aamcnamara: (Default)
aamcnamara ([personal profile] aamcnamara) wrote2010-07-05 12:59 pm

theater, fireworks, etc.

Since I keep forgetting to write about these, here's a quick summary of my last few evenings.

Friday: an event at the Bedlam Theater, which started at nine and which we didn't stay for the main act of--I was tired, and still not really moved between houses--but what we did see was kind of neat. A cellist opened; Open Eye Theater had a puppetry wagon, with little bells and doors all over and things that rotated and opened and spit water at the audience... it was a bit hard to see the puppets from our distance, but their bit was still entertaining.

Then there was a multimedia part: one screen had a digital projector, and then a film/slide projector went onto a folding paper screen behind a guitarist. The contrast in illumination between the two projectors was amazing--the digital projector's image was bright and jarring, while the slide projector gave these clear, warm gems.

On Saturday, there was a Park Square Theater production of a pastiche play, Sherlock Holmes and the Jersey Lily. From the blurb, I acquired only two phrases: "Sherlock Holmes" and "Oscar Wilde". To my eternal and undying disappointment, they put Oscar Wilde in as the foppish comic relief, Gay Best Friend character. I'm still not certain how you can do that, but they did. (Delivery resembled nothing so much as the Sassy Gay Friend sketches on Youtube, if you're wondering.)

The play itself was amusing enough--disguises, mistaken identity, very silly plots, an epee duel between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty (unfortunately, similarly neater in concept than execution, at least to my modern-fencing-trained eyes), some Shakespeare (ditto above, in some regards)--but I never could quite get over how they used Oscar Wilde.

At any rate, part of why I like being back in the Cities for the summer is all the theater, so: yay. (They gave Wilde very nice clothes, possibly as compensation, so there's that. And Holmes's study had an astrolabe-type instrument I wished to purloin.)

Last night, being the fourth of July, there were fireworks above the river. It was the first time I'd actually been down to them--some of my high school friends were going--and they were very passable fireworks, sparkling and thumping satisfyingly under my collarbone and leaving drifting octopi of smoke behind them in the sky. I can take or leave the fourth of July as a holiday, but I enjoy fireworks.

So this morning was raspberry pancakes and laundry, that being about all my brain has been up to. Whether I get anything done on writing in the rest of today is up in the air for right now.

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