Torpor

Webster's defines "torpor" as "a state of not being active and having very little energy."  While this might describe me most of the time, today I had a good excuse -- it was 104 outside.

Walt, a better man than I just about all the time, hauled furniture out to the dump and cleaned up the yard for garbage pick up tomorrow.  

Me?  I bought more plastic and spent a couple of hours watching my mother sleep.

Early in the morning, I took Walt out to a rental place where he got a truck large enough to hold the furniture he was taking to the dump.  He wanted to get it done before the sun got too high.

I dropped him off and then went out to Office Max, where I bought a thingy which is 4 plastic drawers on wheels, which I can use to put all the things that have been in the desk drawer I've been using for 30 years.  They aren't quite as large, so I am limited, but that means making decisions about what to save and what to toss.  The drawers are filled and I still have things left over, but I am a good way there.

I also, at Office Max, found a desk chair that was not only comfortable, but on sale for nearly 50% off, so I threw caution to the wind and bought it.

The office is coming together nicely, and I feel very good about working in here until I go into the living room and realize how much more there is and how I can't even begin to know where to fit it all in.  But for now, this is a nice workable place to work.

It was a shock to walk into Atria at 1:30 and find my mother coming back from lunch!  She couldn't remember if she had had lunch or not, but she had coffee breath, so I assume she did.  But she was out in public!  It may be that she was just feeling better and not remembering what she looked like, just went to lunch as she always does.

But I can tell she's feeling better because most of our repeated conversatiaon today was about how she's getting old, how it would be neat to be 100 and what am I doing exciting tonight.  Right back where we began before the accident.

Her finger still hurts, but it used to be 4 fingers that were excruciatingly painful, now one finger hurts a little bit.

The purple around her eyes is turning yellow so she is on the mend and won't be technicolor any more, though it still shocks her to get a glimpse of herself,  But in some corner of that demented mind she finally knows that there was something about an accident, but she isn't clear on the details.  Still just her knowing that "accident" was somehow involved is a huge step forward.

* -- * -- * -- * -- *

I'm in the middle of writing a review of a show we saw on Saturday called "The Totalitarians" by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb.  It's a mostly hilarious comedy, but about 10 minutes into it, I decided that this was actually Donald Trump's playbook.  There is a Sarah Palin-type candidate named Penny Easter running for governor of Nebraska who comes up with the slogan "Freedom From Fear" and hands out tattoos with "FFF" on them.

You land the "Freedom from Fear" moment and everyone raises their fists in the air.  At first dead silence, just fists.  F-F-F. F-F-F. F-F-F. And then a whisper growing, the crowd beings to chant "Fff fff fff fff fff.

Penny Easter gives a long speech (2-1/2 pages in the script), her first before a large crowd.  I'll tell ya, if she had only called other politicians nasty names you would have thought it was an actual Trump speech.

But at intermission, I looked at info on the play and realized it was first produced in 2014, which means it was written even before that, long before Trump invested in a hat factory so he could sell stupid "Make America Great Again" caps and make money doing it.

After the show, I talked with the director and told him how lucky he was that Trump was running for president and he said he had been nervously watching the campaign and hoping that he didn't "peak too soon."

So it appears that the Trump candidacy, which frightens me so much, is good for something at least, to help sell a very funny play at one of my favorite venues.

Love, Information and Pizza

I was proud of myself for getting both reviews of the show we saw last night finished and sent off to the respective publications.  Usually, I find writing two different reviews of the same show a challenge, but not for this show.  I almost always sweat bullets trying to get it right and to make the two reviews sound like I didn't plagiarize myself.  But it was easy to take a slight different perspective on this for each paper this time.  I kind of like what I wrote for the Sacramento News and Review:

Watching Capital Stage’s Love and Information, by award-winning playwright Caryl Churchill is like sitting in front of your television and clicking through the channels one by one, pausing briefly to see what is going on.

Eleven talented actors, some of the best Sacramento has to offer, play ~100 characters during 50+ scenes over 95 minutes. There is no plot to intrude on the action and you’d think this would be a big mess, but it works beautifully.

Under director Benjamin T. Ismail, the show moves at a fast clip and in the end, you realize the importance of “communication” in our lives, the sad, the funny, the informative.

Churchill takes the audience on an exhilarating carnival ride. Take two giddy teenagers mooning over a popular star and contrast to a conversation with an Alzheimers patient, or learning how scientists test chicken brains, or various words for the thing we put our dinner on as we sit down to eat.

We have developed short attention spans and this show plays into that. We get a glimpse, but only a glimpse of the lives of others and then we move on to the next scene. It’s the equivalent of theater in 140 characters, like Twitter posts.

It sounds as if it wouldn’t fit together, but it does. This is innovative theater at its finest, thanks to the skill of all involved (no small amount of which includes the technicians who designed the set, the lighting and the sound, all integral to the success of this show).

Capital Stage is offering its audience an opportunity to see a unique, highly acclaimed new play which should not be missed.

The difficulty with reviewing for the News and Review is that you have to give stars, 1 to 5, to show how much you liked it (I was SO glad when we got rid of that star rating system at The Davis Enterprise!).  I was going to give it a 4 because it really was fun, but the more I wrote my two reviews, the more I decided I really liked it, so in the end I gave it a 5.  

Before we went to the theater, I had to prepare dinner.  Usually on Sacramento theater nights I cook a frozen dinner but we were in luck yesterday.  Our Brasilian daughter, Sonia, stopped by for a visit with her daughter Denise (who is going to grad school at UC Davis).  Sonia is an artist, living in Napa with her vintner husband and so they are close by, but not THAT close by and we don't see each other often.

They could only stay a short time, but she brought me a sample of her newest "invention."  One Brasilian food I use to make and absolutely love is something called pao de queijo, which are little cheese breads. They are made with cassava flour instead of wheat flour and there has never been a time when I did not think I had made some horrible mistake as the dough, which feels like silly putty, looks grey and unappetizing.  But somehow, after it has chilled, when you roll it into balls an cook it magic occurs and the most delicious thing emerges from the oven as your finished product.  

Brasilians who have lived with us have said it tastes like the real thing.  I don't think I could make it any more because I don't think I still have the recipe.

But Sonia, after a lot of experimentation has created a gluten-free pizza using pao de queijo for the dough.  She gave us one of her vegetarian pizzas and it was delicious.

She had taken it to Whole Foods, which immediately wanted to order 25 of them, after tasting the sample, but unfortunately there are all those messy rules and regulations you have to go through before you can sell something like that professionally (thank goodness I didn't know about that when I was baking and selling cakes!) and banks are reluctant to give you a loan if you have no experience, which you can't get without a loan.  So she's in a Catch-22 situation and I don't know what is going to happen with her potential business.

But if she can't get it going the world will miss out on a delicious treat (and I won't be able to get another pao de queijo pizza!)