Friday morning Shabbat prep and commute

I got home too late last night, too tired to face even starting challah dough. Shabbat's getting earlier at an amazing rate, though, so I needed to cook something before work. I partly steamed broccoli, then finished it cooking with sauteed onions, garlic, and ginger (not fresh, some of the somewhat sweetened stuff I made earlier; I balanced the sweetness by adding a bunch of black pepper). I roasted a tray of cubed beets and sweet potatoes, and made spicy almond noodles (less spicy than last week, 'cause there wasn't as much spicy sauce left as I'd thought). And I started challah dough, a small batch, since I'll be baking again on Sunday.

The plan for the afternoon includes baking challah (the second rise will likely be shorter than I'd choose), perhaps a gingerbread with honey (an advance trial for a R"H dessert, since the honeycake I've had has been too dry and too unrelievedly sweet, without anything to balance it), and a pot of butternut squash with sausage and spinach (and garlic and onions, of course). I'd like to make another vegetable of some sort, not sure what.

Plus one or two errands. It feels ambitious; it feels like the chagim are here and one million things must be done to have it all work right....


So I headed to work a bit later than I'd wanted. And it's never a good sign when you go into the T station and there's smoke. The inbound train was just sitting there, doors open, while the smoke slowly spread along the lower (inbound) platform. Eventually they had everyone get off the train, which practically filled the platform. There was no way everyone would fit on the next train, or possibly even the second. The silver lining to this was that I ran into an old acquaintance, a dancer, and we caught up with each other on the platform and the ride in.

Random interesting link: radical cartography, which has a bunch about Boston transportation, among other places, and thoughts about public transport in general. I haven't poked around the site much (the configuration was non-intuitive for me), but it looks interesting.

Pulp

Last night I went to the first performance of BTW's production of Pulp (Patricia Kane), which is described as "a play with music". Despite the first night glitches, it's a fabulous show, following Terry Logan after her discharge (for finally being caught with some girl or another) from the WACS as she goes to Chicago, finding a bar with other lesbians, both out and not. It's over-the-top, self-consciously cheesy, and it works beautifully.

The space at the Black Box Theatre is set up with woodwork around the whole space, the audience seated either at little tables for two (with little lamps on each), or the one row of chairs along the perimeter. The performance space is at the bar, and a little circular stage space in the middle. The audience becomes part of the play, the audience for a variety of singing performances. It totally works. Of course, there are the usual issues with working in the round, making sure that no one is blocked from seeing the action for too long, but they did a pretty good job of that.

The dialogue is fun, being over-the-top parody of lesbian pulp fiction filled with innuendo. And the music was impressive: these actors can sing, too.

The glitches: there was a screw-up with the sound, which lead to them having to rerecord a lot of the incidental sounds. Even though we started half an hour late (luckily, it's about a 90 minute show, so it didn't make the night too late), they'd gotten only 75% done, so the composer was in the sound booth doing some sounds live, and I could tell that the timing was a tiny bit off. Not a huge deal, and obviously one that won't be recurring. The sounds themselves were funny: each time someone mentioned particular things, there were the sound effects you'd expect for it. There were one or two times when people's timing for their lines was off, talking over someone else's end-of-line. The last thing that I didn't like wasn't a glitch at all, just a costuming choice. One actor plays two roles, a very short one at the beginning, and another through the rest of the play. And though the costumes were different, the hair combs were the same, which made me wonder a bit longer than I should've whether they were the same character. Oh, and I'm assuming it's because of the genre being spoofed, but there was a conflation of cross-dressing with gayness that is obviously not correlated.

Everything else, though, was great, two thumbs up, a really enjoyable evening.