On Friday, Mer and I headed down to Canton to see Aunt Mary. It was a low-key evening, but that is a good thing oftentimes. We got Chinese take-out, which was very good, and then we watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! on TV while I puttered on Aunt Mary’s laptop to see if I could fix some minor issues she was having. Good company, good food, and the bonus of being useful make for a good time.

Saturday morning was noteworthy in a couple of ways – I set a personal record, and Mer participated in her first 5k race. CVCA was hosting a 5k race called the “Run4Perry,” which was the first annual race to honor Perry Carroscia, a CVCA parent and active member of his church. Perry passed away unexpectedly last year, and the race was designed as a fundraiser, with part of the funds going to the family to help with college costs, and with part of the money going to a scholarship for CVCA. It was a good cause, and was in my backyard (indeed, the course ran though my neighborhood, giving me a true “home field” advantage), so it was a perfect race to run.

Mer had been asked to walk the race by a CVCA administrative colleague, and Mer decided to give it a try. She was shorter than the two women (the administrator and a staff member of CVCA) with whom she walked, but she was also a decade younger, so she hoped that would even things out. She said she was winded a few times, but she finished in 45:45, which is over 4 mph, which is amazing for a walk.

I had a really great race, helped out some by my familiarity with the course. I ended up running a personal-best 19:24, which made me tenth overall (out of 236 finishers), and I won my age bracket (forty to forty-nine years old). The weather was perfect for running, and the after-race party was very well organized. I won a small medal and a Bible for winning my age bracket; I went home very happy (and full from the excellent food). I was very pleased for Mer as well – she did quite well, especially for her first 5k.

In the evening, based on my fortunate discovery on the internet, I took Mer to Cleveland, to Playhouse Square, to see the musical Once. We were in the ten-dollar nosebleed seats, but since the main attraction of Once is the music, that worked out fine.

Once is the story of a discouraged Irish musician who meets up with a Czech woman who encourages him to make an album, on which she plays piano and sings with him. The play features lots of original music that is very good, and the chemistry between the Irish musician and the Czech woman was obvious even from the back seats. The play is not deep – it is about the music – but it does have some thought-provoking moments, and it does not end in any typical Hollywood fashion. That was a pleasant surprise.

The set was like the inside of a pub, dominated by a giant curved bar across the back of the stage. All the other spaces needed in the play were created using lighting; if they needed a bedroom, they would light a square on the stage and put some chairs in it. It worked very well.

One very interesting thing Mer and I had never seen: the show used super-titles a few times. Usually, super-titles are projected to translate a foreign language into English. In this production, when the Czech characters were speaking Czech, they would speak in English with accents, and the super-titles read in Czech to let us know the characters were speaking in Czech. It was also very effective.

I loved the play – the music alone was worth going to hear, and the ten-dollar tickets were an amazing bargain. Mer enjoyed the evening as well, and it was a good evening out on the town. It is still fun, even six years after moving closer to Cleveland, to skip up to Cleveland almost on a whim.

Last Saturday was “Mer’s day”:  she was in charge, and she surprised me by heading up to Cleveland, to the campus of John Carroll, where we met up with one of our former students, Kim. Kim is a freshman at John Carroll, and we were both very fond of her when she was at CVCA. Kim was in my Irish dance club and my improv group, and she was in Mer’s English classes.

Kim took us around the campus, showing us various buildings, including her simple, but pleasant, dorm room. We got to meet Kim’s roommate, who comes from Michigan and was very affable to two people she had never met and were not of her generation. I enjoyed the campus very much – it is spread out and features harmonious buildings made of red brick.

We took Kim out to supper; we walked to the north end of campus to go to an Italian place that was quite good. We chatted and ate and had a good time, although Kim noticed I was a tad low-energy from not having eaten much that day. After supper, Kim had to go get ready for her job, which was being part of the crew for the university’s fall musical, Legally Blonde. I figured we were there to see the play as well as Kim, and I was correct. We walked Kim back to the main part of campus before Mer and I turned around and headed back to the north end. We had some time before the start of the show, and we had seen a Ben and Jerry’s scoop shop near the Italian restaurant. We grabbed dessert there and headed back for the show.

