Still hot. Still muggy. However, I see the basic temperature range when I’m in Europe is like 50’s low, 70’s high. That will make packing easier. I know (intellectually) that I don’t have to pack for every likely scenario – however, I also know that I’m big enough that finding me clothes over there might be difficult. Eh, it will all work out. Kind of a core sample of my constant anxiety since ‘the thing’, part of my brain is telling me I should be far more freaked out about the travel and the show than I am. But the other part is like, oh, you mean the type of travel you’ve done a hundred times before, and a project (major though it is) that you’ve successfully already done three times? Even if worst comes to worst (and it won’t), one of the main things I’ve learned over the last year-plus is people have my back. If I need help or support, I’ll get it.
I did finally finish erasing the orchestral parts (well, there are 4 ‘spare’ books that I may have minions do the erasing of during rehearsals, but with luck we won’t need them). I also realized, with a bit of digging, that I’d managed to find PDFs of those parts and those are safely up in the cloud. So if I drop the bag of parts into a fjord when I’m in Norway, we can recreate them.
Anyway, my life right now is about prepping for this trip and nothing else (oh yeah, I have to work, too. Guess how my concentration is right now…). But it’s all coming together, and I know once we’re underway, it’s going to be more fun than anything.
I’ve had some odd, but mostly entertaining entertainment over the last few days. I’ve been meaning to go see Mischief Theater‘s Peter Pan Goes Wrong since it opened on Broadway, not that long ago. But it turns out it was a limited run and was closing this weekend, so on Thursday, I got a TKTS ticket and went. It was a ton of fun, of course. Not significantly different from The Play That Goes Wrong, except they’d upped their game as far as sets and stuff. The first event that gut-punched me into laughing was when the Darling children’s 3-level bunkbed started collapsing with the children in it. The flying stuff was a hoot, most especially when the stage manager, temporarily filling in for Peter, ended up comatose hanging upside-down – and an actor essentially pushed him off behind a set piece, much as you would draw a curtain. So that was great.
Friday night, I wanted something silly, and I’d noted in my spreadsheet of movies to watch soon (shut up, I keep a spreadsheet) that I’d wanted to rewatch Revenge of the Nerds. Why? I’d remembered it as mildly amusing, and had also heard that, like so many 80’s comedies, it was now problematic because sensibilities have changed. So I rewatched it and had a good time while keeping my critical eye open. One thing I love is that the gay character isn’t really made fun of for being gay, so much – except for that actually-pretty-funny bit about aerodynamically designing a javelin for his limp-wristed throw. The treatment of the Japanese guy is pretty cringey, and the ‘rape by deception’, where Lewis makes out with Betty while she thinks he’s Stan is just awful. Also the “Eata Pi” trick with the naked pictures from the girl’s sorority house. (sure, they were awful people, but still…) So, no excuses except ‘it wuz the times’. Oh, yes, also, at the end, the evil rich frat bros back down simply because the nerds’ black frat brothers show up in solidarity. They’re not even that scary looking, but ‘oh no black people are scary’.
It’s not a great movie, and doesn’t really pretend to make a lot of sense. Oh, hey, that’s John Goodman as the bullying football coach, that’s kinda fun. And Timothy Busfield as one of the nerds. And James Cromwell as Lewis’s dad. I wouldn’t have recognized him, but prettyboy lead villain Stan is the same actor who now plays Christa Miller’s husband on Shrinking.
No one attends any classes in this movie, I thought that was amusing.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to watch on Saturday night, so I started poking around the DVDs around the TV and realized I’d finally gotten a copy of Bearcity 2. We’d seen the first one when it came out, and it’s not a great movie, but it’s a lot of fun. (One bugaboo – neither one of the main couple is a bear. The older one is a ‘daddy’, but not a bear, and the younger one is a twink. He gets described at some point as a ‘bear cub’, but he’s not, he’s a twink who’s a bear chaser. He’s never going to turn into a bear himself.
(total side note – I somehow managed to get for cheap a Kindle copy of a M/F romance series where all the guys are bear shapeshifters. And I started reading it – it’s cute and fun, actually. Not really my kink – I have no interest in actual bears.)
Anyway, Bearcity 2 for some reason became hard to rent or watch not long after it was released, so I’d never seen it. It takes place largely in Provincetown, so I’m glad I waited since I could now say I’ve been to most of the locales in the movie. It was entertaining, possibly better than the first one, and had a surprise ending that I thought worked very well. I did notice that there’s approximately 1 second of screen time where a black person appears.
I watched Bearcity 3, easily streamable, on Sunday night. Clearly, enough of a fuss was made about the whiteness of #2 because there was far more representation in #3 – including having a couple of main characters of color. (Oh, yeah, there was a Latino lead in #2 as well, but no black people.) This mostly took place at a gay campground called The Woods, which is a real place and which might be worth visiting at some point. I also enjoyed this a lot – somewhat clunky in terms of craft, but definitely entertaining.
(My buddy Martin, who’s very active in the bear community, has let me know that he knows a lot of the guys in the movies, which is fun. Sadly, the director – who was one of his friends – passed away a couple of years ago.)
I guess the FB algorithm somehow knew I’d watched Bearcity 3, because I started getting ads for a different gay campground called “Camp Out Poconos”, which is fairly close to Rainbow Mountain, the gay resort I test-drove last year. That also might be worth visiting. Once I get back from England, I’ll be looking at my vacation balances and plotting some fall excursions, so it’s nice to have possibilities.
More as it develops… I would love to blog daily on this trip like I did on Cape Cod last year, but I’m going to be busy-busy, so we’ll see. Twenty years ago was my first visit to the festival, and I’d just started blogging that year. You can look back in time here.
The Toast Point Page 