The streets were filled with celebration! Everyone ate hamantashen!
Rebecca had her first Purim celebration this weekend. It was held at the temple in Lafayette, and folks from the temples here and in New Iberia all drove there for it. (What does it say about Jews in Acadiana that people had to come from three different cities to get a decent Purim crowd?) I was in a van with two grown-ups and six kids, ranging in age from five to twelve. For the most part, they were a sweet, well-behaved bunch, but we were on the road for +2 hours, so naturally there was some bickering and whining.
Purim is a costume holiday, and before my disastrous trip to New Orleans, I had to brainstorm something to wear. Somebody suggested I wear my old Catholic high school uniform, but A) I no longer have it because I literally burned it after I graduated, B) I couldn't fit into it if I did, and C) I don't think it's an appropriate costume for a Jewish holiday! I would've been a great Katniss Everdeen before I cut my hair. Then finally an idea came to me: the French stereotype! I found a striped shirt and red scarf but no beret so instead I wore the Paris cap I bought the first time I went to France. I thought it was a good costume, but... no one knew what I was supposed to be. Zut alors! Maybe next year I'll go as Queen Esther. All the little girls dressed there were dressed as her, as well as my sassy Jewish grandmother.
So my costume wasn't a hit, but I still had fun. The kids put on a play of the megilla, and we all made hamantashen and had lunch together. I took some pictures, but my camera must have been on the fritz that day because they all came out horribly. Here's one of the few good ones:
This is Ryan, one of the kids I rode to Lafayette with, and the hamantashen he decorated with a pyramid of mini-marshmallows held together by frosting. I'm not sure what his costume is; some sort of bedouin sheik, maybe? He played King Achashverosh in the megilla play. The crowd booed whenever Haman's name was said, and said "gesundheit" after Achashverosh's name. Haha.
Yesterday was my first day back at work after my vacation. That was NO fun, although I did crack up when I told Josh I'd gone to a Purim festival, and he did the biggest double-take ever and said, "Wait, what? A porn festival? You?" If I didn't know any better, I'd say Josh had his mind in the gutter. :)
And today was our first new NCIS episode in three weeks! Just to make this already long post a little longer, here are my episode notes on it.
Episode 8x18 Out of the Frying Pan
Writers: Reed Steiner & Christopher J. Waild (Ships in the Night)
+ The opening scene of the parking enforcement officers finding the dead body made me chuckle. "Call the police! The real police!"
+ The bullpen scene was interesting, and I still feel like the writers are dropping us hints about what's to come. Ziva asked Tony semi-casual questions about EJ, as if she suspects that something's going on between them. We still don't know why Vance summoned EJ and her team back to DC. If the boxes were intended for her, why were they delivered to Gibbs and his team? (And didn't you just love Ziva whipping out that huge knife to cut open a cardboard box? So her.) I sat up a little when Vance gave the team orders and Gibbs told them to "stand down." The writers have been playing up the antagonism between them a lot.
? Gibbs calling Tony "loverboy." What the hell? I can hear the Gibbs/Tony shippers squealing, though.
- The build-up to revealing Nick as the suspected murderer felt a little ridiculous. Vance called him "a monster" who hacked a retired Marine to death with an axe and didn't break under twenty-seven hours of questioning. Then we cut to the reveal the suspect is the Marine's high school student son. I rolled my eyes.
+/- Gibbs and Tony were really playing "good cop, bad cop" interrogating Nick, weren't they? While it was a treat to see them working together, I felt they kinda overdid it.
+ The autopsy scene with Ziva and Ducky. It was nice to see just the two of them together. Ducky reciting nursery rhymes to the dead body was a little stupid, though.
+ I was surprised at McGee trying to snoop in EJ's desk. I'd expect that from Tony, but not from you, McGee! I liked how Ziva called him out on it and her smile when Gibbs told McGee to "stay out of her drawers."
- Nick's backstory felt pretty stupid. The kid is barely out of high school and behaves like a Boy Scout in interrogation, and yet we're supposed to believe that he skips school, uses hard drugs, and has a history of violence? I really had a hard time wrapping my mind around that one, writers. Maybe if the actor playing him hadn't been so baby-faced and innocent-looking.
+ Gibbs chomping on that burger in interrogation made me lol.
+ Tony describing the fake Casablanca scene. I had a feeling he would do this as soon as he mentioned the movie.
- "The kid's on the ropes. Let's knock him down." Damn, Vance was a bastard in this episode. It scared me a little when he showed up with that axe. Congratulations, Vance, you made an 18-year-old boy cry and all but threatened him with an axe. Even Vance isn't usually this big of a jerk, so it felt pretty out-of-character to me.
+ Abby calling McGee "Dr. McFrankenstein." Haha!
+ Tony pointedly looking away and whistling when Vance and Gibbs confronted each other in the bullpen. Nice little touch.
+ Mark putting his daughter's school portrait over the photo of her dead body. Also a nice touch; it felt very real.
- So the killer turned out to be Nick's mom all along? This felt like a really last-minute, half-baked idea.
- Gibbs and Vance glaring at each other across the mezzanine at the end. Again, writers? Already? We just had a nearly identical shot of them doing that at the end of Defiance.
- Well, it wasn't terrible, but Rebecca really wasn't feeling this episode. It seems pretty clear what the writers were doing here: they were just killing time until they could bring back EJ and all the other guest characters that we'll see during this finale arc (according to recent spoilers, there will be a lot of them). That's why this episode had virtually no mention of the team's personal lives: the writers are saving that for later. I think we're supposed to assume that Tony and EJ are continuing their dalliance off-screen, since they were set up at the end of One Last Score last week. It was kinda nice to take a break from all the personal drama, and focus on the case... but it would've been even better if this case hadn't felt so darn weak. Vance was an out-of-character, over-the-top jerk, and Nick was badly-written and not very well acted, resulting in a case that no one really cared about. The story with Nick and his dad reminded me of the case in Recruited, which also involved a father and son, but that one was executed much better.