Last weekend (April 25-27th) was the start of a marathon of theater. Due to season tickets bought months ago combined with tickets that we bought at the CVCA Auction, we managed to have four outings in three days – three evening performances and one afternoon performance.

Friday evening was CVCA’s spring musical, Oliver!. CVCA has impressed me deeply with its musicals, and this (my eighth) was no exception. The set was elaborate and fantastic. There was a thrust stage built just for the musical. The stage was painted to look like cobblestones. Several of the buildings on the set could be moved so you could see the inside or the outside depending on the scene. There was an elevated bridge at the back of the stage to be London Bridge. It was a great set.

The acting was superb. The stereotype of high school acting is that it is at best “okay for high school,” but I think our students were at a high collegiate level or a good amateur group. The leads were especially good, and of the leads, I was most impressed with the actor playing Fagin, the old man in charge of the young pickpockets. The actor playing Fagin not only did a great job when he was center-stage, but he never left character even when a minor part of a major dance scene. He would still be “old” even then – putting his hand on his back, being slightly stooped, relying on his walking stick, and so on. What a great job.

The orchestra was scaled way back this year to about a 10-piece group, but it was still capable of providing excellent music. There were four adults and about six student musicians, and I am impressed that students would be able to play at that level for two hours. Nicely done.

There is also a joy in seeing “your” kids on stage. It is a great pleasure being part of the “in” crowd – of being able to wave and say hi to fellow audience members, and to congratulate the actors and musicians after the show. Several of the actors came looking specifically for Meredith – it was quite touching. So, that was an excellent Friday night.

Saturday afternoon was more serious, but jaw-droppingly good. We went up to Cleveland to Playhouse Square to the Great Lakes Theater Festival to see a production of the The Crucible. What a deep, thought-provoking play, and Great Lakes did a magnificent job of putting it on.

The set was very interesting. The stage was filled with a three-sided box made of plywood. This box was added to with other plywood settings to make different spaces. All of that wood should have been warm to see, but they were lighting everything with really harsh florescent light (much to Meredith’s satisfaction, since it was showing that florescent light was evil). The light became more and more harsh as the play went on, especially in the courtroom and prison. The only time the wood was lit warmly was in the home of the main character, John Proctor. It got to such an extreme that near the end of the play, the officials came into the prison carrying florescent lights instead of torches. It was unusual, but it worked very well to have the set reflect the action on the stage.

The actors were great. This show ran in repertory with All’s Well That Ends Well, and it is much credit to the skill of the actors that we either forgot who they were in the play we had just seen a week ago, or we forgot within just a few minutes. Two of the comic characters from All’s Well were playing very serious roles in this one, and I could not place one of them, and Mer could not place the other. Amazing. The actor playing John Proctor was especially good in his role. We were also excited to see an Actor’s Summit regualr (Alicia Kahn) on the stage in Cleveland.

The Crucible is such a great play. It was painful to see the community of the play being torn apart by the literal witch hunt, and seeing good and sensible people being driven into the ground just on suspicion. It makes you think about what happens when a large group or even society itself conflicts with your beliefs. It is probably not a coincidence that the play was staged with the current background of terrorism and the U.S. government’s response to it. Very moving play, which I’d love to see again someday.

Saturday evening we upped the culture level even further. We went to see and hear the Summit Choral Society’s concert of Gabriel Fauré’s and Maurice Duruflé’s requiems. There was a large orchestra and choir, and a large children’s choir as well. The music was peaceful – both composers went for quieter versions of the requiem. We got to see this with our friends, Ray and Sara George. We met them for supper at another CVCA Auction gift certificate, an Italian restaurant near Akron, where we all got really excellent pizza. But I digress. I enjoyed the concert well enough, but it did reinforce that I really like folk music much better than classical. The music was done really well, but my mind wandered quite a bit. Of the two requiems, I liked Durufle’s better – it had more dynamics going on, and the melodies were more interesting to me.

We actually had to leave the concert a little early, because we had to be a CVCA at 10:00. We were meeting our Dominican Republic small group team at school to help tear down the Oliver! set as a fund raiser (each small group needs to raise $400 to contribute toward the trip). So, Mer and I got to see more people, and we had a good and productive time tearing the set down, which took about two-and-a-half hours to finish.

