As you may know, Mer and I alternate Saturdays as far as who is in charge of the day. We find this makes us actually plan and do things more often than the “what do you want to do today?” method of weekends. Saturday, October 24th, was Mer’s weekend.

I had been given a gift certificate to Bob Evans a while ago, and so Mer started her day out with breakfast at Bob Evans. We are both huge fans of big breakfasts, and so this started the day out right.

Once we got back home, Mer wanted to watch the film version of Henry V with Kenneth Branagh in it. We were pretty pleased that it had a star-studded cast, including a very young Christian Bale (Batman), who was only 15 at the time. The film was quite well done, and I understood it pretty well this time around (I had seen the film, or at least large sections of it, when I was in my early 20s). After the movie, I was looking up historical information to see what the play/film got right and what it exaggerated, when Mer pointed out that we were watching it on the weekend of St. Crispin’s Day (which is October 25th). The major English victory over the French in the play happens on St. Crispin’s Day, so we were pleased to be seeing the film on the right weekend.

To finish off her day, Mer took me to the Akron Weathervane Community Playhouse to see a play that neither of us knew anything about – The Last Night of Ballyhoo. The play is by the same author who wrote Driving Miss Daisy. It turned out to be a play about a Jewish family who lived in the south in the late 1930s. The play looks at how this family was Southern first, and then Jewish. It also examines some of the conflict between European Jews and Russian Jews. It was thoughtful and at times very funny, and I quite liked it.

The Weathervane set was just a dining room and a living room with a front door and a staircase, but that was enough for the play. It never felt limited or crowded; most of the action just takes place in the living room (with a couple of short scenes that were done on small stage thrusts to the far left and right of the main stage). The acting was very fine, with the only negative being accents – some of the actors had trouble staying in character with accents, and some (probably wisely) did not try. It did not take away from the play, at least not to a Northerner like me (it may have driven a real Southerner crazy). It was a good play, and since Mer and I are in education, we got in for half price, which was a bonus. The music before the show and at intermission were all period pieces, so the music was lots of fun swing tunes and the like. As a final treat, the programs had $3 coupons to a local pub that could be used for food, so we had another excuse to go out some other day.