Let’s get one thing out of the way – Legally Blonde is based on the movie that came out about a decade ago, and both the movie and musical are total fluff. Having said that, fluff can still be quite entertaining, and this production was. The music was upbeat and fun, the lead actors were all good, and the set was pretty extensive. The lead actress, playing Elle, was very upbeat, smiling and energetic throughout the play. She made her scenes fun to watch. Mer and I already knew the plot, so the interest was in the music and in seeing how the adaptation would handle the transition to the stage. It worked, and while I was not moved to mull deep thoughts, and I did not rush out to buy the soundtrack, I did have a really fun evening at the theater, and we had the bonus of being able to see Kim again briefly after the show.

The tradition of the “Educators’ Evening” at Playhouse Square continues this year, and Tuesday was our first time of taking advantage of that for this season. The Educators’ Evening is an outreach by the theater to help local teachers incorporate theater and theatrical arts into mainstream curriculum; they do this by providing an hour-long talk before a show, and then the teachers can get $15 tickets to the play. It is a great program, and they even feed us.

Tuesday’s play was Venus in Fur, a play about a director casting a woman for his production of Venus in Furs, his stage adaptation of the book by the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name we get the term “masochism.” The original book is about a man who agrees to become the slave of a woman, with the expectation that he would be treated badly, and he enjoyed the treatment. The fictional play being cast in the real play is the adaptation of the book, and so the real play explores the politics of power between men and women, and between directors and actors, with the role of power switching many times during the play.

Okay. So, how does that tie in with teachers? The focus of the educational part of the evening was the cultural perception of gender roles. We were challenged to try to recognize these kinds of roles in the classroom, so that we did not always assume that boys “act up” and girls are “good.” We were also asked to think about broader ideas, like that mechanics would always be men and grade school teachers would always be women.

I talked with the African-American woman presenter afterwards, and we had a good, if short, discussion. My concern was that we were being encouraged to pretend men and women were identical when we are not (our bodies and hormones are different). The instructor agreed we are different and we should be willing to embrace differences, but we needed to make sure opportunities for both sexes were accessible and equal, as much as possible. She stressed that there was nothing wrong with “being girly” or “being manly” as long as it was an individual’s choice and the people choosing could express why they did what they did. That made sense to me, and I was pleased with that answer.

As for the actual play, it was really well acted. It is only a two-person play, so each player had a ton of lines. It was also a very physical play, with lots of movement and some intense emotions. Finally, since the setting was an audition, we were seeing an actor playing a director who was “forced” to act for the evening, and we had an actress playing an actress who played two distinct personalities. That was impressive.

I found the actual play disturbing, though. I’m not a fan of raw power displays, not a fan of unkindness, not a fan of lying, not a fan of unfaithfulness, and I found the idea of people’s getting pleasure from being abused and humiliated sickening. So, as good as the actors were in this play, and as good and/or funny as some of the individual moments were, I left with a definite opinion that I never needed to see the play again. I am still most grateful for the Educators’ Evening, and I am looking forward to the next one we plan on attending in March – Clybourne Park.

The plays keep piling up, but I get ahead of myself. We started Saturday out by going down to church, where Mer graded papers while I put up a temporary mount for a new computer projector at church. I hit a few snags, but managed to get it in rough working order. Sunday was “Friend Day” at church, and so I wanted the new projector up for that service. The permanent mounting kit was due in early during the week, so in the meantime, I improvised by making a mounting kit out of a metal baking sheet. It worked well enough to work for one service.

After that, we went home, where I took a nap, before Mer and I headed up to Cleveland Heights, on the east side of Cleveland. I took Mer to a theater we had never been to or even heard of – the Ensemble Theater. I had stumbled across them online and saw they were performing an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, based pretty firmly on the book and not on the movies. I had listened to Frankenstein on iPod last year, so I was interested in how it would translate to the stage.

Pretty well, as it turned out. Because the weather was poor (cold rain), the audience was sparse, with maybe only eight or ten of us in attendance. The actors still played well, which was admirable. There was one fill-in actor who missed the occasional cue, but that is understandable.

Ensemble Theater’s solution to the wide-ranging action and settings of the book was to go with no set. There was a central raised platform, which was accessed under any of four scaffolds, which were used occasionally by the cast. We were told by characters or by a narrator where we were, and the action would commence. It was effective, and probably the only low-budget way to approach it.

