shannon_a | Entries tagged with play

We are heading home *tomorrow*!

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I haven't really written about our AirB&B.

Over the last few years I've shuttled back and forth between hotels and AirB&Bs. When I was in Köln for the last Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, I had a particularly terrible AirB&B (no AC, big-south-facing windows, serious noise pollution from a biergarten downstairs, very tiny), followed by a great hotel in Frankfurt on my last night before I flew back. We'd had a disappointing AirB&B in Berkeley the year before (poor lighting, noise pollution from the other half of the duplex, Ayn Rand books on the shelves). So it was to hotels for a year or two. And that was of particular help when K. was still on her scooter, as most of the AirB&B's had also been handicap inaccessible. However, the Hotel Shattuck Plaza where we stayed was a bit rundown (poor heating, and just not in great shape), so last year we moved back to AirB&Bs again.

We had a very nice AirB&B in Rockridge last year and would have booked it again if it was available. (My experience staying holiday after holiday in Berkeley for five years now is that the same AirB&B is *never* available. Maybe if we made our reservations earlier, but nope.) So this year we found several options again in the Rockridge area and splurged a bit to choose one of the nicer ones. (Probably only $20 or $30 a night more expensive than the other one we were looking at it, and it looked so nice in the pictures that it seemed worth it.)

It's indeed very nicely decorated. Recently redone. Gorgeous bathroom. Large, well-lit living room. Two comfortable places to lounge. Tiny bedroom, but as big as it needs to be (e.g., space to walk around the bed). The neighborhood is also nice. It's the first block where the foothills start to rise up on the east side of Berkeley (or Oakland really, we're just over the border), and that's where the increasingly fancy/expensive houses are. That means it's safer and quieter than places just slightly more low-land.

But the downsides:

First, the owners seem like obsessive paranoids. The lock is what I believe is called a dimple lock: it has side pins rather than the normal pins that would be pushed down by the bottom of your key. The locks tend to be harder to pick because of their overall design, and the keys are also much harder and more expensive to duplicate, which I suspect is the goal.

Likely due to that, the owners only gave us a single key, and yes there are two of us here. Perhaps that's fine for most couples and most other people willing to share a single bed while visiting together, but K. and I have different friends to see and different places to be while we're here. So we have to go through this stupid dance of locking the key in an outside lockbox every time we leave. If we mess up: someone gets locked out in the cold, possibly for hours. (Or someone needs to cut one of their get-togethers short.)

The particular lock they choose also sucks. You have to do another weird dance here, of lifting up the handle before you twist the key around to lock it. You have to do similar on the inside with a knob, and afterward you CAN'T GET OUT unless you first unlock the door, which seems like a fire hazard and that it should be illegal. (Maybe it is.) I have to guess that it was more secure in some way or another, further feeding their paranoia at the risk of our safety.

Also evidence of the weird paranoia: buried in the house rules (not anywhere you'd see before renting, nor even if you just read what they message you when your arrival date is drawing near) is the statement that you have to OK with them anyone coming into the unit other than the registered guests. Not staying the night, just dropping in for coffee or a game. (To which I said: yeah, I think not, and though I considered having people over on Sunday to game, it never became necessary.)

(Frankly, if you're that fearful of what might be getting done to your unit, so you're obscuring keys, putting in unsafe doors, and trying to keep people out, then you probably shouldn't be renting, but I'm also totally unsurprised by the attitude here in the Oakland foothills.)

Second, the unit, which was likely originally a basement and/or storage space for the nice house atop, has SERIOUS noise pollution issues from upstairs. K. took a nap after we got here on Friday, before our play, and she was woken up multiple times by people talking upstairs. Then, while we ate dinner and got ready, we frequently heard the thundering of stuff being moved around upstairs. I had thought it might be a miserable stay, but as far as we can tell there's been no one upstairs since that first day. I have a suspicion that it's a rental too, and was being cleaned on the day we got here, and we got lucky and it's been empty since. But given the annoying noise on the first day, I would never rent this place again, just because you can't expect the rest of the house to be unoccupied when you're staying.

