shannon_a

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 ...

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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.