Come for the Cheesecake...

...stay for the play

We went off to Winters to see Nunsense tonight.  I really don't like 3-show weeks, but if you have to have a 3-show week, Nunsense, especially at Winters Theatre Company, is a nice way to end it.  Silliness from start to finish.  I didn't have to think like I did last night at the dance production at the university.

I love Winters because on opening night they give you free cheesecake and champagne.  It was fun before the show because we were with Debra LoGuercio, the editor of the Winters Express and prolific Facebook writer (it was she who wrote the immortal words "isn't it nice that Girl Scout cookies are sold in single serving packages."  I laughed myself silly, covered with Tagalong crumbs as I read it!).   There were also two women at our table who were "meeting in the middle for a fun weekend."  One lives in Auburn and one in Vallejo and they figured Winters was the inbetween spot where they could spend a girls' weekend.  Kind of like Lynn and I are doing next weekend. They had gone biking during the day and had read about Nunsense and thought it would be a fun thing to do in the evening.  Fortunately, as the play ended, they were laughing and talking about what fun it was.

The show was fun and a lot of that had to do with a long-time performer with the Davis Musical Theater Company, making her Winters debut in the role of the Mother Superior.  Mary has been with DMTC for years, but when you are with any company "for years," you eventually start aging out of the kinds of roles you have done forever, especially as newer, stronger talent shows up at auditions.   I told Walt I thought Mary was the best thing to happen to the Winters Theatre Company and that the Winters Theatre Company was the best thing to happen to Mary.   It was a happy mingling and it made the show such fun.

We were sitting at a table right in front of the stage and both Mary and Eleanor, another former Davis performer who has worked with Walt before, used him as the target of some of their audience interactions.

Earlier in the day, I had finally had my visit with the ophthalmologist about whether I am going to let them attempt cataract surgery on my "bad" eye or not.

The doctor was another Doogie Howser-type, but then most doctors seem to be Doogie Howser these days.  But she obviously knew her stuff.  She explained in much fuller detail than anybody had ever explained before exactly what the difficulty with this eye is.  She said she was surprised nobody had ever explained it to me until 4 years ago when the guy who did my surgery gave me a cursory explanation.   I realized that though I have gotten regular eye exams for the last 35 years or so, I just always assumed that I was seeing an ophthalmalogist because there is only one eye doctor at Kaiser in Davis.  

Only it turns out that he is an optometrist...he was the guy who told me that my recent eye problems were NOT cataract-related because my cataracts were not "ripe enough."  He put me into a panic of fear of blindness for a month until I finally got an appointment with the opthalmologist in Sacramento.  The very FIRST words I heard from that office was "it used to be believed that cataracts had to be 'ripe' before they were removed, but that isn't true any more."  I have never returned to the Davis eye department and will never return to the Davis eye department.

Anyway, according to Doogette Howser, she thinks that because of a deformed eye, the cataract is growing around in back of the lens, which makes removing it more tricky than your run of the mill cataract.  There is a danger that, given where she thinks it is (but won't know until she gets in there), pieces of the cataract could "drop behind the lens" and that would require a second or third surgery by another specialist to remove the bits and replace the lens.

There are encouraging things about the surgery and scary things about the surgery.  I asked her what she would do if it were her and while she didn't really answer that question, she also didn't cringe when I suggested that we give it another year and see how things are then.  She seemed comfortable with that decision.

So no surgery this year and I'll just go along as before.  I don't use the eye or vision anyway, so even if it couldn't be fixed and I were somehow to lose the vision in that eye entirely, the only reason it would ever be a problem for me is if something happened to the OTHER eye.  

But I feel OK about the decision to postpone making a decision.   Doogette will be a year older next year anyway.  :)