Anyway, that's our AirB&B. We'll probably still be on the AirB&B side of things next year, as the overall experience has been fine, even if that was apparently due to the luck of non-occupancy upstairs.

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Sunday was gaming day #1, with a few members of the old Endgame crew.

Very few members, it turned out, as E.V., who usually sets these things up for me, ended up sick. E.L. and S. and I got together instead, at E.L.'s place out in Concord. (Easy to get to from Rockridge BART!) It was a nice gaming day and we played three games that I do not believe are on BGA, and so we can't usually play when we're online: Railroad Tiles (because I continue to spread the gospel), Machi Koro, and Orléans: Invasion. The last was a particular treat because it's a favorite that I haven't played since 2019.

Orléans is a bag-building game with some pretty neat mechanics, while Invasion! is the co-op version of play. The Endgame crew all like the co-op much more than the original, whereas I'm totally good with either. It's the type of game that's too complex to play with the folks I'm gaming with in Kauai (K., my folks, and new friend M.), which is why I haven't seen it since we left. But maybe K. and I should give the co-op two play a try sometime. (When we have some time. Our three-player game took 2.5 hours, which by my memory is pretty standard for Orléans.)

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Monday was a day of meals & theatre.

I had lunch with C&M. We went for a little walk in the Rockridge area afterward. That's pretty much our typical visit.

K. and I then had dinner with our financial advisor, A., who took over the business a few years ago and has slowly been meeting all of his clients in-person. (We talk via Zoom about three times a year, but that's of course not the same thing.) Apparently, when the business was founded by A's predecessor, all the clients were in the Bay Area, but there's been a gradual exodus since them, with people moving to the East Coast, Hawaii (we're not the only ones), and everywhere in between. A. has been making trips to see some people, but was able to meet with us because of our visit out here. We were apparently among the last people for him to see. (It's been a few years since he took over.) Obviously, we have a business relationship with A., but it's great to have a bit of personal interaction as well.

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Before I write about the theatre, I should note that when I was at the Legion of Honor on Saturday, I not only saw the Manet/Morisot exhibit, but I also visiting with my favorite artwork in the museum's permanent collection. It's a small pointillist painting of the Eiffel Tower by Georges Seurat.

Which is a prelude to the fact that I had no idea that the play we were seeing Monday night, "Sunday in the Park with George", is all about Georges Seurat. And more so, about his painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte] (which is out in Chicago, not at the Legion of Honor).

It wasn't my favorite Sondheim (that's likely Into the Woods, which we saw on Friday). But it was thoughtful and it was an intriguing insight into the world of a post-impressionist painting (though from everything I've seen there wasn't a lot of attention given to historical veracity).

Appropriate for a play about Seurat, it was a pointillist play with a pointillist score and pointillist scenes. In fact, much of the play is spent introducing the various characters in the park (point-point-point-pont), so that we know who they are when they're all rearranged by Seurat into the actual painting (as the points resolve into the painting) as the act-one finale, which I found oddly moving.

I found the two-act structure weirdly similar to Into the Woods. In both plays the main action that's set up at the start of act one comes to a complete conclusion at the end of act one. In Into the Woods, it's the high point of the play, an inversion of the usual plot structure (where we'd instead expect a low point, where everything seems the worst). Maybe the same could be said for Sunday in the Park with George, as Seurat has completed his masterpiece(?), but it's fundamentally a more logistical conclusion. In Sunday in the Park with George, we then jump forward a hundred years to see some of how Seurat has been recognized, and also that his grandson (a made-up character) faces many of the same issues as him. It was a pretty surprising twist for the second half, but I hadn't realized that Seurat died at the very young age of 31, leaving just 7 major works behind (one of which I saw a few days ago, though as I said, it's a pretty small piece, unlike "Sunday Afternoon", which is 2x3m and took more than two years of work).

Overall, I loved the pointillist creation of the painting and also the idea that it embedded these people and their stories forever, so that they were all there 100 years later, when all but the youngest babe had passed on. The personal stories felt weaker to me and the more abstract discussions of art (create what you love, don't be afraid to do something new, etc.) were ... well abstract.

