Left to her own device

I'd been waiting to see The Shakespeare Show for over a month. I mean, it's clearly my kind of entertainment: Shakespeare, David Tennant, Shakespeare, the cream of Britain's acting community with a couple of foreigners thrown in, Shakespeare, ballet, Shakespeare, musical theatre, Shakespeare, jazz, Shakespeare....

We arrived at the cinema early enough to snag our favourite seats in the middle of the back row. Soon, I was in my element. I even enjoyed the intense hip-hop performance about a quarter of the way into the two-hour show. That's when I started to become distracted by a bright light to my left.

A woman seated about four empty seats over appeared to be reading in a Kindle-like fashion on what was either a very large phone, or a very small tablet. She sat like a toad in white capris, with the device held out in front of her. Each time she shifted or tapped the screen, the glow would change and draw my eye back. I held up my ticket print-out to shield the left side of my face, and endeavoured to ignore her.

Every now and then, she'd set the device aside - presumably when something interested her in this pageant chockfull of different styles of delight. I let my hand fall, but shortly, the bright light was bobbing again.

As heaven is my witness, she was watching a video.

I debated inwardly. Should I take action? I wanted to throw something at her, or better still, hurl her damn device down to the bottom of the theatre, but that would cause more problems than it would solve, and a woman who comes to a special showing of a once-in-a-lifetime event and spends it reading and watching videos is probably not in the best of mental health herself.

What do you suppose would be her rationale?

I'm in the back row.

I don't have the sound on.

There's no one sitting immediately next to me.

I don't give a #*&@$%.

Most likely, she hadn't given this any thought at all.

About three quarters of the way through, she packed up and left. I sagged with relief, and settled to watch the show.

The two young men in front of us started texting.

Now, these guys were in some danger, because I was reaching the end of my rope and they were within an arm's reach. We were also watching Othello strangling Desdemona, and Lady Macbeth brandishing bloody daggers - fuel for my darkening fantasies.

These remained fantasies because I didn't want to embarrass my family nor disturb the other patrons who were attentively appreciating Judy Dench, Ian McKellan, Helen Mirren, and a host of others. Elder daughter, alas, picked up on my body language and thought it was directed at her. The Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter were having a lovely time, being on the right side of elder daughter.

The lights came up and as I descended the side stairs, I mentioned the lady with a device to two kindly women preparing to leave. They gazed at me in astonishment: "Why did she come?"

That is the question.

The following is a much-discussed (and much shared) portion of the evening, featuring several Hamlets bickering over the correct delivery of the opening lines of the most famous soliloquy in English theatre. The "Hamlets" are, in order of appearance: Paapa Essiedu (the most recent of the Royal Shakepeare Company's Hamlets, age 25), Tim Minchin (Australian songwriter, comedian, and a particular favourite of elder daughter), Benedict Cumberbatch (being mistaken for Eddie Redmayne here), Dame Harriet Walter (an accomplished stage actress who is also known for films such as 1996's Sense and Sensibility, and is a niece of the late Christopher Lee), David Tennant, Rory Kinnear (apart from his stage accomplishments, a son of Richard Lester favourite Roy Kinnear), Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Judi Dench, and some guy from the audience.

What isn't shown in the clip is the aftermath. Paapa Essiedu, after all this hilarity, still has to deliver the soliloquy and win back the audience. (He does.)

'To be or not to be_' featuring Benedict Cumberbatch & Prince Charles - Shakespeare Live! - BBC from Mai Martin on Vimeo.

You ain't no punk, you punk

Rant alert.  I'm here to talk trash.  Literally.

What is it about garbage that makes us treat our neighbours like rubbish?

We live just up the road from a coffee shop, which is usually a pleasant convenience, except every now and then, people strolling up Springfield Road on our neighbourhood's garbage and recycling pick-up day would toss their  half-full coffee cups into our empty garbage can after the trucks had been by.  It was neither fun nor particularly easy to retrieve soggy cardboard cups from the bottom of the receptacle and then rinse the coffee out.  After a couple of times,  I made sure to get our containers away from the sidewalk as soon as they were empty to foil coffee-tossers or dog-poop disposers.  (Actually, I'm flummoxed by the number of dog-owners who leave their used poop bags on the edge, and sometimes on, the sidewalk.  Why?  Why would they bother to bag it up then just leave it? Do they think someone else will pick it up?  I suppose so. No one's gonna pick it up, sunshine.)

This morning was another garbage and recycling pickup day, and while the Resident Fan Boy was taking the Accent Snob for his dawn relief walk, somebody slithered by with about three bags of trash, lifted and discarded the lid of our bin set by the sidewalk for the garbage truck, and stuffed the bags in, heedless of the overflow.  When the trucks had gone, about mid-morning, I found a small pile consisting of packaging, a very liquified banana peel and a flattened soup can with the paper label still on it.  Unsurprisingly, our donor doesn't bother to sort the compostables and recyclables.

This rather spoiled the mood of goodwill and tranquility I'd worked hard to establish after waking.

I guess the thinking (if any thinking were involved), goes something like this:  "It's a garbage can; so it's okay to put my trash in it 'cause then I'm not littering, see?"

They don't care, of course, that other people - like me, for example - have to pick up the disgusting slop-overs that didn't make it into the truck because their gift to us was in three (three!) flimsy and open bags.  Why?  Because I'm not a friend, family member or acquaintance of this dumper and therefore don't matter.