There were only six actors, and two were always the same (Frankenstein and his creature), with the other four actors playing all the other parts. The actors playing the two leads were very strong. The other actors were good, but made occasional odd choices; for example, one actor chose to play an Austrian professor as a buffoon, which he was not in the book, and that was odd. The young woman playing Frankenstein’s beloved was very good as the beloved, but was weaker as the narrator Mary Shelley. There was also a place where a man was narrating, and they cut to a recording of “Mary” finishing his lines. If the director was going to use a recording anyway, why not just have the man finish his own lines? It was a little jarring.

Still, I really loved the production. It was true to the book and was intense in many places. The starkness of the bare stage and the suggestive (rather than literal) props used by the actors helped us to fill in details with our minds. It was a good theater experience, and we really liked the small theater space, as well as some of the productions they have coming up. I look forward to going back soon.

On the way home, since we went right by it, I do have to admit we stopped for dessert at the Cheesecake Factory. It is hard to drive past that place.

Halloween is usually about costumes and candy. We got the costumes part right, at least in seeing them. Yesterday, we used Halloween to drive over to Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, to see their production of Les Miserables, even though it was just a Thursday, and so a workday. It was the only day we could get tickets.

First, we ate. We stopped at the Main Street Diner, mostly because I love anything with the word “diner” in it. The food was quite good, and the service was good, but I might hesitate in going back because they had several TVs on, and I really hate seeing TV when I am in a restaurant.

Back to the play. Mer and I knew two of the students involved in Les Mis – one in the pit and one as a chorus member on stage, who even had a few solos. I am impressed that a college with no graduate students and only a theater minor (no theater major) could pull off a musical on the scale of Les Mis. What is impressive is that they did, and did so really well. The only negatives I remember catching were the occasional failure of a microphone for a non-major character. Mer and I were in the front row, and there were two or three times we could not hear the actor singing, but that was rare. The other negative was in casting – the young woman playing the main love interest, Cosette, is supposed to be the jaw-dropping beauty of the play. She was pretty, but the girl playing Eponine was noticeably more striking, especially with her long, dark hair. Even Meredith commented on it after the play, and we both thought the director should have had her tuck up her hair for the play so she would not be so pretty.

Having said that, the production was a colossal success. The pit was nearly perfect, the singers were all well cast, the sets were huge and effective. All of the leads were strong. While Grove did not have the typical moving stage associated with big-budget productions of the play, they compensated for it effectively by having characters walk around the front of the pit. I am still in awe at how well the cast and crew did for this musical. The notes said it was the thirty-fifth and last year for the college director, who was retiring, and he wanted to go out on a huge production. He did, and they all did very well.

Today, Wednesday, was an unusually student-filled day. Mer and I and a few other teachers, along with about 125 students, went up to Cleveland to the Hanna Theater to see the Great Lakes Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. These field trips are always a bit uneasy in that you never know if the students will like the play, and also, since the theater holds about another three hundred students from other schools, how the day is going to go.

Pretty well, as it turned out. There was a slight delay in getting the play going, and the students were a bit restless (especially those from other schools), with some of them starting rhythmic clapping at times, but once the production got going, everyone settled down and the audience was as good as you could hope for.

Richard III was great. It was set in an unspecified modern time, with most actors wearing suits or skirts. The set was minimalist, with lots of bare metal supporting a catwalk, on which was hung a lit-up neon-esque sign proclaiming whichever monarch was in power at the time. There were cell phones and automatic weapons and modern camouflage uniforms, and it all worked well on stage for me and Mer. We were both reminded that students are not always used to “modern” productions of Shakespeare plays, where the clothes are modern but the speech is four hundred years old, and formal for even that time. Some students said it took them a bit to get used to all of that. Plus, Richard III can be hard to follow because of the sheer number of characters, many of whom are related, share names, and/or also go by titles different from their names. It is not easy to keep it all straight, but the kids did really well.

The acting was excellent across the board. I have never seen a poor performance at Great Lakes. Richard was quite strong, with the actor taking on a limp and a crippled hand throughout the play.

After the play, we dropped everyone off in Hudson to go get lunch anywhere on the old square or in the new one. Mer and I and the other teachers went to Hattie’s, an ice cream parlor run for the benefit of mentally disabled people. The food is good, and the cause is a good one. We did get ice cream at the end of the meal, but we had to get it to go, as we were running out of time.