Sunday, we finished off the theater going with a Weathervane Community Theater’s production of Enchanted April. Meredith had shown me the film a number of years ago, and while a “chick flick,” it was quite enjoyable. It tells the story of four women (and two husbands) right after World War One who go to Italy in April. It has a very happy ending, and is not terribly deep, but I’m a sucker for Pollyanna-esque plays and movies.

The set for the second act, which is in Italy, was very impressive. They had a master gardener design the set, which had an elaborate garden for the women to romp in. They did a nice job. Mer and I had a good time at this play.

The hardest part of the weekend was losing nap time. I was beat all week long, which found me going to bed at 7:30 on Thursday evening.

Saturday was a very nice day. I slept in until about 8:00, and then I went down in the Valley to the Towpath Trail. It was early yet, and the trail had only a few wildlife photographers on it. I had a very solid-feeling 33-minute run. Since I had been struggling with running the previous week, this run made me quite happy.

I went home and cleaned myself up. Mer and I had a light breakfast about 9:00 while we watched an episode of the second-Doctor Doctor Who. We then got dressed up and headed up to Cleveland (the Big City) to go to Playhouse Square to see the Great Lakes Theater Festival’s production of All’s Well That End’s Well.

I knew nothing about this play. It is one of the “problem comedies” of Shakespeare’s. The main problem is that it has the form of a comedy (marriages at the end), but the leading man is a total jerk. The main lady wins the right to marry the man (by curing the king of a disease), but he despises her (in a mean and cruel fashion) and flees to the wars. There, he falls in lust with an Italian woman. The main lady finds out about this, and arranges to trick the man into thinking he is sleeping with the Italian, but he is really sleeping with his wife. Eventually, she confronts her husband with the proofs that he required, and he decides he loves her, and all’s well.

This play is rarely performed, which is a shame. There are some great lines, and the main plot is arresting, and the comic relief is very good. The main lady, Helena, is one of the great leading lady parts for Shakespeare. The problem is that modern audiences really hate that a smart and capable woman could keep throwing herself at a total loser of a man. Meredith’s father, a retired English professor, used this play to model the love Jesus has for the lost – that he pursues those who hate him and want nothing to do with him. That interpretation usually caught the students off guard, even at the Christian college Dale taught at. I think it works very well. I am very glad to have had the chance to see this play.

On the way home, I took my lovely wife to an upscale Italian restaurant, Vaccaro’s Trattoria. We are both fond of this restaurant, but only go on special occasions since it is easy to run up a $50 bill (even without alcohol). We both got daring and decided to get a spicy pizza. It turned out to be a bad choice for me – it was too hot for my refined Mainer tastes. Mer ended up with a lot of pizza! We both got desserts – mine was a really good triple chocolate torte.

After the leisurely one-and-a-half-hour meal, we headed home, where we watched another 25-minute Doctor Who episode, and then we finished the evening up by listening to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on the computer. What a very nice day!

The BBC announced today that David Tennant will be leaving Doctor Who at the end of the Fourth Series. The new Doctor is an unknown American, but the BBC expressed that “he was obviously the best choice.” Mu-sings has recovered a bootleg of the regeneration scene from the cliff-hanger of Series Four:

Oh, what a difference a month (five weeks) can make! Emma is now on the other side of the window!

Northeast Ohio does have the occational cool perk….

As everyone knows, there can only be one possible choice for a Riordan Doctor.

By the way, Photoshop is a HUGE pain in the butt. It is not the friendliest program that I have ever run across.

Last night Mer and I went to CVCA’s annual auction. This is CVCA’s largest fundraiser of the year, and the school goes all out for the event. Every year there is a theme; we’ve had a 50s theme, a Hawaiian theme, a New York theme, a fairy-tale theme, and more. This year’s theme was exciting for me and Mer – it was an Italian theme, including lots of Italian food!

The small army of volunteers transforms the main hallway and the two gyms of CVCA into a fairly elegant banquet hall. The large gym is set up with tables for people to eat at, and silent auction items ring the gym. The smaller gym, which is next to the big gym, is set up with the check-out computers (and the reason I get to go to the auction every year), as well as the food. CVCA has students staff the event as servers, and uses members of the strings group to play music in the small gym.