I admire Sondheim's consideration of the question, "How could I make a pointillist musical?" And I admire the fact that he mirrored the two Georges' take on modern-art with a modern-art musical. I'm thrilled to have seen it once. But I wouldn't feel the need to see it again, in part because of the distance that the story created from me overall, but also because I just didn't find the music that memorable. (I see people lauding "Finishing the Hat" and a few others, but none of them ear-wormed for me.)

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Today is our last day. I'll be gaming with some of the folks who used to get together at my house on Thursday nights.

Then K. and I need to pack up, and we're off to the airport in the morning.

As I already wrote, Monday was our travel day, and the only thing that I didn't write about was its annoying end. We arrived in San Jose right on time at 9.30,pm but then had to wait almost an hour for our luggage.

I can't blame Alaskan (Hawaiian) too much, because they had a flight from Honolulu that arrived an hour late, just before us, and they probably had minimal ground crew that time of night and they had to prioritize the late flight over us, but it was still annoying.

I later learned that Alaska has a 20-minute luggage guarantee. You can get a small amount of credit or points if you complain about late luggage. But you had to do it in-person that their baggage office within two hours of either your flight's arrival or your luggage actually showing up (I forget which), which is just crap. Almost no one is going to go beg for a few points or credits while they're either waiting for their very late luggage or after they've *finally* gotten it and just want to go home. So, it's entirely performative (a word that I increasingly use to describe the East Bay now that I've been away from it for six years, though Alaska of course has wider scope). They can make extravagant promises (OK, not very extravagant), and never pay out on them.

But because of the luggage hijinks, we got into San Martin about 11pm, which was even later than the very late time we'd reluctantly agreed too. Poor Bob who picked us up and stayed up past his bedtime!

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Tuesday through mid-Friday were our San Martin days, spent with my mom and Bob and at various times visiting with my brothers (and sister-in-law and niece and nephew).

Oh man, it is so wonderful to just be taken care of for close to four days. Bob and my mom prepared us all our meals and made sure they met our dietary restrictions (which is mainly the annoying no-dairy for me). They also had all the activities planned as usual. So we didn't have to do anything but enjoy company and relax and talk and play games and pet dogs. Nirvana!

Often biking or pickleball or both are scheduled, but Christmas visits tend to be a bit tighter than Thanksgiving visits because of how the days fall, and in addition, it was forecast to rain the entire time we were there. (It did not, though there was some decent downpour one of the nights. Apparently the atmospheric river swung north of us.)

So instead we had visits scheduled. Tuesday my mom scheduled a nice Christmas ham dinner with some friends and my brother J. Wednesday we had our typical shrimp Christmas Eve dinner and my brother R. made it for that. We had our familial Christmas that night, a Christmas Eve tradition for many, but never for us. (But, it fit R's schedule and kept Christmas from being crazy, and meant I got to start reading one of my Christmas books that night!) Then Thursday of course was Christmas, which means we went to Hollister to visit J's family, including niece, nephew, and sister-in-law L.

What that listing of meals and visits doesn't include is the gaming. We played at least a baker's dozen of games from Tuesday through Friday morning, not including kiddie games played with the niblings (and I can remember at least three of those). The Wiedlin family has always been big on gaming. I grew up playing card games like Euchre and Hearts and Golf, but we also had games like Twixt around, and of course I was starting to build up a collection that wasn't _just_ D&D (but was often other games put out by TSR). And so we always bring a couple of favorite games with us when we come. This year it was _Railroad Tiles_, _Cascadia_, and _Between Two Cities_ (the last being one that comes with us pretty much every year because it plays up to seven, but is still pretty small, unlike say my pimped-out Seven Wonders set, which is HEAVY). But my mom has increasingly been playing game with her uke and pickleball groups over the last year! So I think there was even more play than usual, because everyone is in the gaming mindset. Which is great, because in-person gaming has been more sparse since we moved. (Though we're working on that!) And that's how we hit at least 13 games. Everything we brought (with _Railroad Tiles_ being the break-out hit) plus _Harmonies_ (which my mom bought based on my journal entries talking about Kimberly and my's frequent play). We also played a few games that I definitely usually would not: _LCR_ (which probably should be categorized with the kids' games, and which I explained is an "activity", not a "game") and _Rummikub_ (which was simultaneously too random and too thinky for me).