Back at school, I had a standard Fools’ practice. The improv practices are always from 3:30 to 4:30 on Wednesdays, and I have typically had about fourteen of the eighteen Fools show up each week, which is a good class size.

I ended my student-intensive day with going out to eat with some of my Connections guys. At CVCA, each faculty member is assigned a group of eight to twelve students to meet with once per week, and staff can sign up too. I have a group of ten seniors, and five of them met me in Cuyahoga Falls, at the Royal Buffet Chinese restaurant. I like buffets because we can all get what we like, and we can be leisurely over the meal. The six of us ate and visited for over an hour, and they guys seemed eager to go out again before too long, although given the business of the holidays, I’m guessing it will be January or February before we go out again.

Mer and I have one holiday tradition that we have done every year of our marriage (and actually a few years before that) – we carve pumpkins every Halloween. This year we were more on top of things than we have been of late and actually carved them yesterday (Monday), a full four days before Halloween. This makes the 16th set of marriage pumpkins, and at least two years prior to that.

Since we had been there this summer, I tried to carve Italy. It came out a bit rounded and plump, so I figured that was Italy in the world of the Pillsbury Ragazzo di Pane. Mer got clever and carved a patch, for a “pumpkin patch.” She is so witty, and it actually worked pretty well.

Playhouse Square in Cleveland has a partnership with Case Western Reserve where Case Western students who are working on their Master’s degrees in acting get to do two shows a year at Playhouse Square. Granted, it is usually in the very small Bialosky Lab Theatre, which holds 150 patrons, but it is still a cool space in which to perform. On Saturday, Mer took me to the matinee showing of Case Western’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Mer and I have seen Twelfth Night a lot – at least three times in the theater, and we own two versions on DVD. Being familiar with the play is helpful. Quickly, it is a comedy, which means there is a block to young love (in this case, gender confusion from disguise, and a lady in mourning), and there is much confusion because of the presence of a twin brother and sister, each of whom thinks the other is dead. Throw in a fool, a rigid butler, a drunken kinsman, and a stupid but wealthy knight, and you are good to go.

Case set this production in the Mississippi Delta region, which made for amazing music in the play – lots of slide guitar and blues and harmonica. The music may have been the best part of the play, and that is no small feat. The acting was solid across the board for all of the main characters, with the actress playing Viola/Cesario doing a very good job, and the Fool was solid actor and a very good musician. The actor playing Sir Toby did well, although I was not always on board with some of the directorial choices.

My biggest disappointment was in fact some of the direction; the play is very funny, and usually borders on slapstick in places. The director of this production toned that humor down in most places, and that was too bad. They did do some fun things with the wild hair of the stupid but rich knight, but on the whole, the humor was smile-worthy instead of laugh-out-loud.

As if that were not enough, we left the theater and headed east to Chardon. I had never been to Chardon – it has a pretty town square, where we ate at a diner. The food was good, but the service was a tad slow, so we had to skip dessert. Mer had more plans for the evening, and another play, to boot.

We walked over to the Geauga Theater, the community theater of Chardon. We were there to see The Haunting of Hill House, which is appropriate enough for this time of year. The choice surprised me a bit until Mer told me the play was based on a book by Shirley Jackson.

The play takes place in Hill House, with a group of six people investigating the supernatural. Creepy things happen throughout, like doors closing on their own, and doors shaking in the casings, and strange lights and such. It was a fun show from an effects and set standpoint. The set was two rooms and the silhouette of a tower. I did not see where the plot was going and was completely wrong about the end. My only slight complaint was there were enough hesitations and repeated phrases that it seemed as if some of the actors did not know their lines completely, and that took me “out” of the play and made me edgy.  Still, I enjoyed the story, and had a good time.

On the way home, we took steps to rectify the problem of missing dessert. We were driving very close to the Cheesecake Factory, so we stopped there and each got a piece of cheesecake. As always, I thought I could plow through it with no problem, but the last four to six bites made me feel queasy. There is a lot of cheesecake in one of those pieces.

We did not get home until late, but it was a good long date day.

Sometimes our “day” concept gets interrupted for good reason. Last Tuesday, Dave Krichbaum passed away. I never met Dave, but his wife, Sue, has been going to our church forever and is a wonderful lady, so we wanted to go to the funeral and funeral dinner, both of which were on Saturday. It was not the occasion I would have sought, but it did let us spend a good chunk of the day with Aunt Mary, who also knows Sue quite well. That was nice.