It is a fun evening, and the food was fantastic this year – I stuffed myself with two very full plates of Italian food (which I love). The actual auction is an interesting thing – there a few high-end items that Mer and I can’t even begin to bid on (there are resort vacations that go for thousands of dollars), but there are many items that are under 100 dollars. Auctions bring out an interesting side to Meredith. Usually, she rarely spends any money, but auctions hit two of her buttons: she likes to support good causes, and she is competitive. So, she usually goes around the room and bids on about a dozen items, knowing that she will not get them all. This year, I bid for the first time as well. We made out all right. We picked up some gift certificates for spa things (hair and facial), restaurant gift certificates, a small home gym (my fault), and a nifty gift for our niece which we now need to get to her somehow. In all, we bought $700 worth of stuff for $350 (thank you, tax refund!). And, it all goes to helping to keep CVCA’s tuition down, so good fun all around!

Last Saturday, Mer and I started the day off in a mellow way by sleeping in, and then going to Friendly’s for breakfast. I had never thought about if a place I go for ice cream served breakfast, but they do, and we had a two-for-one coupon, so our food was on the cheap. Yum!

We continued the mellow theme through much of the day, taking time to listen to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!, a favorite Saturday pastime.

In the evening, we went to Actors’ Summit theater to see Golda’s Balcony, a one-woman show about Golda Meir. Not to my credit, I had no idea who Golda Meir was. Now I know! For those who do not know, Golda Meir was a strong supporter of having a Jewish state, and became the Israeli Prime Minister in the early seventies. She was Prime Minister during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which Israel was losing early on, and Golda made the decision to load 25 atomic bombs onto planes to end the war. This convinced the U.S. to supply Israel with needed supplies, and they turned the tide of the war without using the atomic weapons.

The play started with Golda as an old woman, telling us (the audience) about her life story. She kept changing time frames quickly, always skirting around the question of nuclear weapons until the end of the play. Every time she got to the recollection of giving the order to load the bombs, she would change topic. In this way, in about 90 minutes, we went through her life story. I thought this worked really well; it kept my attention. I had guessed that Golda was skirting around the topic of the bomb, but it was still a moving moment when she talked about the decision.

I have to admit that I like getting my history in these ways. I’ve liked all the historical plays we’ve seen at Actors’ Summit (ones on Feynman, Bohr, Truman, Darrow, and more).

However, this play is apparently not for all audiences. One of my students was there. Her thirteen-year-old mind’s summary of the play the next day was “that play about that strange lady doing those boring things.” I told her she might think differently in twenty years.

 My goal this winter was to try to get to 10 mph on the treadmill, with a goal of breaking 19:00 in a 5k race. It looks as if that will probably not happen, at least this year. After about 5 months on the treadmill, I could not take it anymore and started running outside again. That is fine as it goes, but it is harder to work on speed outside. I maxed out at 9.7 mph on the treadmill this year, and I’m still hoping to break a 19:30 5k time – I’ll have to see how it goes.

First, I have to get back in shape! Because of spring break, and then being sick, and then being busy, I had not run for three weeks until this morning. I went at a fairly easy pace, and ran about 4.3-4.4 miles today. I did okay, but it always amazes me that months of training can go away for short periods of time. My lungs hurt for much of the run, and my legs were quite tired at the end. I’m sure I’ll be okay again within a week or two of running, but I’m not sure the 19:00 5k is going to happen this year. Maybe next year!

Tonight I went to Ombudsman’s last class in his twenty-week-long course on the book of Isaiah. We started last fall, and took some time off for December, but we met twenty times (as a class – I think I made seventeen of the classes). Craig is working on his Master’s degree in Biblical Studies, and he spent an entire class just on Isaiah, so he did a great job of teaching the book. Some of the things I took away and want to remember:

– God offers his rest if we trust in him. Frantic activity on our part does not offer rest.
– Prophecy happens in a cycle of patterns, so that a prophecy can be “fulfilled” more than once.
– Isaiah tells us who God is and what he wants, over and over.
– God has always been looking for servants who want (God’s) justice and righteousness. This is heavily concerned with the treatment of the poor and powerless.
– Judah only escaped (with delayed) punishment with Israel because of Emmanuel – “God with us”; only because God chose to extend grace to Judah (not because they earned better treatment).
– God offers salvation – not the world (consider Hezekiah finally trusting in God instead of Egypt and God then turning the Assyrian army away).
– Although God calls his servants to strive for justice and righteousness, in the end God must establish these things himself. That is the basis for the promises that Isaiah makes – God himself will do them.
– God will make things right, but in his own timing, not ours.

What a great class. Props to Ombudsman for a lot of work and dedication (in addition to a full-time job, growing family, grad school, and various ministries).