Revealed themselves one star at a time

 Planning is key - especially with someone on the autistic spectrum.

I'd carefully sold the outdoor screening of A Hard Day's Night at Beacon Hill Park to younger daughter a couple of days in advance.

On the day in question, we had a couple of hours to sunset, so I put on some music after dinner and made popcorn - having been mindful enough to locate the popping corn earlier in the day, which required cleaning out a couple of cupboards.  (The B-Festival wasn't selling popcorn this year.) I summoned younger daughter, so she could enjoy the kernels blossoming into white.

Then I withdrew to cover myself in highly toxic "Muskol", having also dug that out in advance. I diplomatically got younger daughter to don shoes and socks, rather than her favoured footwear of the summer, her fancy flip-flops.

Leaving our building, I took the lead, race-walking the most direct route to the Cameron Bandshell, reflecting on how it had been almost exactly three years since the evening we last attended a film at the Free-B Movie Festival.  In 2019, we took younger daughter to the condo, to break the news that we were moving from the apartment we'd occupied since our return to Victoria in 2017.  That way, she could see her new bedroom, and to soften the blow, proceed to the park to watch a Harry Potter movie.  (It went well.)

Three years later, we secured a bench corner, not too near the front, and munched the home-made popcorn, and, in the deepening dusk, watched the Beatles in a film we must have seen over fifty times, but there are still new things to discover.  This time, I saw George Harrison fall against a speaker as he played, and wondered how I'd missed that, all these years.

A star (or, more likely, a planet) rose slowly behind the screen, and I made a wish.  It's always the same one, and I can't tell you what it is, for fear it won't come true.

Afterwards, the Resident Fan Boy, who'd been grumbling all weekend, said he was happy he'd come.  A large orange moon, just past being full, had made its way to a spot above the buildings on the eastern horizon,  beyond the dark park. On Southgate, I caught a glimpse of a brilliant meteor whizzing silently eastward, and younger daughter told me, as we walked home, that she'd spotted a shooting star during the movie.  This was at the time of the Perseids.  

I felt tired, but content.  It would have been nice to have ended there.

Planning doesn't prevent the unexpected.  Once home, the Resident Fan Boy couldn't find his phone.  Sighing patiently, I phoned his number from mine.  We heard nothing.

The RFB sought and panicked, while I went into the bathroom to turn off the taps on the tub he'd been running.  The RFB dove back into the night, to retrace his steps in the dark.

About five minutes later, younger daughter found the missing phone under the bathmat.  I texted, hoping the message would flash up on his FitBit:  "You can come home."  "It was under the bathmat."

I texted over and over.  Thirty-seven times.

When the RFB returned half an hour later, he realized he'd silenced the ringer for the movie, which is why we couldn't hear it when searching the apartment.

I got to bed about 1 am, after rinsing the toxic insect repellent from my body.  Two days later, about a dozen bites blossomed on my knees.  They seemed to come out of nowhere, like stars in a summer sky. 

Securely locked out

The problem with moving between provinces is that the email I've used for about 15 years became unusable last November when we hooked up the computer in our new apartment, complete with new service provider.

This was fine until my laptop got fed up with my failure to update and rebooted itself in a fit of temper, apparently taking my password with it.

This blog continues to be under my extinct email address, which means I can't have a new password sent to it, and was forced to access another ancient Yahoo Mail account. Then Blogger refused to let me sign in a series of passwords.

This was last spring.

It's taken me the summer to summon up the courage to try again, while I came to terms with the possibility of never being able to access this blog again. However, I tried from our main computer, instead of my rapidly aging and cantankerous laptop, and I'm here!

Now I'm terrified to try to sign back into my regular account...

Wifi disaster

We've moved out of our house-sit, only to discover that Demeter's wifi is mysteriously unfunctional. Try explaining this to a teenager living on the autistic spectrum.  From a café a few blocks away, I offer you an image from our final peaceful evening, about thirty-five hours ago.

That's not a bird, by the way. It's a kite-surfer. He's even nuttier than I'm rapidly becoming.

Shutter flutter

So there I was at Planet Coffee, eating a cream cheese brownie and sipping the best egg nog latté on the planet (Earth, that is) when a sparrow began making his rounds.

Sparrows usually sneak into Planet Coffee through the open windows in the summer, and one or two slip in during the winter despite the staff's best efforts to guide them out. This one hopped from crumb to crumb along the floor.

I muted my phone to eliminate the artificial (and rather loud) shutter click. Looking up, there was Mr Sparrow nodding cheekily at me from the top of the opposite chair. I swung my phone up quietly and he sat there cooperatively, while my phone slipped off camera setting - as it usually does. I punched it back in and released the shutter. I thought I saw the his fleeting outline in the upper right-hand corner through the viewfinder.

But evidently I didn't.

Wake me up before you nonny-nonny

Watching David Tennant and Catherine Tate in a filmed performance of Much Ado About Nothing downloaded to my computer is a bit like the live-stream videos of the Sunday services at my mother's church. Now there's something I never thought I'd be saying.

See, last week word came from DT fan sources that last summer's West End production of MAAN at Wyndham's Theatre would be available on DVD come February. Almost immediately, Amazon.co.uk seemed to back-pedal, announcing it wasn't happening just yet. Then word came through Doctor Who channels that this production is available now for downloading. You have to install something called Digital Theatre (DT - nice symmetry, wot?), and the downloading process takes more than four hours. Mind you, my computer is a bit of a dinosaur -- the programmes on it are almost two years old -- so that may be at the root of what ensued.

