The Play That Put Me To Sleep

Morning was another reading in bed rabbit hole. Spook reminded me to get up at about 9:30. She was out of treats. Of course. And needed the bedroom window opened.

Printed the rent check. The usual breakfast - some of the eggs did not boil up completely but today's did - easy to peel.  Lots of FB likes, not a lot of comments. I have a running conversation with a friend who is in WA where the health bill in the legislature calls for totally free, no questions asked, no co-pay coverage for anyone in the state. True - I read the bill. Amazing. He keeps wanting to call it Medicare for All, or single-payer coverage. WRONG. It is universal health care, there is no payer. Medicare costs $$ per month and $$ for the insurance plan. This WA plan cuts all the insurance companies out of the loop.

I don't want the expensive and lame Medicare system. I don't want an insurance company involved. I just want care paid for directly to the provider by the gummint.

A little before 1 I dropped off the rent check, then drove to MV where I was an hour early for the matinée at The Pear. Parked by the trailhead past where MSFT is building their new campus on the bones of the old one. The old one was 5 small buildings, one and 2 storeys. MV has since abandoned its height restrictions.

Lovely sunny day in the 70's. Only saw a handful of people on the trail, odd for a sunny Sunday.

Checked in at the theater, gave and got a big hug to Betsy, the artistic director. I have been a fan for years, and she posted on FB that she was needing some friendly support. Lots of drama in her life - the good kind - she runs The Pear but she also teaches and directs multiple casts in her school plays. And raises her own kids.

The show is called Sojourn,  locally written, the premise is NASA sends a man and woman into space on a one way flight past Saturn, with incubators and embryos. Early in the flight Something Goes Wrong™.


There are 4 characters - the two astronauts (who for unexplained reasons are not in a romantic relationship. LJBF), the mission director, the woman who does the CAPCOM thing, and the director of NASA. No spoilers, but I will say that the set is beautiful, very basic but looks like something out of Star Trek. There is a wide projection screen above the proscenium, which shows us images of Saturn, how many AUs the craft has traveled, live feeds from CAPCOM (she is onstage in the upstage right corner), an image of a futuristic NASA HQ, video of the launch, etc. The one-woman booth crew did a fabulous job.

Unfortunately, the script kept bogging down, a few times I found myself nodding off. The mission commander shouted a lot, way more than a mission commander would IRL. There was a major bombshell dropped near the end of the first act which makes us re-assess what we think of the crew. And early in the second act there is a seriously macabre scene which was highly disturbing to me.

The ending was difficult to believe, too many issues were not resolved for the ending to work for me.

And there was one major technical error which any NASA enthusiast would have caught - most of the last half of Act II required us to believe the spacecraft would be out of communication range soon after it passed Saturn. The play is set 100 years from now. Even today NASA communicates with craft which are well past that point. If anything, the range will improve over time.

In this age of standing ovations, I was pleased to see only two people, way in the back row, stand. Neither the play nor the performances were above average. The leads had a lot of lines, and got them all out...but that's about it.

The show let out in time for me to be 20 minutes early meeting Janice at the nearby Starbucks. It was warm, we sat outside. She filled me in on her last two weeks, but not before asking me some tech things which I'd answered for her last time. She doesn't like that her phone automatically connects to wi-fi. And she doesn't get it that she can put an antenna on her TV and get most of the local HD channels. And so on. 

She mentors two different AA members, and has taken it upon herself to help with their three children. Two are fraternal twins, she thinks the boy is insane, I've met him and talked to him and all he is is way smarter than his age group. His sister is nowhere near as smart, so she gets along in school just fine. The other child is no longer a child (21) and made a feeble attempt at suicide by Tylenol overdose, apparently to get her parents' attention. The rest of the story is she is chubby and a slow reader so she got teased a lot at school. But at 21 Janice needs to back off, I think.

Grocery Outlet, the charger refused to charge the car. I bought some salad greens, milk and strawberries, tried the charger again, then went home and plugged it in there. I called EvGo, they said there was something wrong with that charger. They are craptastic about changing the display to an "out of order" message.

Janice reminded me that I could swing a vacation while job hunting, so I went online to Amtrak Vacations where I have a $500 credit, and asked for help in booking a Grand Canyon trip. I canceled last time because it was snowing heavily.

Dinner was salad and lightly breaded fish squares. Kraft tartar sauce, Lamyay for dessert, and some halvah which Janice gave to me.

Plans for tomorrow:
Job hunt
Talk to Amtrak rep
Enjoy the summer weather
Do something April Foolish