Besides gaming, we also had the pups Joy and Zeke getting lots of attention. And my mom encouraged me to get going on the uke again, as I fell off as the year got hard (c.f. sending Elmer to Boston). My mom found me a few books of fingerstyle (fingerpicking) on the uke, as she knew I'd been enjoying the riffs for _Here Comes the Sun_, and they were terrific. I fooled around with a bunch of classics before finally settling on trying to properly learn _Yesterday_. (Yeah, there's a theme there.) On our last day in San Martin, I was lounging back in my seat, picking at _Yesterday_ again and again while we talked, which was pretty cool. Much more fun than just going off to a private room to practice.

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Ah yes, and Christmas proper. As I said that was over at my brother J's house. L prepared us an absolute feast of deserts, appetizers, and a main meal (though I was pretty light in what I ate because my guts were pretty upset shortly after our arrival).

Everyone else had exchanged presents previously, but the rest of us swapped with J. and family (and mostly with the kids, who absolutely tore through their presents, not even pausing to see what one was before they went on to the next). My niece L. is still as sweet as ever, frequently throwing herself at people for hugs, even K. and me, who she just barely knows since we're a once-a-year sighting. My nephew J. is more obviously quite smart the older he gets, mainly in the way he talks, but also in working on a spatial puzzle-game (_Little Red Riding Hood_) that my mom had got. The two of them were both pretty wild when they were at my mom's house with J. on Tuesday, but they were on their best behavior on Christmas, though as noted the present opening was very frenetic.

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Friday was our last day in San Martin. We had bacon and eggs in the morning (mmmmmmmmm!), then played some games (I think I might have won those two, after my mom being the main winner over most of the holiday). At 1 o'clock we headed northward.

We made in a stop in San Jose to visit with my sister M. and brother-in-law J. and other niece A. They were just returning home from their own Christmas visits and got back about half-an-hour before we came by. Usually we miss them because they're still away, so this was a bit of a surprise. We might have spent more time if we'd known! (But I don't know, as I said, figuring out the logistics of Christmas is always a little tough.)

Then at about 3.30 we landed at our AirB&B in Rockridge.

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We actually had additional plans for the day! A play in San Francisco at 8pm! (I had wrangled us an early check-in to our Air B&B so that we weren't pressed for time, and that worked out great.)

The play was at the San Francisco Playhouse, which neither K. nor I remember at all from when we lived out here. I thought it must have been new, but no it's been around since 2009 or something. I eventually decided that we must have noticed it and decided we didn't need another musical theatre because we were already seeing four musicals a year at the Berkeley Playhouse.

Anyways, it's a neat venue because it's in the Kensington Park Hotel. You go up a flight of stairs to their mezzanine and then up one or two additional flights or stairs and around some corners to get to the theatre. And if you have tickets for the mezzanine of the theatre, that's ANOTHER flight of stairs. It was delightfully maze like (but also a bit much for K's knee).

I wondered what the weird multi-level room where the theatre now is had originally been, with my guess being a ballroom. (I've been in a similar upper story, multi-level ballroom in one of the older hotels in downtown Berkeley, though I can no longer remember which.) It turned out that the Kensington Park Hotel was originally built as an Elk's Lodge! The room we were in had originally been the Elk's meeting hall, but after the Elks started renting out space in their lodge in 1981, it was converted to a 750-seat theatre. It had been cut in half twice since, and now is a 199-seat theatre for the San Francisco Playhouse, which means that original room must have been huge. Besides being neat, it was a nice venue. We had seats in the front row of the mezzanine, and they were great seats (and cheaper than the orchestra would have been).

Oh, the play? That was _Into the Woods_, the first of two Sondheim plays that we expect to see while we're out here (the other being _Sundays in the Park with George_), and the first of three we hope to see in the next few months (as the Kauai Community Players seem fond of Sondheim and are doing _Assassins_ in April).

