A Bloody Weekend

This is going to be a bloody weekend.  And I mean that literally.

As a general rule, I don't really like 3-show weekends.  By the time the third show rolls around, I'm really theater-ed out and don't really want to go to yet another show.  But if you have, like a musical, or a comedy among the straight dramas, it's not too bad.

This weekend is not like that.

Tonight we went to the University production of Woyzeck, by Georg Buchner.  Woyzeck is the story of a man being driven insane by a Mengle-like doctor, who wants to see what happens when you have a patient eat only peas, morning noon and night, and by a sadistic sergeant who has Woyzeck working his tail off while being yelled at and ridiculed.  Then there is his common-law wife, the mother of his only child, who is cheating on him -- in front of him.  In the end, he ends up murdering her, in a bloody struggle with a knife, when he stabs her several times while she dies.

(I had to admit that as he was doing that, and she was moaning each time he stabbed her, I couldn't help thinking of the murder a couple of years ago, of an older couple who were murdered by a kid who wanted to find out what it was to kill someone.  Each of the couple was stabbed something like 40 times and I could just picture what the woman, whom I knew, was going through).

It was a good production, and I liked it better than I expected to, but still we went home with a bloody vision in our heads.

Tomorrow night I review Sweeny Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, who slashes his customers' throats and shoots them down to the villainous Mrs. Lovett, who cuts them up, cooks them, and puts them in her famous meat pies.

And we close out this happy journey through murder and mayhem with a production of Julius Caesar, and we all know how THAT one turns out!  Probably shouldn't be around me until I've had a chance to get some Music Man or other musical therapy!

When Walt got up this morning, there were cards from the dogs and one from me but I told him that we were going to have to pretend that his birthday was March 1, because it would be that long before we could celebrate.  Besides, Ned had root canal yesterday and I didn't think HE would be up for a birthday dinner tonight either!

I had some interesting customers at Logos today.  A woman was telling me about finding a copy of a 1885 edition of "The Tour Around the World in 80 Days," which she was able to buy very cheap.  Apparently, she tells me, Verne's original story was in French and was translated two different ways, the other, of course, being "Around the World in 80 Days."  We both wondered if it had only been called "The Tour..." if it would have ever made it to the movie screen.

A regular customer, a short, older guy who sounds like he might be Italian, had just returned from London.  We talked about weather (it was raining in London) and we decided God must be living in California this month!

A woman with plaid shoes and the bushiest hair I've ever seen kept flouncing it and rearranging it on her head.  She didn't buy anything, but I never did see her face because it was always covered by her hair.

 

Another woman was wearing the most electric purple shoes I'd ever seen, in contrast to her rather drab appearance otherwise.

 

An older man looked around the store for awhile while his white-haired wife sat at the front table looking disinterested and picking at her teeth...I halfway expected her to remove her dentures.

Knowing that I had heavy drama ahead of me, and still full from my lunch at Atria, I came home and went right to sleep and slept for about an hour while Walt fed the dogs and reheated his own dinner.  Happy birthday, husband!  But it worked.  I didn't have the "nod off" problem and didn't miss a single minute of the bloody murder.