Apr. 27th, 2025

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A Midsummer Night's Dream put on by the Actors' Shakespeare Project at the Mosesian Center in Watertown. My MIL generously wanted to take the family out to a play - I think this was Q's first live Shakespeare? For me, it's always interesting to see what a different production will do with a very familiar text like this one. I did not love every choice this company made (it was very screamy and I had a moderately bad headache, and they had cast the young lovers with some of the older actors and the over-the-topness I can kind of deal with coming from young people gets creepier when they're all middle-aged, and they played the last bit of the play-within-the-play weirdly straightly-dramatic rather than going for comedy). But they were obviously having a lot of fun, and the 90s-club styling of the fairies was fun, and they made the interesting choice of casting Puck with an amazing breakdancer and giving some of his speeches to voiceovers (and the last bit to Quince, here a veteran theater director lady). And the kids thought it was funny and had fun, so, definitely a success as a theater outing.
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The Pomegranate Gate, Ariel Kaplan, 2023 fantasy novel. It's the Inquisition and the Jews are getting expelled from (mildly-fantasy) Spain, but two young adults get entangled with the (definitely-fantasy) parallel magical universe and their own magical heritage. I felt like this had a lot of potential, and overall I did like it and hope to read the rest of the trilogy, but it also had a number of problems which I am now going to complain about as is my way. It was really long and slow, and was the kind of plot that is more driven by the slow reveal of epic backstory than a sense of forward momentum, only I felt like I was having a lot of trouble even connecting that, like, characters A and B in one POV were the same people as characters C and D in another POV, so I'm not sure if I figured out that they were the same people at the right time or really belatedly or what. And there were sometimes reveals that, like, F was actually G! Only I had no idea why that mattered. Or, there's a couple of macguffins, only it took most of the book to even figure out what they were or why anyone cared, and then, like, now someone we've never heard of has one of them, what am I even supposed to make of this? I don't know. There was maybe something interesting going on with the full-magic people doing magic intuitively, but part-human magic users needing to use words and breath and writing (which felt relevant to it being a specifically Jewish fantasy) and I wanted to go back and reread some bits related to that but my ebook expired. In other ways, the magic-item and magic-court-intrigue parts felt like a weird fit with the moments of real Sephardic history where the human Jewish characters were trying to figure out where they could go, making choices about seizing possible chances for safety vs trying to reunite with loved ones, and seeing their homes and possessions taken from them. Like, that stuff all had some real weight, and then you're back to the magic people, who I think Kaplan cared a lot more about than I did. I did like that there were a couple of older women with some interesting complexity of character and interesting conflict between them; I suspect my feelings about the next book may depend a lot on how much of them we get, and how much the plot is able to take off now that the whole stage is set.

NEFFA

Apr. 27th, 2025 12:43 pm
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I've been having some big sad feelings about whether I would ever be able to dance again - *not* because guilty feet have got no rhythm, thank you, but because last time I wore my right ankle brace for anything it messed up my right knee, and I can't dance safely without my ankle braces, but I can't do stairs and hills without my knee. So I have been all woe, alack, maybe I don't want to even be around the dance scene if I can't dance, but I really wanted to see some friends, so I decided to get over myself and go to NEFFA. And! I danced! I did the medley prep where we learned the dances for the ECD medley, and then danced the medley, and my ankles and knees both did fine, and the only thing that felt bad this morning was a muscle in my left thigh. So apparently the brace is not just instant poison for the knee - maybe it was something specific I did in it last time, like walking up- and downhill, or driving in it, but ECD is not that thing. So maybe I can do more of it, and maybe even experiment with some walked Scottish, or - who knows! The contra medley next year? It felt so good and I was so happy to get to dance again.

(I did screw up the medley fairly significantly, but not for ankle or knee reasons - I was dancing with a contra dancer but ECD newbie and forgot the important rule of having newbies dance the position they've been learning, and then we collided with another couple who were confused about whether they were ones or twos and got really confused about whether *we* were ones or twos, and that took multiple times through to sort out while we vexed various other couples who were expecting one or the other. But I think she had fun, and I've always enjoyed trying to get a less-familiar dancer through a dance, so it was fun for me. Although it's weird in a mask! I'm, like, smiling away, and is that even coming across? Anyways, this felt like a totally normal and reasonable way to botch a medley, as opposed to, you know, my secret dread of rolling an ankle and bringing the entire dance to a halt while I have to be helped off the floor, so enh, it felt like a glorious victory even if by frequent-dancer standards it was a poor showing.)

Other highlights of NEFFA included getting to watch two friends' ritual dance groups (both of whom have now been joined in said groups by their teen children! which is neat). And dinner with one of said friends, and a fun musical performance/history lesson about queer maritime music by the Ranzo Boys, who have an album coming out that I look forward to buying, and listening to the contra medley music even if I wasn't dancing it. (Whose album I suppose I could also buy!) So, that was great. An excellent NEFFA, after I don't know how many years away. (Okay, we apparently went in 2010 and 2011 when the first kid was a baby/toddler, and then in 2013 and 2014 when the second kid was a baby/toddler, but then in 2015 I had had one of the really bad ankle re-sprains, and after that we were more like in "wrangling children who don't want to be dragged to NEFFA and have weekend activities of their own" mode. As far as dancing at all, I apparently went to Harvard English once in 2017, successfully, and meant to go back and just didn't (and/or had more poorly-timed ankle events), and then we began a pandemic.)

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