Back in DC

After a very whirlwind visit to the home country, I am back in DC where it is surprisingly cold. It's all windchill (or Real Feel as my father says they refer to it as in Boston - hilarious) as the air temperature is only like -1C. However, windy windy.

Today was just one of those days. First day back after two weeks off and 100s of email to sort through (the marketing folk love their email). My watch battery died, and I didn't realize this until it was 10:30 every time I looked at it for likely 20 minutes - until I clued in that there was a problem with this and was late for a meeting because of it. I couldn't remember how to do one of the daily reports I'm responsible for this week - which hadn't been updated in my absence so there were many weird sales days to sort through to get it right. Anyway, it was really just one of those days.

I went to a panel discussion tonight on race and the stage which was pretty interesting but relied too heavily on references to a play that is in previews currently for the theatre hosting the discussion. It's a new work so only four audiences worth of people have seen the play - of which only five individuals were in the audience for the discussion. I'm all for plugging your season (and certainly I'm now very interested in seeing this play), but the discussion was advertised as a much broader issue and I would have liked to have seen it addressed more in depth. In the states, the race issues only refer to black and white, there was no reference to any other race or demographic. This makes sense given this country's history, but it is different from the discussions I've participated in in Canada. I'm not convinced that we offer more opportunity for other races and cultures to participate in the theatre than they do here, but perhaps those communities in Canada have a greater opportunity to speak out and be heard as part of the work. There is a huge divide in this country and it truly handicaps their arts community...