I've seen the movie and I love the movie, and I loved the play. The interweaving songs are so clever, and even more clever on stage, with interesting staged nuances like days being broken up by people reporting on their lesson learned, which I'm pretty sure wasn't in the movie. The interweaving faerie tales are of course terrific too. All around it's an amazing creative design, and so I'm thrilled to see the original on stage. And there was a reprise of _Agony_ that wasn't in the movie!

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Sitting next to me was a young woman who had clearly never been to a musical before. When she talked to her date at intermission, she said things like "It's hard to understand what they're singing, it's ... lyric" and "You have to know what they're singing to understand the plot" and "The songs are all dialogue heavy." She also didn't like the fact that the play was "too happy."

Well, she got to act II and I heard two "Oh my God!" exclamations at some shocking moments and after that two "What the Fuck!"s after additional shocks (that were not quite as traumatic as the first two: one was when a character thought dead returned and the other was at an inappropriate kiss).

I hope the second act helped her gain an enjoyment/understanding for musicals, but we later saw them go by on the street, and her date was still trying to explain things to her.

(Well, I guess _Into the Woods_ is a slightly twisty, complex, deconstructionist type of play, so it might not be the best first musical. But maybe it is, because it's awesome.)

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The person sitting next to K. was also interesting, but apparently less enjoyable. He apparently elbowed her, kicked her, and constantly burped. And that then there the Tik Tok women he constantly watched before the show and during intermission, dancing in tight, tight clothes.

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In any case, we had a great time, with the only issue being that it was tough to get out of that maze with 197 other people also fighting their way free. But we eventually made it to the street, and we'd already negotiated that we were going to call a ride-share so that we'd get home at 11.30, not midnight.

So we did.

And we did.

And that's been our first four days in the Bay Area, with us just settling into our first night in Berkeley (Oakland, really, we're a few blocks over the border) as this entry ends.

A busy, busy day. I walked down in the beaches in the morning. Kimberly and I played Harmonies before lunch. We found a new dim sum restaurant out in Chinatown that we liked. We sat and read aloud on the River Street promenade just past Chinatown. We returned to swim at The Walls in high tide around 5pm. And Kimberly got some Zippy's dinner she'd been craving.

A funny bit of dialogue overheard yesterday:

Tourist1: "I can't believe we both forgot to bring sun screen."

Tourist2: "We're going to get some really good tans."

(Yeah, not how it works, dudes.)

But the highlight of the day was a play that Kimberly found: "Prescription: Murder", the original Columbo play, at the Hawaii Theatre, which is right next to Chinatown (hence the lunchtime and reading locales).

It was terrific fun.

The play is pure Columbo. "Just one more thing." Brilliant investigator who plays as a doddering fool to trick his suspects. It was arranged much like Poker Face is nowadays: the first couple of scenes were the setup and the murder, and then we got to see how Columbo figured things out (but without the neat backtracking timeline usually found in Poker Face.)

It was a really nice, classic mystery, and I'm a fan of classic mysteries. Murderer sets himself up with unbreakable alibi, and Columbo figures out how to break it.

So, neat play, but everything else about the production was neat too.

First up, the venue. The Hawaii Theatre is a gorgeously restored theatre from the 1920s. (Some images here: https://theclio.com/entry/77050)

My favorite story of the restoration was about the Lionel Walden mural over the stage, called "The Procession of the Drama". It apparently partially came down in a big storm in the 1970s, and then what had come down was thrown away(!!!). It was restored from photographs(!!).

Second up, the play starred Joe Moore and Pat Sajak. Yes, that Pat Sajak. When he first came on stage, his ever-so-familiar voice was weirdly disorienting, but within a few minutes, I was able to just enjoy the show. (And yes, that Joe Moore, he's obviously less known, but a Hawaii television journalist, and an old friend of Sajak's because they served in Vietnam together!).

