I am doing something unusual - blogging in the morning - but I probably won't blog tonight and didn't want to get too far behind. Thursday I didn't blog because there was nothing to say. I was too sick to go to the funeral for the woman who was a pillar of our parish, and I took the afternoon off of work (I was working from home) and just rested. In the evening I didn't go to the Quebecois jam at the leftist brewery either, which I had been looking forward to. The air quality was terrible due to smoke from Canadian wildfires, but I put on an N95 mask (the one Hardingfele gave me a few weeks ago) and walked very slowly outside, but due to the virus my heart rate was so elevated that yesterday my FitBit said I had really overdone it and should take it easy.
Yesterday I worked from home and kept pounding the Mucinex, so I had a productive day since that really helped keep the virus symptoms at bay. Now I have to give some exposition to explain the evening: the Dairyman's Daughter, as my regular readers may remember, can get cheap tickets to the outdoor theater if we go on a particular Friday evening. When the list came out, Tiffy and I discussed it and felt like going so late on a Friday was too much, and the only one we wanted to see happened to be a night that Travalon and I had already purchased Mallards tickets for, so she and I got full-price tickets to a matinee on a Saturday later this month. There was one other play I was a bit interested in, called Anna in the Tropics, about a Cuban family, but Tiffy wasn't really interested. Very recently the Dairyman's Daughter reminded us that she could get tickets for the remaining shows, and only Jilly Moose was going to Anna in the Tropics, so I asked Travalon if he would want to go, and he said sure, it's not Shakespeare and it's about Cuba. Meanwhile Rich, Luxuli, and Prairie Man said they were going too, so it was going to be a big crowd. The Dairyman's Daughter knows someone who works at the outdoor theater, so he said he could get her ticket for free... and then he got all our tickets for free! I feel very bad that Tiffy didn't get in on this deal, but it all happened very rapidly, and she was on a road trip out west so I didn't want to bother her, and I had no idea the tickets would be FREE.
So yesterday evening we all met at Grandma Mary's Cafe in Arena for fish fry, except for Luxuli, who was stuck in traffic in Michigan and couldn't get back in time. I thought about calling Tiffy, but Rich offered the ticket to Kathbert, who turned it down, and then another woman from our old church, who took it. She couldn't join us until the play, and she was wearing a perfect tropical print dress so I complimented her on her sartorial choice, and she seemed annoyed and said that was just what she had worn to work, she had no idea she'd be coming to the play. Now she is a socially awkward person and maybe didn't mean to come across that abruptly, but I mean, that's an even better story, so why not play it up? "I know, isn't it crazy? I had no idea I'd be coming to a play about Cuba tonight!" As it turned out, the play was not set in Cuba but in Tampa, Florida, where the Cuban family had a cigar factory in the 1920's and had hired a lector to read novels to the workers as they did their monotonous jobs. He started with Anna Karenina, and there was a lot of drama involving adultery and a shocking ending. If I had read the novel, I would have liked it even better, but I did enjoy it, although I think some of the group didn't.
Going up the hill at the outdoor theater is part of the experience, but I was a little afraid of going into a fib with my weird heart rate issues, so the Dairyman's Daughter and I took the shuttle up the hill for the first time. I then ran into one of our faculty members, who was there alone because her wife had to run back to Russia to care for her ailing mother, and she had never been to the outdoor theater before. She teaches a course on Anna Karenina, so she was really looking forward to the play. Things worked out well in that I had to go to the bathroom about three minutes into the play but managed to hold it until intermission, when I made a mad sprint to the bathroom and then couldn't find the group. As I stood there alone and bewildered, our faculty member found me, so we had a great conversation about the play, and then she didn't have to stand around all alone during intermission herself, so it all worked out perfectly. Best of all, since Travalon drove, I didn't have to make that long drive back in the dark. That is always my least favorite part of going to the outdoor theater.
Famous Hat
