Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story

 The photos from my previous post are:

Eve in grade eight in a fractured fairy tales play at her school. She was the princess from The Frog Prince, and she complained to The Storyteller that her frog was not as wealthy and handsome as promised. Near the end she comes onstage yelling "Storyteller, I need a new frog, this one's broken!" The school kept yards of this tulle stuff, and in many plays the costume was black leggings and a fitted shirt with the different colours of tulle draped on somehow. It was actually pretty cool.

A stage backdrop at Bluesfest. I don't remember for which band.

An exhibit at the Corning Museum of Glass (trees made out of glasses) which we visited when we drove Angus to Elmira for the very first time, almost exactly.... SEVEN years ago, *whimper*. I absolutely loved that museum. We always meant to go back - I think Covid really prevented that as much or more as procrastination and laziness, but who can say really.

A fire whipper arounder guy in Mexico, or maybe Hawaii?

I have changed my blog layout and am accepting opinions. I felt like the other one made sentences too long and it might be annoying to try to read. I've had to stop reading blogs before because they were visually too difficult for me. I love Sarah's layout with the narrower columns, so I was aiming for something kind of like that. Eve doesn't like the grey background. 

Engie asked what all the fuss was about Hamilton. I was not an early adopter. I am sometimes susceptible to a kind of reverse snobbery that is just as bad as the regular kind, where I think that anything too popular is probably not that good. They say things like 'ten million people can't be wrong', but they can, right? They can be SO wrong. 

I randomly started listening to the soundtrack on my break at a school where I don't work any more. The first song I listened to was Helpless. I think the next thing that happened fairly soon after was that I got the flu right before March Break and we were supposed to go visit Matt's mom in Florida at her summer house, but I was too sick so Matt and Eve went and I stayed home and hovered near death without getting out of bed for about seventy-two hours. One of the things that comforted me was listening to the soundtrack on repeat, and by the time I was better I was devoted.

I have heard that people think it's not right to portray George Washington as a remotely good guy because he owned slaves, as did many of the other characters in the play. I can't really refute that. I'm not going looking for more criticism because this is my blog and I don't feel like it. I just think it's an incredibly creative and fun way to set some events from a certain point of history to music (and rap). Someone that I used to be friends with said the fact that it casts POC in traditionally white roles was 'cute, not impactful', which I thought was kind of snotty - I mean, it's a matter of scale, maybe it didn't change the theater world but it was presumably a little impactful (no, I didn't unfriend her because of Hamilton, but it was admittedly a nail in the coffin).

We saw it for the first time last summer - it was supposed to be during one of the Covid years, so we had the tickets for a really long time. It was really fun to see then, but I feel like this production was even better - that might be because of recency bias, but I think a couple of roles were just cast better, and this time I just got the sense that they were having a hell of a lot of fun as well as turning in some amazing performances. Eve and I were talking about how it's difficult with something like this where so many people are so familiar with the original Broadway soundtrack that when you go see it you kind of want it to sound the same, but you accept that each actor probably wants to kind of put their own spin on it. Yesterday King George and Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson did a bang-up job of being faithful to the original while putting their own hilarious spin on things. 

Going to try posting a relevant picture now. 

Whoo hoo! That's from the first time we went, but I posted it on purpose!