We hadn't realized that this was the last show for Prescription: Murder. I've often been a fan of last shows, because it really seems to bring out the emotion in the actors. And we really hadn't realized that Sajak and Moore had decided this would be their last show together. (Sajak said they were getting old and decrepit. And to be fair, they both served in Vietnam a long time ago.) They've apparently done 7 shows together in the last 24 years, and in the process had raised $1 million dollars for the Hawaii Theatre.

As a result of all that, there were some emotional goodbyes and thank yous and gifts to close out the show, which were pretty cool to see.

Sajak and Moore talked some back and forth and I was struck by how amazingly charismatic Sajak is. Not only could he grab the attention of the whole room with just a few words, but he also knew right when to take over for other people on the stage to get things moving. One can see why he became the longest running game show host ever.

We'll definitely be returning to the Hawaii Theatre on future trips if there are cool things going on, but I suspect it'll take a lot to match this fairly amazing afternoon.

By the by, it was The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis that we were reading out on the promenade. Kimberly and I have both read it before. I've in fact read all of the Oxford Time Travel series and adore all four (and like the short story). We just started it at the airport on Friday, so it'll be with us a few months more.

The framing story of The Doomsday Book is set somewhere in the 21st century, with Oxford college using time travel to go back and look at past times. But I think one thing struck both of us: this book published in 1992 talked about a pandemic in the 21st century!!! What a scary bit of prescience. Willis quoted 65 million deaths, and our real pandemic fortunately wasn't quite that high. But the count of excess deaths since COVID suggests the number for COVID may be somewhere between 19 and 36 million.

Makes one wonder if Willis has a time machine of her own in her basement.

Kimberly and I saw "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" (the musical play) last night and it was a big disappointment. It was, I think, the fourth play that we've seen at Kauai Community Players since we moved out here, and they've all been disappointments except the lead play, "She Kills Monsters", which was awesome. It's not the directing, acting, or staging, which have all been fair to good. It's the choice of plays. Last year we saw two bits of misery porn from the Eugene-O-Neill school of plot ("life sucks and it won't get better") and then there was last night's play which was bad on many different levels.

(Spoiler: we snuck out at intermission, just the second play that Kimberly and I have abandoned midstream and we've seen dozens and dozens of plays together.)

I mean, it started off good enough. Great messaging about how kids think they can do anything and that gets beat out of them as they turn into teenagers and adults. Great messaging that we need to keep LOOKing at the world around us.

Oh, the music part of the musical wasn't at all notable, and one of the actors actually seemed to have no sense of rhythm or beat, but I momentarily thought it was messaging: you can do something creative even if you're bad at it, and that's ok. (If it was messaging, it carried through the play, which shows some real stamina.)

And then the play is lazily divided into individual unrelated stories, and the first was quite good. Kindergarten class, kid wants to play a pig in a production of Cinderella, makes up his own role, and it's terrific and well-loved. I mean in another setting it'd be a problematic story of someone who can't work in a team, but as a kindergarten story, especially after that intro, we instead read it as a teacher empowering their student's creativity rather than crushing it.

But from there it was downhill faster than an Olympic toboggan.

It was a two-fer of stories maybe 15 minutes it that did it for me.

(Trigger warning: a story about suicide.)

First was a matinee star who kills himself after his wife of 44 years dies from cancer. Because he can't live without her. Sad story, no? No. It was presented as so great that it proved that true love existed. Seriously. The narrator/author kept talking about how it gave him hope. The suicide gave him hope.

Immediately on the heels of that was the story about how when you're depressed all you need to do is listen to Beethoven. Or maybe it was that whenever you're depressed all you need to do is remember that you don't have it as bad as the world-renowned composer Beethoven, because he could never hear his 9th symphony.

Exaltation-of-suicide / erasure-of-self immediately followed by erasure of the struggles of mental illness, and I would probably have just walked out there if I was there on my own.

A bit later, we had a piece about how narcissistic it is to have a gravestone, and you just need to provide quiet service even in death (there's that erasure-of-self again), coupled with an ode to how great it is that we all die. Then there was a final song that about how we can reflect light in the night (like the moon one presumes), with no conception that we might be our own light. At some point in one of these last scenes, Kimberly and I exchanged googley-eyes with each others.

