A typical Tuesday

Today was a very bizarre day. I ended up at three events, none of which I was attending when the day started.

In the afternoon I went to the dress rehearsal for our next TYA show Teddy Roosevelt and the Ghostly Mistletoe. A significant portion of our children's programming seems to focus on tales about presidents. The stories are fiction, but they give little educational tidbits throughout - helpful for me, because I know very little about American Presidents. This one was about the President not wanting a Christmas tree but his kids trying to persuade him to get one. It was quite cute, with some fun slap-stick bits which I'm sure the kids in particular would enjoy, but I didn't find the writing overly strong.

I then attended a panel discussion with four of the actors from August Osage County. Why did I do this??? I was kicking myself about 2 minutes in. Actors, when given the opportunity to speak in public, talk about themselves. Endlessly. And they aren't very interesting or articulate (with rare exceptions of course). This was mind-numbing. My Toronto friends will be pleased to know that they loved the audiences in TO (though they slammed the Canon Theatre itself - which is hard to fault them for...). One of the actresses kept saying "hilar", because of course saying the full word "hilarious" is just too much work. How many ways can I say annoying??Anyway, in addition the event was poorly moderated and so the hour felt much, much longer.

And lastly I went to a lecture by these folk:

http://www.nysocialdiary.com/node/281959

It was on:

“A World of Trouble: The White House & the Middle East--from the Cold War to the War on Terror”

I felt a bit like there should have been a secret handshake or something to get in. It was a room full of retired journalists and high up Capitol Hill folk (who I'm sure I should likely have recognized). It was interesting, but far too broad a topic to be covered in an hour and the speaker basically summed it all up with "it's complicated", which wasn't really anything we didn't know going in. It was like a DC lefty version of some of the political groups some of my Canadian relatives have been known to attend :-) It was that high functioning, retired but still engaged demographic. It was however, a pleasant change from talking about arts management in these troubled economic times! Which is what I spend all day talking about and debating...