I missed my posts last weekend. I also missed yesterday’s post. It turns out that weekends are much, much busier than weekdays. I must not be the only person that is true for, since the blog stats go down on weekends. Presumably, you all are out living your lives, rather than reading about other people’s? Anyway, the last couple of weekends, I’ve been out living my life, leaving less time than normal for writing about it.
Last weekend, my daughter and I went and had a sleepover, since we are blessed with knowing another family with close friends at both generations. It feels very old-fashioned, and fills a surprisingly deep need for me, to share friends with my children. It’s just so much… easier, to negotiate the subtleties of the adult relationships when you are basically aligned on what it is that you are trying to do with the kids. Much harder to stand around on the playground making idle chit-chat when you are struggling to find common ground, still more challenging when you want to talk about solar power when they want to talk about power boats. This friend and I spent hours talking about community, natural parenting, entitlement, western society, what we are going to do with our educations… one of these days… when a miracle occurs… and the girls played some very complicated games involving barbies, pets, and dinosaurs. I’m not clear where the dinosaurs came into all of it; there may have been time travel involved. We went for a long walk to the playground and the cafe (one of the tradeoffs for rural life). It was lovely.
This week was taken up with a festival put on by the drama school my oldest son goes to. We had a great week of kids’ theatre, and I am so impressed. These plays (several of which were written by the older students) rivalled most that I have seen in adult amateur productions. There was humour, there was subtlety, there was complex subject matter – I accidentally took my 7-y.o. to the “PG-13” evening, leading to accidental humour, when the lights went down, and she piped into the darkness, “Mummy, what’s a slut?” I promised her that I would answer all of her questions later, (questions like, “How did she get a baby when they aren’t even married?”), probably with liberal reference to meerkats. (She is a huge fan of Meerkat Manor. This is meerkat life turned to high drama, of the soap opera and biological variety.) Several of the performances featured superior portrayals of drunkenness, a tough nut to crack in a dramatic moment. I had my director’s hat on, though; there were a couple of things that I would have mentioned in adjudication – like staying in character until you are entirely out of sight of the audience, and not being excessive with expository dialogue. But they were, for the most part, quibbles.
A lovely week was had by all. And after neglecting one of my main passions for the last several dozen years, suddenly I found myself at 6 evenings of theatre in a month? Something like that. Almost like I’m being called back.