Did I mention the awful miasma of perfume? We actually moved back from our original seats after a lady with heavy perfume sat down immediately next to Kimberly (and why she sat right next to her in the waning days of a pandemic I dunno, but I guess it's the same self-absorption that has you wearing heavy perfume to the theatre in this day and age). And then people sat in our previous seats and they seemed to have had a swim in perfume and/or cologne before going to the theatre. So I was riding the edge of a nasty headache the whole time we watched these bad messages.

And the thing was, they weren't even consistent. I mean we had, suicide-is-great-because-it-shows-love, immediately followed by if-you're-depressed-just-remember-beethoven, followed by a story about a guy who got cancer and didn't tell anyone and so he died and they didn't get to say goodbye. I was like, hello, did the friends of the matinee star get to say goodbye? I bet not. It was like the author just always latched onto the last thing he heard and wasn't even trying to create a moral structure.

Bleh.

I wonder if Kauai theatre just isn't for us after what I think are three failures in a row. But they were supposed to do Noises Off before (I think) it was cancelled by COVID. And the next one up is Private Lives, and those both sound like more our thing ... There was a Romeo & Juliet that we missed too. (Between COVID concerns and health issues we've made it to maybe half the shows since COVID restrictions lifted.) So, bad luck? We did definitely have failures at all of the Berkeley theatres, including one that we walked out of at Shotgun Players and another that drove us away from that threatre for years; and some from Berkeley Rep that we still laugh at ...

We have rejoined society. Tonight Kimberly and I walked out to Paco's Tacos for an early dinner, and then went to see Jen Silverman's "The Roommate", put on by the Kauai Community Players.

The experience was bizarre and a little unnerving, because other than our otherworldly sojourn to the Bay Area in December (and to a lesser extent, various trips to Oahu), this was our first normal getting out and about in two years. Even more bizarre, no one was masked at Paco's Tacos and (even more to my surprise) no one was masked at the play.

But, we're tripled vacced. The death rate for COVID on average has dropped below flu, and that's obviously all about the people who are actually vacced. The biggest problem seems to be that it's more contagious than most things we have by a fair amount. I get a flu every ten years: I don't want to get COVID yearly. So I guess we'll see how this rejoining goes.

Anyway, the play.

It was a two-woman play about middle-aged women trying to find new directions in their life. And how they sabotage each other. And how new direction can be both hard and dangerous. I didn't like it. The writing was mostly OK (except occasionally too obviously "literary") but it was depressing.

But that's fine. Just as I'm happy to play a bad game on occasion, I'm happy to see a play I don't love on occasion, in both cases if they make me think a little.

I started the week running on fumes. That was due to my hike with L. last Friday and my podcast that I did for Wandering DMs on Sunday. They were both entirely fun events when they happened (which is why I did them), but before they happened they were set points on my schedule that raised a little anxiety.

Here's the funniest bit of why the hike was a little anxious in advance: because we were going to meet up at the Arboretum, and I knew I wouldn't have cell coverage up there, so there was no way to communicate if there was a problem. You know, it was like it would have been for *ANYONE* doing any hike together 20 years ago!

Anyhow, that all meant that last week felt less relaxing than usual, and then we tumbled into ELECTION WEEK.

I've had an adversarial relationship with presidential elections in recent years. I generally figure out how to get the heck away from my computer for the day.

This year, I didn't want to interrupt my regular tech-writing work schedule so instead I decided I would just do my regular work day from 7.30-3.30, and stay away from media. And, that worked. I kept my nose down and pushed through my Blockchain Commons work. It went great until Apple started sending my notifications at 3pm that the polls were closing.

So, after I knocked off work and before I did anything else, I couldn't help but look at how things were going ... and Florida was already slipping away from us. It felt like a repeat of 2016, where we saw Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina all slip away in the early evening, and then the Blue Wall of the Midwest fall in the late evening, naming a malignant narcissistic sociopath to the presidency.

My plans for the afternoon were also spoiled, because I was going to go do yard work for an hour or an hour and a half, but it was raining, so instead I went straight to the next step: I took my laptop and my Fire out to the pavilion on the golf course without my cell phone. There, I read some comics, played some Wingspan, organized the next chapter of The TSR Codex V2, and tried not to think too much about the potential crumbling of our democracy. I stayed out until almost sunset.