While the Resident Fan Boy and I were steaming, we recalled a morning a few years back when we left an ancient, defunct and very heavy TV set by the curb for pick-up.  It had disappeared by daybreak and then - get this - whoever had taken it discovered that there was a reason we were throwing it out and returned it to the curb in front of our house the next morning.  We were forced to lug the weighty bit of junk into the garage, wait for the next pickup in two weeks' time as it was winter, and set it out again, this time with a large sign reading "BROKEN - This television does NOT work".

Such crap is not limited to Hades. When we lived in Victoria, we had a picket fence around our tiny front lawn which evidently caused  passersby to mistake our yard for a wastebasket.

I've said something like this before: if we treat people we don't know as if they don't matter because we don't know them, then there is little hope for us.  The world is simply getting too small.

All of which means, I suppose, that I shouldn't fantasize about tossing these miscreants down the garbage shute like Veruca Salt, but heck, this was the one song I really liked from the 2005 version of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's very Beach-Boy-ish, as in Pet Sounds. It's also a firm favourite with younger daughter, who dressed up as Veruca Salt (pre-garbage-shute) a few Hallowe'ens back:



Or I can vent my rage like The Cramps.  I know I've posted this song before, but I can't resist.  Take it away, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy.
Please.
Just take it away.

The sisterhood

Today, I feel a little more invisible than usual. It's time for my annual ophthalmology appointment, so I've left off the makeup and am wearing glasses. I could get depressed about looking less appealing than usual, but, heck, I'm over thirty-five. Nobody looks at me anyway. It's not all bad; I've discovered that I can cry in public -- no one notices.

Invisibility doesn't just come from failing to be young. Having a special needs child can make you vanish into the scenery more effectively than Harry Potter's magic cloak. I've discussed this with other "special needs mums". One of them described chatting with another mum while waiting outside the school for her son on the autism spectrum. A woman walked up to the other mum and arranged a play date between their respective children. It was as if my friend were not standing there. She tells me this is a regular occurrence. No one ever approaches to make a play date with her son.

I believe her. I'd been at that school for eight years: four with neuro-typical (albeit gifted) older daughter and four with PDD-NOS younger daughter. I was visible and included the first four; invisible and excluded the second four, even though I was at the school every day -- exactly like my daughters.

Actually, invisibility has its own blessings, because the only time you become visible with a special needs child is when there's a problem. One of our national papers here in Canada is The Globe and Mail which, for the past fifteen years or so, has had a feature called "Facts and Arguments", a daily essay submitted by a G&M reader. Not long ago, a heart-breaking piece appeared, written by a special needs mum who is on that still-hopeful-not-yet-exhausted opening edge of seeing her child through school. In an effort to help classmates and their parents understand about her son, who is living with Down's Syndrome, she wrote a letter and the teacher distributed it to the class families. She was approached by a parent who said she was "surprised at the letter" then asked (wait for it) why this mother had not had prenatal testing. This gentle mother managed a polite response, stumbled to her car and spent the rest of the morning crying:

What I should have asked the mom in the playground was, “What if your daughter was in a car accident tomorrow and had a brain injury? Would you love her any less?”

Oh, darlin', I've been there too, leaning unseen against a tree in the little park below the school, gasping and weeping. For myself, what I long to ask those other parents with neuro-typical children is this: "Do you really think that your child's strengths and gifts are your doing? Do you really think that my child's disabilities are my doing? Because, dear people, all it takes is an illness or an accident. Then you can be in my little club."

I have a secret name for my little club. I call it The Sisterhood. I realize that dads are in this too, but it's the mums that I encounter. Have you ever heard of "gaydar"? I'm reasonably certain that there's a similar sort of sense between special needs mums because ever since I came to Hades (mere months after younger daughter was first "identified"), the only true connections I seem to have made have been with others in The Sisterhood, and there's usually been an attraction of sorts, even before we learn about each other's children. Like any club, we have our own sort of competitions; a meeting over coffee includes support, sympathy, and the underlying gauging of whose life is more challenging and whose child is more, or less, challenged. I usually seem to lose in the first category and win in the second, and feel that the other Sister leaves thinking her child is making better progress than mine.

It's a service I provide.

We share our frustrations over therapy, teachers, bone-headed comments (see above), bullying....

Oh yes, bullying. Sometimes it seems our kids are invisible and that's when they fall through the cracks of the school system, but our kids are different, not a desirable thing in school culture and that makes them highly visible targets.

Not long ago, this article appeared in our local paper, about a boy from Alma, Québec, which is about 600 kilometres (a bit less than 400 miles) from Hades. He's been missing for over a year and the events leading up to his disappearance were uncomfortably familiar.

It was sadness for him and his mother (one of The Sisterhood) that had me riding in the bus, listening to Kate Rusby:
Winter comes around,
And he knows he is homeward bound,
His heartbeat is the only sound he's known,

He once lost his way,
He knows now that was yesterday,
He fell down on his knees to pray for home.

We'll sing to the morning,
We'll sing till the bells they sound,
We'll sing till the wandering soul is found.

He's found his way at last,
With each turn a new bond was cast,
His friends now hold him steady fast and true.

With peace in his eyes,
The fear now is a pain in the skies,
With friends near he sees only skies of blue

It's clearer every day,
He knows now he is here to stay,
He cares not why he went away so long.

He's found where he belongs,
He know he's been here all along,
He is smiling as he joins his friends in song.

We'll sing to the morning,
We'll sing till the bells they sound,
We'll sing till the wandering soul is found.

And there it is -- all our invisible hopes and dreams for these children who were sent to us. Pipe-dreams, perhaps, but it's what we hold on to.

Oh, my Sisters. This song is for you and them.