Today was definitely low key. I called Atria in the
morning and learned that my mother is still coughing a lot, but she is
taking her Tamiflu and that the facility is still on lockdown, so I couldn't
go to visit her. They may be free tomorrow, we'll see.
With the day stretched out in front of me, I decided to catch
up on Homeland. I watched the show for the first 3 or 4
seasons, but soon got tired of the intrigue (necessitating dialog I couldn't
understand) and gave up.
But I recently watched Mandy Patinkin on Morning Joe
and he and Mika got into an animated discussion about the series and she
kept saying it was the only show she watched and that this season was the
best ever. I normally hate picking up a multi-season show late in its
run, but I decided to check out episode 1 of season 7 and was hooked.
Finally the action is on our own shores and concerns Russia's
attempts to mess things up. It was all depressingly familiar, but the
thing that's interesting, Patinkin said, was that all the things you'd
assume were coming from the newspapers of the day, were actually written
long before and filmed before they made headline news.
I watched 2 episodes in the morning and then we went to check
all the work that Ned and Marta and Marta's nieces have been doing on the
house Marta's mother owns in Davis, where Marta grew up. Her mother
hasn't lived there for many years and it has been rented, but she's decided
to renovate it and put it on the market, so Ned has been overseeing things
and doing a lot of the work himself.
I'm very impressed with what a "house guy" our son has become
and all the tricks of the trade he has learned doing house work, like
building my office and some other projects he has helped friends with.
We came back home and I spent the next 3 hours watching
Homeland and I am now caught up to this week's episode which is the
next-to-last in the season. And yes, it has been a very good season.
Last night we went to review a show called Gutenberg! the
Musical! which is by a brand new theater group in town, Bike City
Theatre Company. Problem is that they have no theater, so they are
performing in several different venues for each performance -- 2 different
breweries, a music store, and an art gallery. We saw them at Root of
Happiness Kava Bar. I don't know what Kava is, but apparently it's a
new "in" thing in Davis. Fortunately we did not have to buy anything
to see the show!
They are also trying to be ecologically correct, so there are
no printed programs, but a QR code you can scan which will bring the program
to your cell phone (I found this is a real pain in the butt when you are
trying to write a review).
But the show itself was hilariously funny, madcap zaniness
for 90 minutes (including an intermission). It's about two playwrights
who have written what they think is going to be the next big Broadway show
and they are showing it at a backer's audition (us) to see if anyone might
be interested in funding the show.
There are only two actors and about 20 characters, all of
whom are delineated by different hats which have the character's ID on it
There is even a hat labeled "dead baby" for the child who died because his
mother couldn't read that there were jelly beans, not medicine, in the
bottle she had. Crowd scenes are indicated when the actors pile all
the hats on their heads, removing one at a time, while saying a line as that
character. (And the 5-man "kick line" was hilarious!)
There are forgettable, but very funny-at-the-time songs and
terrible groaners like when Gutenberg tells his girlfriend Helvetica (it is
just assumed the audience will realize that is a font name) that he likes
lamb stew by saying "I love ewe" and she thinks he is professing his love
for her.
The guys explain at the start of the play (which was
nominated to lots of awards in NY back in the early 2000s) that they did a
thorough Google search and found very little about the inventor of the
printing press, so they had to resort to alternative facts to write the play
(actually they called them fictitious facts, but that was in 2007 before
anybody had heard of alternative facts!)
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