The funeral was in Hartville, down near where the Krichbaums live and where we go to church. We met Aunt Mary at the funeral home and we in for the funeral. Our pastor, Ken, did a fabulous job of giving a personal and detailed sermon, which was all the more amazing given that no one was sure what Dave’s faith was. He was a reserved man, and never talked much about religion. Ken treated that subject with sensitivity and compassion, and that was a good thing for Ken to do.

As I said, I did not know Dave, but what I picked up at the funeral was that he was a math and physics major at Mount Union College, and then he served in the Air Force for twenty years before retiring as a major. He moved back home to the farm to take care of his mother and the farm, and he lived out his life there. He was a quiet, no-nonsense man who loved his family. He worked hard, even when his back bothered him from all they physical work around the farm. He had a sense of humor. He died of complications due to a blood disease that was diagnosed two-and-a-half years ago. Sue loved him, and that speaks volumes to me. It sounds as if he was a very good man.

The graveside service was very moving. There were six members of the Air Force there as an honor guard, and the ceremony was precise and unhurried. It choked me up a couple of times, especially when one of them played a perfect rendition of “Taps,” which was not an easy feat given the temperatures in the low 40s with intermittent drizzling.

After the graveside service, we all went back to the church in New Baltimore for a funeral dinner. There was food for about 150 people! (There were about fifty or sixty of us at the dinner). We had a good time of fellowship, and Sue seemed to be taking things fairly well, although I’m sure it will be very difficult over the next few weeks and months.

Mer and I said goodbye to Aunt Mary and headed home, where we took a long food-induced nap (after Mer made a very quick grocery run for the week). Once we were up, I made supper, and we streamed the movie Iron Man 3, which we had not seen yet. It was pretty good. The Iron Man series of films does a good job of balancing the action with lots of humor, which makes the basis for a decent superhero movie. There were a few “oh, come on!” moments, but only a few, and I was quite entertained, especially by the Tony Stark moments (as opposed to the Iron Man moments). Stark is funny and at times introspective and resourceful; when he is Iron Man, he tends to be fighting, and that makes Stark more interesting to me. Not a great movie, but it was a good one.

On Sunday, I managed to get Mer to go for a late evening walk with me down on the Towpath near the Beaver Pond. It was a perfect fall day, and we ran into one set of CVCA parents and another CVCA teacher. We walked for about an hour. I do love Ohio falls – they are pretty and tend to be cool and dry.

Saturday was Mer’s day, and after a mellow start to the day, we headed west of Akron. It was a beautiful day, and Mer wanted to go for a hike out of our 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Cleveland book. The national parks were all closed due to the funding issues going on in Washington, so Mer picked a county park, which was still open. She picked the Allardale County Park, which was private land that was donated by a couple about thirty years ago and has become quite a nice little park.

For a small park, Allardale has a couple of impressive hills, including a sledding hill. The path through the park is both paved and grass, and one side trail we took was all grown-up woods, and the path was just a forest trail, including a small ford over a stream. None of it was breathtaking, but it was pretty, especially the overlook at the top of the big hill that looks out over a field and a treeline. It took us over an hour to walk the whole park, and while there were other people around, we often had the trail to ourselves. It was great to get outside on such a fine day.

In the evening, Mer took me up to the east side of Cleveland, to Case Western University. After a small search for a parking lot, we managed to find the on-campus theater for which we were looking, to go see the university’s production of Betty the Yeti. I know – I had the same thought of “Huh?” Mer had decided to gamble and go to see a production we had never seen nor even heard of.

It was a decent pick. Betty is set in the Pacific Northwest, and focuses on five characters representing the logging industry, environmentalists, and park rangers. The author added in a yeti for good measure as an endangered species, and he went at it. It is a funny play, and the author made sure to poke fun at all of the characters, and he made sure to turn things on their heads with a logger wanting to protect the Yeti and an environmentalist wanting to get rid of her because she was not useful to “the cause.” It was funny and moderately thought-provoking without being heavy-handed. The production was a little uneven at times as far as acting goes, but the actors were all competent, with the lead logger being quite good. I had a good time, and enjoyed being out on the town with Mer. We also got to see a new-to-us venue by going to Case Western.