When I got home, I called out for pizza, looked a bit more at the results, which were increasingly undecided, got the pizza, then watched Hamilton for the next two and a half hours, the first 20 minutes of which I was joined by Kimberly, before she decided it really wasn't her thing. She didn't even make it to A Winter's Ball / Helpless / Satisfied, the high-point of the first act!

So, Hamilton. I've listened to it any number of times on my computers, my phone, and through Amazon Music, but this was a first viewing. It brought much of the show into better focus, and was wonderful to see.

Part of that wonder was being able to see the marvelous staging of things like the rewind in the Winter's Ball sequence and the Philip Hamilton duel ("Blow Us All Away" / "Stay Alive").

But actually seeing the actors on stage really helps to connect all the dots.

I appreciated the humor a bit more in songs like "Farmer Refuted" and "You'll be Back" and was surprised how much humor there was in other parts of the play. I'd never realized that a lot of laugh lines were just that.

I understand better how Hamilton isn't presented in an entirely positive light: that his "Not throwing away my shot" refrain often feels desperate and dogmatic and that it's very selfish. That seems particularly true when Washington asks Hamilton to return, somewhere amidst "That Would be Enough" / "Guns and Ships" and it's obviously a contest between Washington and Eliza for Hamilton's loyalties, but Hamilton then storms off on his own, not directly joining Washington.

And Burr, wow, he comes across as a stalker. Through the soundtrack alone, it's easy to think he's mostly off-stage, but when you see him actually giving all the narration, it's more obvious how obsessed he is with Hamilton and his success, and the biting nature of much of that narration suddenly clicks into place.

I also suddenly met James Madison as a separate character.

Also, the same actress playing Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds? Ick! Though that "ick" might partially be because Peggy comes across younger on the soundtrack.

I was somewhat surprised to see how much the play really jumps straight from song to song without anything between, but I was even more surprised by the one thing I noticed cut from the soundtrack, which is the letter from Lawrence's father about his death. I'd always been puzzled by the "I died for him" statement in "Alexander Hamilton", and I can't believe that if they were going to cut a minute from the soundtrack, that's what they chose.

Overall, a wonderful experience, and as planned a distracting one.

By the time I went to bed, Fox had called Arizona (in what turns out to have been a premature call that reflected their poor understanding of the remaining ballots, a recurring patterns at the big networks, while internet analysts totally got it right). So, the election was looking a bit more positive.

Still, Wednesday felt like a hazy day as I fought through a day of very scattered, small Blockchain Commons work. I can't say I really recall the evening after that, but fortunately on Thursday it was increasingly clear that Biden would be the winner, because he was running far enough ahead in the vote-counting in Pennsylvania.

Seriously, though, f*** a bunch of Republican legislators in the Midwest who blocked mail-in vote counting prior to election day (and in some cases after it). They purposefully created a multi-day spectacle that put an extreme strain on the entire fabric of America. And they did so hoping to somehow finagle that into an illegitimate victory, where they could reinstall King Don solely based on the votes that they chose to count first.

It was raw political game-playing at its worst, and it exerted a heavy toll on America, whose full repercussions we have yet to see.

On Friday, I decided to head out to Mahaulepu, my most-quiet, least-stressful possible day out (trading it for my usual hiking day on Saturday, not because of the electoral stress, but because the forecast was looking increasingly rainy starting on Saturday, and I wanted to make sure that my relaxing day out wasn't spoiled).

It was great getting out, away from everything, and relaxing, as planned. And, I actually got a lot of work done, mostly finishing up two of my Designers & Dragons updates for November (one of which is already sent out, the other of which is scheduled).

And this morning the networks finally had the balls to make the call. I mean, I feel like it had been inevitable since Thursday, but it was still good to hear.

And the celebrations all over the world, wow. Crowds out on the streets, fireworks and bells ringing in Europe like it was the end of WWII.

Wow.

We'll see what 2021 will bring.