When I finally completed all this and settled down to watch, I found the images beautifully defined -- when the actors don't move much. Unfortunately, this production involves plenty of physical comedy, a revolving stage, and gyrating to eighties-style pop. When this happens, the images tend to freeze and jerk, and often the speech isn't quite synchronized to the moving lips. As I said, it's rather like the live stream of Unitarian church services in Victoria, which tends to freeze every time the camera pans or the congregation rises to sing a hymn. When the actors are still, they are beautifully visible, though; if you want to feast your eyes on Tennant's stubble and Tate's mole, you can do so. The audio, likewise, is crystal clear.

Anyway, it took me the first half hour to get over the distraction of the flashing and freezing and get into the story.

I've probably seen more productions of Much Ado About Nothing than any other Shakespeare play, although I've never sat down and done a tabulation. It is the one play I've seen at Stratford-upon-Avon (set in the British Raj with a line of Indian guards bellowing: "Stap in the niem of the Prince!"). It is a fine play, a rollicking play, but I actually have more difficulty with it than I do with The Taming of the Shrew or even The Merchant of Venice. This is because I find it hard to concentrate on the humour when, like Beatrice, I want to kill Claudio.

I wrote about a Company of Fools production of MAAN a couple of years ago which dealt with the problem of the Hero-and-Claudio plot by making both wronged Hero and cloddish, self-righteous Claudio attractive airheads. It worked very well. After all, why else would they end up married at the end of the play after Claudio has shamed Hero at their first attempted wedding on the flimsiest of evidence, unless both parties were not all that bright?

Tennant and Tate's version puts heavy emphasis on the rage of the wronged family: the reactions of Beatrice, Leonato, Ursula, and finally, Benedict to Claudio's (and the Prince's) appalling behaviour and lack of remorse. There still remains the problem of restoring the Prince and Claudio back to the status of "good guys", so we get to see Claudio go into paroxysms of grief in a vigil for the supposedly dead Hero with the aid of a bottle of whiskey, a ghetto-blaster and a pistol. He doesn't use the latter because he catches a brief glimpse of Hero whom he presumably mistakes for a ghost before the Prince arrives to escort him to his wedding to Hero's "cousin" (who turns out to be Hero herself, of course). It still doesn't quite work, but it's a nice try.

Things I liked about the production:

1) The neat conceit of paralleling Hero in this eighties-flavoured show with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, right down to her wedding dress. Too bad they didn't find a jug-eared actor to play Claudio.

2) The predicaments in which Benedict and Beatrice find themselves as they eavesdrop on their friends' staged conversations about their passion for each other. Benedict gets tangled up with cans of paint, and Beatrice is hoisted aloft by the seat of her pants (although the harness is clearly visible).

3) The serious scenes following Hero's shaming at her own wedding. I found myself, despite the technical distractions of this download, getting totally absorbed in events and believed, for the first time, that there was indeed a deep connection between Benedict and Beatrice. There was a truth there that simply hadn't been in the comedy which, coming from performances by Tennant and Tate, surprises me. Maybe they did too good a job of eighties shallow.

4) Elliot Levey's portrayal of the villainous Don John. This is a fiendishly difficult role to pull off because Don John is supposed to be a thoroughly unlikeable chap. He's shown here as being rather socially inept and it's clear that his princely brother Don Pedro loathes him. This rescues him from the second dimension and makes his actions more understandable.

On the downside, the director and Catherine Tate evidently decided to give Beatrice an awkward side. When Don Pedro suggests marriage, and when Benedict declares himself to her, Tate dissolves into odd vocalizations and hyperventilation. I can see what they were aiming for, but I found it more grating than humanizing and it rather spoiled my favourite line in the play (and possibly in all of Shakespeare), when Don Pedro comments that she was born in a merry hour and she replies: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. In a flash of lyrical poignancy, we get the measure of Beatrice, but I think it was lost here.

I also didn't care much for Tennant's and Tate's more obvious playing to the audience. I'm sure it was far more amusing for those actually there, but it leaves us poor schmucks who couldn't come up with the airfare to London out in the cold.

All in all? It's good fun, but I feel I'm missing a lot due to the technical difficulties of this download and I really hope this is released to DVD soon.

In need of re-animation

Oh gawd. I've just spent a frantic hour proof-reading elder daughter's essay via Skype and Microsoft Word. She doesn't ask me to do this often --- and may never do so again. I was using the rather marvelous "Track Changes" tool on Word, the one that notes your changes and deletions in red while preserving the original uncorrected text in the right margin. Ever tried it? It's fab! So I saved it, went to attach it and discovered I'd lost it. After searching files for it only to be told I couldn't open it, I had to do it all over again, this time carefully renaming the file and saving it to my desktop where I could see the damn thing to attach it.

Thank goodness someone else posted something rather wonderful on my Facebook page today. These are videos from the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), and they're called "RSA Animates". I rather wish all lectures could be this way, or that I could take notes like this, but I would need to be both artistically competent and prescient and I'm neither. If you can spare a few minutes, just look at this:

Isn't that great? Here's another from an American professor (with a Sicilian background which apparently hasn't slowed him down -- watch this to see what I mean):

If you just close your eyes and listen, it's interesting enough, but by golly, it's much easier to follow and remember with the visual accompaniment, doncha think?