Howdy, squiders. Here it is, October, best month of the year and Spooky Season.
September Books: 5/7 (Heir Apparent, Love Your Enemy, and Drinks and Sinkholes)
So I need 14 more books for the year and have three months in which to read those books, so I’m setting a 6 book goal for October, because I have yet to actually read as many books in a month as I’m supposed to. But that gets me to 4 books each for Nov and Dec, which is where we’re supposed to be anyway.
Today I’m going to tell you a story.
When I was a kid, I lived near a small amusement park. There’d been grand plans to rival Disneyland when it had began, but that had never materialized, so instead of a massive complex of various lands, we had a fully-built out Old West town-themed main central shopping and dining district, and then your normal garden variety carnival rides like a tilt-a-whirl and bumper boats, a fancy restaurant with nice views, a train that went around the whole thing, and an alpine slide.
And the Music Hall.
The Music Hall was a local theater that served dinner beforehand upstairs, and then performed downstairs. We went fairly regularly and were very fond of it (when it went out of business when the amusement park closed for good, myself and several of my theater friends from high school made the trek back to see the final show, which was, as we shall get to, Sweeney Todd).
It was always the same actors and they were great, very funny and talented and excellent when they would invariably break character or something would go awry.
And, yes, my favorite show that they would do was Sweeney Todd. I suspect it was everyone’s favorite show, and it was always hilarious and I loved it a lot, and that’s no doubt why it was the last show they performed.
But, Kit, I hear you say, Sweeney Todd is not funny. It is, in fact, mostly horrifying.
As I know now but did not know then, they did their own version of the show. (They did it as a musical as well, but I’m not sure they didn’t make up some of their own songs. Or maybe all of them.) And while it follows the same storyline as the normal version, it was definitely played as a comedy, and that’s what I grew up knowing.
So when the movie came out, I said to my now-spouse that we should absolutely go see it, it was my favorite play, it was so funny, he was going to love it.
And he did love it! But I was horrified. What was this? Where was the silliness and the laughs? Where was the inspector sticking a fake eyeball on the end of his pipe?
(Also, the singing in that movie is Not Good, and now-spouse bought the soundtrack and listened to it incessantly, which was Very Annoying.)
There’s a lesson in here, but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s to not assume that your local favorite community theater group is doing shows the way the original playwright meant them to be done. Maybe it’s to watch the trailer of a movie before you go see it. Maybe it’s that nothing is ever as it exists in your memory.
It also feels like places like my little local amusement park no longer really exist. It was free to get in (but the rides cost money) so my friends and I were there all the time, talking to other friends who worked in various businesses, hitting the haunted house that arrived each autumn, window shopping, just chilling. Now everywhere is so expensive, there’s almost nowhere you can spend enough time at to really make your own.
Woop, this post got more nostalgic than I meant it to.
Anyway, I hope your week is going well, squider.
