Last Friday Mer and I had tickets to go to Actors’ Summit Theater (where else?). So, I dug out my Date Day reserves and took Mer to San Francisco Pizza Oven in Hudson.
San Francisco Pizza Oven is a decent enough place to eat. It is not going to win any awards on charm, but the food is usually decent and it was striking a chord last Friday. We ordered our food (Mer – ziti, me – bbq chicken panini), and I got a hot chocolate. Since the restaurant is SF-themed, they use Ghirardelli’s chocolate in their hot chocolate. I figured it had to be good. Boy, was I wrong. It was about 800 degrees hot, and completely tasteless. I do not know if they put the “small” amount of chocolate in the “large” cup, but it was pretty bad stuff. Do not get hot chocolate there!
The food was very tasty, although my modest sandwich was fairly late in coming out to the table, for whatever reason. Mer’s food was hearty and good (she let me try some). Happily, because of the delay in the food, the waitress gave us a coupon for a free sandwich for the next visit. Yes, we can be bribed with food.
We made our way the very short distance to the playhouse, where we got to see The Year of Magical Thinking. Magical Thinking is a one-woman show about the author trying to cope with the sudden death of her husband and the constant illness of her daughter, who dies a little over a year after the husband. The play was quite well written and very well acted (the poor actress had a ton of lines with no one to help). The theme of loss and grief is pretty universal, and so I should have been into this play, and yet I was not.
I’ve tried to figure out why. I think it is lots of reasons. It was a Friday and so I was tired from work. The play dealt openly with emotions and internal thoughts, which Mainers and especially Riordans do not do. My world view and the author’s are wildly different. The author feels she can fix and control everything, and I can relate to that – maybe we are too similar. Maybe I don’t like to deal head-on with death. For whatever reason (and maybe all of these and more), the play just made me feel impatient and failed to capture my attention or emotions. It should have, but it did not. There you are.