Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I went across the street to watch the Super Bowl at a neighbor’s party.  Since I really didn’t have a dog in the hunt, and it was a social occasion, I probably didn’t give the 2007 ads as much scrutiny as they deserved.  One thing I do know - Snickers is America’s favorite gay bar.

Sometime last week, Mrs. Perils mentioned that a Tom Stoppard play was being presented at a small theatre nearby, so I scored four tickets, and we went on Thursday night with our son and a young/old friend of mine. We’ve seen two other Stoppard plays, Arcadia here in Seattle and Rough Crossing down in Ashland a few years ago, loved both and jumped at the chance to see another.

The play was The Travesties, which was first performed in 1974. Its premise is a hypothetical interaction in 1916 between James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, the founder of the Dada movement, as recalled by an ultimately unreliable narrator late in his life. All three did, in fact, reside in Zurich at the time - Joyce was writing Ulysses, Lenin was in exile waiting for the right moment to join the revolution in Russia, and I have no idea what the Dada guy was up to - but Stoppard isn’t suggesting that any such interaction actually happened - it’s just a convenient setup for cascades of snappy comedic dialog.

And snappy it was, rich and clever, and it kept me in stitches. It was replete with puns, limericks and featured a sorta-history lesson delivered as a strip-tease that I thought would have been right at home in Gravity’s Rainbow - just a lot of nutty stuff. In order to fully comprehend some of the byplay, though, I might have to read up on Dada a bit and (sigh) finally tackle Ulysses.

The theater itself is situated in an old bathhouse down by Greenlake, about 2 miles from the house. It’s pretty intimate, seats 100 people at most. Last year we saw a production of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage there, with a cast of 3 women. The Stoppard play had a 7 or 8, and it seemed very busy by comparison. They pulled off a lot of kaleidescopic action with a single (I believe) scene change. It’s amazing to me the level of talent that you encounter in these small theater troupes, without the resources that the cash-cow repertories have at their disposal. (although they probably struggle to break even, too.)

And, happily, there’s a Stoppard play, On The Razzle, in the list of plays we’ll be seeing this July in Ashland. We purchased our Ashland tickets during the member’s presale last November, and our seats for all the performances just rock. We’re in the first row for almost every play, including the Stoppard.

Update: Here’s a much more coherent review from the Seattle Times

Many of us know Carroll, the Drive-By Blogger (there’s nothing to link to - she doesn’t have a blog of her own.  Instead, she enlivens our comments sections with her itinerant conversation).  She and spouse are off to Maui for the entire month of February, and after reading her email explaining why we won’t find her sacked out in our blog-basements, I started to reminisce about our own trips to the sun-splashed isles.

All three of our trips to Maui occurred before I had a digital camera, so the photos are squirrelled away somewhere in the hundreds of photo-processing envelopes filling our drawers and shelves.  Too lazy to hunt for them, I did a report from Quicken filtered on “vacations”, and there they were, the trips from 1999 and 2000.  I was transported back to the Old Lahaina Luau, the Paia Fish House, Haleakala National Park…

Boy, you know you’re an accountant when ledger entries make you nostalgic.

Not that I have an unhealthy fixation on this topic..but I had to laugh at this bit in today’s P-I by Cathy Sorbo:

I wonder how long the novelty of sexy gals at the drive-thru will last. Forever? Maybe. And why are there no hot and hunky shirtless and bethonged boy baristas available to serve us ladies our coffee?

And if there were, would you have the guts to order a short drip?

And if you think I’m bad, one of her commenters  raised (heh) the idea of breast-milk lattes.