleep while watching something or other on the DVR, I gave up and went to bed. At 8:15. I woke up at midnight-thirty and returned to my corner of the couch to try watching my recordings and play around with my graphics program. jebra came home about an hour later -- he'd spent his time at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival.
Sunday I stayed in bed until I started worrying that I'd oversleep and miss the Nia Jam. I got up and got ready, then woke jebra and had him get ready to drive me and to be our unofficial photographer. The Jam was lots of fun (they almost always are) but I was dog tired afterwards and quite shaky. I think my blood sugar plummeted about half way through class and I was rather worried what my body would do next. I managed to keep moving -- albeit at a pace much slower than the teacher's.
After class jebra went out to dinner, which was disappointing as we returned to the place we'd gone on Thursday night, and although I ordered the exact same thing, it wasn't prepared correctly. The side dish was cold and the main dish was missing its signature ingredient -- the portabella mushroom. My dinner was far from inedible, however, and I was so hungry I didn't care that the side dish was cold and I was half-way through the main dish before I noticed anything amiss.
When we returned to the house I started washing the laundry, beginning with my to-be-felted bag. I was so excited to see how it would look when it came out of the hot water cycle -- and I was crushed when it did. It was knit with 100% alpaca yarn and the damn thing fused to itself, so that the bag could not be opened all the way. I tried to pull the front side away from the back and couldn't. I took scissors to it and tried to cut through the middle but succeeded only in making holes in the body of the bag. I have more of the yarn, so I can probably patch the holes, but I'm not sure what to do about felting the patches. Perhaps it is time to get out my needle-felting kit and see how that works. Do any of you know if needle felting produces as tight of a felt as felting in hot water?
The rest of the laundry was washed, dried, and put away without problem, so at least that was good. I'm still quite upset with the felting failure, to the point where it's in my home office drying out of site and I lost the will to pick my knitting needles and start the next project. I'm sure this a temporary state of affairs and, in the interim, I'm working on crocheting a cat bed for the animal shelter.
Jumping back to Thursday night, jebra and I watched the spy spoof, In Like Flint which I'd recorded the night before. The introduction to the movie revealed that I'd confused it with the earlier movie, Our Man Flint, so I went in somewhat disappointed. I loved Our Man Flint when I saw it during my formative years and I wondered how it would hold up. I still don't have an answer as I've always held that ILF is the weaker movie. I don't believe I fully recognized the Flint movies as spy spoofs back then; this time I had no such problems. I did, however, have a number of problems with the plot. The whole "women plotting to take over the world" was ludicrous and having their plot subsumed by a few bad guys was infuriating. And Flint's explanation of why he is irresistible to women, that he doesn't compete with them, no longer makes any sense to me. As a kid, I loved James Coburn and his guest spot on the Muppet Show made it my favorite episode:
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