Don't Make Me Release The Flying Monkeys

Yesterday Andy and I spent the afternoon hiking all around Mt. Auburn Cemetery. It was the best choice of things to do together. We walked and walked and had plenty of time to talk in a low-pressure environment. We really got to know so much more about each other -- our histories, aspects of our personalities... and that we're both comfortable making jokes in grave yards. We walked 3 or 4 miles, all told.

We were hungry after that, so we went to dinner at Stella's in Watertown. It's a somewhat pricy but very good Italian place. I had a glass of malbec and he had a merlot. We shared a roasted beet salad that was out of this world. It was something I never would have thought to order myself because it contained horseradish which I hate, but I couldn't taste the horseradish at all, just the luscious beets, walnuts, and endive. Then I had an amazing wild mushroom fettuccine that featured sauteed portabello, crimini, shiitake, and porcini mushrooms (I'm trying to be like lillibet in remembering what I ate). It was dressed in a truffle oil and light cream sauce with freshly ground black pepper. Oh. My. God. It was mushroom lover's paradise. It clearly reminded me that I could be a vegetarian if I had dishes like this all the time. Mushrooms are meat.

It was a great day together. But now he has a business trip (teaching at a seminar) and I won't see him for a whole week. :-( I like how this all is actually starting to take on a shape, but I don't want it to lose momentum. Guess e-mail will have to do for the week...

I guess if I had to write a one-sentence review of ART's Romeo & Juliet, I could do it adequately by sucking in my cheeks and saying "Now ees dee time on Shprockets ven vee DIIIIIE."

I actually enjoyed the production on a number of levels, in spite of a rigid treatment that I don't think hit the bulls-eye. It was performed in a ginormous sandbox, essentially. Don't picture a kiddy sandbox, picture a wide strip of sparkly black sand the length of an Olympic sized pool. That was the performance area. Costumes were dark and a mish-mash of periods and styles (a trademark of ART costuming), and the tone was aggressive...adult...angsty. Not quite goth, but halfway to it. The freaky masquerade dance was among the best I've seen, per choreography and originality. A felt the same way about most of it.

At one point in the 1st act, A became concerned that the actor playing Escalus appeared possibly to be having a stroke onstage before our very eyes. I said no, the stutter and right-side stiffness were just character choices. But by intermission, he had me convinced, too, that this poor actor was stroking. Because A is a doctor, I found it harder to doubt him than I would anyone else making a diagnosis like that, and it wouldn't be beyond ART to send an actor onstage in the middle of a medical emergency (I used to work there). I spent the 2nd act wondering if poor actor-playing-Escalus was going to fall face first in the sand, and listening for ambulance sirens approaching the theatre...

Then came curtain call, and the actor dropped character and broke into a healthy and normal gait. All was well. So, job nicely done by (*checks program*) actor John Campion. Should I write him a note saying he tricked my doctor date?

About the other thing...I've decided not to write off thangs with A just yet. There is something there. Upon talking, my suspicions turned out to be unfounded. There's a nice spark growing slowly. More about that in a friends-only post. I want to see where things go, if he does.