theater

Our muttons

Friday’s page from my Forgotten English calendar was “our muttons” meaning…well:

The farming community has given us another useful expression in our muttons. When we speak of something being our muttons, we mean that we like it especially well.

This according to Sydney Baker’s 1941 New Zealand Slang: A Dictionary of Colloquialisms, and if you can’t trust that, what can you trust?

I had a pretty our muttons-y sort of weekend, all things considered; a pretty late night of it yesterday meant I didn’t get a chance to post about it until now, but overall I liked the weekend quite a lot.

I got a haircut, went to the library, and saw my second Broadway show of the week. Not too shabby, eh?

Back on Mother’s Day, we bought my mom tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter, since she’s long been a fan but never seen the singer in concert. The show was this weekend in Manhattan, and so to coincide with that (and last week’s Father’s Day), my sister and her husband drove to New York from Maryland. They brought their dog Chloe with them, which was an interesting experience, I think mostly for Chloe and for our much older — and much less interested in rambunctiousness — dog Tucker. We left the dogs at home (Chloe in her crate, Tucker in his pen) and drove into the city for a very nice dinner out. Then we split up, my father and mother off to see Carpenter at the New York School of Ethical Culture, and the other three of us to see American Idiot on Broadway.

I was a little worried about not liking the show. I like some Green Day songs well enough, and even have a few from the album on which the Broadway show is based in my iTunes catalog, but I’m not exactly what you’d call a huge fan. But the show was quite entertaining. It’s very loud and very bright, and if you blink you could miss the story, but the cast is undeniably talented and there’s a kind of pulse-pounding poetry to the whole thing. It’s a little like being inside a music video, with all the good and the bad that that suggests. It’s a breakneck ninety minutes, and it’s not without its faults, but it was hard not to be impressed by the end.

Since our show was over around 9:30, the three of us caught a train home instead of meeting back uptown with my parents. It’s maybe good that we didn’t stay in Manhattan, like we originally thought we might, since when we got home we discovered that Chloe had soiled her crate, her bedding, and herself while we were gone. Wet food and too much water earlier in the day had apparently not agreed with her. Catherine and Brian spent the next hour or so giving Chloe a bath on the front lawn — thank goodness it’s summer — and cleaning up the mess, while I tried to offer whatever help I could and look after Tucker. It was well after midnight before everyone was settled down — Chloe bathed, Tucker calmed, and my parents home.

Today was relatively calm and uneventful by comparison. I watched this week’s season finale of Doctor Who and thoroughly enjoyed it. As Betty says:

I’m not sure how much sense the finale actually made, but, oh, what wonderful, wonderful nonsense it was.

And I went for a short walk, despite the pretty oppressive heat. I worked on some fake horoscopes for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue — it’s a continuing feature, and the issue comes out next month — and on the Sunday crossword puzzle, which I have yet to finish.

Now I think I’m just going to watch a little TV and retire for the evening. Hopefully there will be more our muttons in the week to come.

Such great heights

I only just got home, and I still have to go to work tomorrow, so I’ll try to make this quick.

This evening, my company had a “Summer Night Out” to see the Broadway musical In the Heights. Not so much a company event — I saw three other employees there — as reduced-price tickets. I met my parents for dinner at Grand Central, then my mother and I walked up to the theater. It’s not a particularly deep show or anything, but it’s very energetic, with a lot of great songs and great fun. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

And now, while I can, I think I’m going to enjoy some sleep.

Oh, but you may notice that I’ve changed the blog’s template. I’m not quite done fine-tuning it, but it definitely seemed like it was time for a change.

Right now, though, it’s time for some sleep.

There ought to be clowns

This afternoon, I accompanied my parents to see a performance of A Little Night Music on Broadway. The tickets were my mother’s Christmas present to my father, and although I didn’t know she was buying three tickets at the time, I’m really glad she did. It was a thoroughly enjoyable show.

Afterward, we took the subway downtown, and had a really nice dinner around Union Square. Sure, we saw a couple of rats in the subway, but it’s not like they were on the platform or anything, just down on the tracks. So I guess that’s something. We just got home a little while ago, and I think I’m maybe going to watch a little TV and fail to finish the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.

Goodnight!

“Future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

Last night, three fellow cappers and I went to see Rifftrax Live in Union Square, allegedly the first theater in the nation that sold out for their simulcast riffing of Plan 9 from Outer Space. I’d never seen the movie in its entirety before — just bits and pieces, and then a big block of it earlier this week when I discovered Netflix had it online — so it was a blast seeing it on a big screen in a crowded theater. It’s such an endearingly awful movie, obviously made with a huge amount of love and excitement by Ed Wood, if not even the tiniest shred of talent or ability. For a movie that is so terrible — “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” — it really doesn’t drag at all, and I think it could be genuinely entertaining even without three really funny guys making fun of it on the side.

But Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett did a great job, first with a really terrific short — “Sorry, Fort Worth!” — and then the feature, really bringing their A material, a script you can tell they’ve been honing for awhile. It was also great to see and hear Jonathan Coulton do a couple of songs (and help out with another), and you definitely got the sense that some people were going to go home after the show and look him and his music up.

Speaking of going home, I didn’t make it there until sometime after midnight, just missing the first subway uptown from Union Square — no Metro card, and long lines at malfunctioning machines — and then having to wait around Penn Station for half an hour until my train showed up. It gave me time to chat with some of the station’s late-night drunks and transients, particularly the one gentleman who, instead of just asking me for some money, wanted to give me a story about how he’d just gotten out of prison for…well, something cocaine-related, though it wasn’t entirely clear what. I was happy to give him a dollar, especially if it meant he’d wander off and bother someone else. He had the unmistakable scent of alcohol on him, plus the look of a man whose good humor and gregariousness could turn to violence, so I just wanted to escape with my book to another (more crowded) section of the station. He, of course, wanted to fist-bump me in thanks for the dollar and to ask me about the book. When I told him it was a book about gardening, I don’t think he approved. But at least that seemed to end the conversation, and he walked off to the Amtrak station upstairs.

Those few moments of weirdness — plus the disgusting heat in Manhattan, especially in the subway — notwithstanding, I had a great evening, and I’m definitely glad I went.

Tuesday various

  • Is the future of Twitter in code? Orangeman? [via]
  • Though I don’t like it, I’m not diametrically opposed to five-day-only mail delivery. But I’d be screwed if the post office shut down all services on Saturday. That’s the only chance I get to check my post office box, and usually my only chance to mail anything like issues of Kaleidotrope. (Act now if you want a copy then?!) [via]
  • Ah literary ice creams… If only.
  • Homeless Offered Free Airfare To Leave NYC. I’m not really sure what to think about this. On the one hand, it’s an effort to reunite the homeless — many of whom I’m sure are teenage runaways — with family members, who may be better equiped to care for them. On the other hand, it’s shipping the homeless problem out of state to save some money and make them somebody else’s problem.
  • But on a somewhat happier note… It’s not often you read the phrase “aerospace engineer turned composer,” but I enjoyed reading about these failed London musicals [via]:

    A common complaint in the reviews for Too Close to the Sun is that the show doesn’t even fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category – that rarefied realm which made Gone With the Wind and Imagine This instant classics of a sort. Crucial to such flops is a sense of failed grand ambitions, which is why the burning of Atlanta in the first was as hilariously inept as the evocation of life in the Warsaw ghetto in the second. To enter the annals of true awfulness, you need to stake a greater claim on the imagination than was ever going to be proffered by a chamber musical about the waning hours of an American novelist. It would have still been a hard sell on the West End if Elton John had written it. (That, by the way, is not a suggestion.)