Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Kid-Free in New York City: Day 2 is When Dreams Come True!

We woke up to SNOW!!!!!!!

It was the perfect magical winter morning in New York City. I think the schoolkids even had a snow day? Happily, all the museums and other assorted tourist destinations stayed open, so after a breakfast of cold pizza, my partner and I bundled into our typical February midwestern outdoor gear and headed out into the magic.

Here in the elevator is when I finally got tipped off enough to Google our hotel and figure out that we were sleeping in a Republican stronghold:


I'm trying to visualize what a Republican women's Galentine Dinner even looks like, but to be honest I don't really know what a regular Galentine Dinner looks like, either, sooo...

Republican stronghold or not, our hotel was SO conveniently located! Just a couple of blocks walking through the snow, and here we are at the MOMA:


I'm not really an art aficionado, shame on me, so I mostly wanted to look at the famous stuff:



I was SUPER excited to see my pal Frida, though!




And words cannot describe my excitement when I saw THIS crowd:


What are they looking at, you ask? Why, none other than my old nemesis, Mr. Starry Night!

This 2,000-piece Starry Night puzzle and I have been locked in battle since early December.




It's an absolutely terrible puzzle, a miserable experience all around, ridiculously hard AND with pieces so poorly cut that they will fit in places they aren't supposed to be, and I tell it all the time that Vincent Van Gogh would be ashamed of how unpleasant it's being to me.

Fortunately, its real-life counterpart is delightful:


Also, I think the real-life Starry Night is actually smaller than my puzzle at home? Weird. 

I wish I had a 2,000-piece puzzle of THIS Van Gogh painting! I'm obsessed with it. It randomly feels like an illustration of some kind of Lovecraftian abomination--I keep seeing that curly beard as squid tentacles, and I don't know why, but I love it. 


Fortunately, my partner has a proper appreciation of art, although I absolutely saw him get chided by a docent for standing too close to one of the paintings. He says he was looking at the artist's brushstrokes, and I believe him, because unlike me he does not have intrusive thoughts that encourage him to maybe just lick the painting a little bit.


But don't worry--I didn't even lick the Mondrian, even though it's such a pretty red!


Nobody could lick the Monet, because they had a barrier up. It's so big, though, that how would you even decide where to put your tongue?


Warhol is surprisingly unlickable, even though he's literally painting food. It think it's probably because most of these soups sound disgusting. 


Pollack, on the other hand, is VERY lickable:


My self-control really won out, because not only did I not lick the art, but I also did not buy a hundred books in the gift shop. Instead, I sneakily and guiltily took photos of the ones I want so I could request them from the library when I got home. That big biography is actually already on hold for me!


After I'd seen all the stereotypical must-sees, my partner dragged me off to experience the proper modern art:


The giant stacked cubes didn't do anything for me, but fine, I DID love the giant hanging stuffed animal sculptures. My old Grumpy Bear is definitely there in that blue sphere:


After most of the day at the art museum, we'd built up sufficient good culture credit so we could, with clear consciences, then go do what is possibly the cheeziest, corniest, hokiest thing you can possibly do in New York City:


If you don't go to Ellen's Stardust Diner to eat overpriced food, drink overpriced (but healthily strong!) cocktails, and watch the waitstaff sing Broadway karaoke, then are you even a New York City tourist?!?


WE are PROPER New York City tourists!!!




The kids would have HAAAAATED it. There's a non-zero chance the college kid would have cried, because she's done that when less embarrassing things have happened in restaurants. The teenager would have never willingly left the house with me ever again. I had an absolutely astounding amount of fun.

Since we're already being corny, might as well take another swing through Times Square!


Okay, actually THIS might be the corniest thing we did in New York City, but when we were there last, every time we walked through Times Square, I swear there was an actual line out the door and around the block consisting of tourists waiting to get into the M&M store. This time, there was no line and we had a little time to kill, so in we went to wander:


And yes, I WAS tempted by the Pride merch. They might even have gotten me if they'd said that they were donating any part of their proceeds to any LGBTQIA+ organizations, because that sweater with the rainbow neckline is randomly very cute?

Saved by corporate greed!

I finally could not stand the suspense anymore, and we walked over to stand in line underneath the most glorious marquee in New York City:


I was so excited that I was about to cycle right around into a panic attack, but thankfully the line started moving and before I could freak out further, somehow I'd found myself in the third row center of the Walter Kerr Theater, holding an honest-to-god playbill and looking at the honest-to-god Hadestown set:

I sent this photo to the kids with the caption "!!!!", and got a serious of supportive exclamation points and keyboard smashes back. Daughters are the greatest gift a person could have.


Y'all, I was so excited at where I was that I did not even notice that every single other person in the audience was also in a flurry of excitement not because it was also their first time at Hadestown and they'd been waiting something like five years for this but actually because apparently LIN-MANUEL FREAKING MIRANDA was sitting two rows directly behind me? And generously doing selfies and autographs with people? And I did not even notice, and if I had noticed, I don't think I would have even cared. If it was Andre DeShields, probably... Eva Noblezada, definitely. 

Anyway, our seats were SO GOOD! We were a little too close to see the elevator set piece (come to think of it, two rows directly behind me was probably the perfect seat...), but the loss was worth it to have the hanging lights swinging over my head. I could see every expression on everyone's faces, and when the main characters knelt at center stage, I was essentially eye level with them. 

I've been a fan of musical theatre since I was 13 or 14 ("Phantom of the Opera" was my gateway original cast recording, and then I found "Hair," and then there was the year that I listened to "Evita" on loop...), but this was my first actual live Broadway show. I've watched so many pirated recordings of Hadestown on YouTube that I was actually surprised at how different, better, and more powerful it was to see it live. I mean, I obviously knew that it was going to be better and more special, but I figured I'd seen it multiple times on screen already, so the better and special parts would just be the experience of being there, like seeing my favorite band playing live after having only listened to their music on Spotify for years. But it was SO different, and SO much more special. Live theatre is this Whole Other Thing that is built between you and the actors and musicians brand-new every single time, this whole other ephemeral thing that you experience just the once, every single time. I'm a little glad that I don't live close to New York City and so can't dilute my memory by watching Hadestown every week, like I would absolutely want to. Even if I didn't get tired of it and instead became the Hadestown version of a Disney Adult, it surely wouldn't stay as magical in my memory as it is now. 

Best. Christmas present. EVER.

After the show, I still completely failed to notice the apparently revived Lin-Manuel Miranda fervor as everyone else but me who hadn't already seen him suddenly saw him, and instead my partner and I busted out of the theater (well, I did take a small detour, because a few minutes later my partner looked at me and was all, "Where did you get that Hadestown souvenir cup?!?" I said, "Someone just left it on the aisle floor so I picked it up!" I drank wine out of it last night while watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and it made me very happy), took a hard right just like the YouTube videos I'd watched told me to, and ended up here, hanging out in front of the stage door:



Here's where I FINALLY heard all the Lin-Manuel Miranda scuttlebutt, as everyone else was gossiping about it and showing each other their cellphone selfies. I've never met a celebrity out in the wild--do they mind having people come up to them and ask for photos and autographs when they're someplace like the theater? Like, I know they get paid an absolute ton of money, but they're not being paid right then, so is it rude to make them work when they're not getting paid, or do we just count all the ton of money that they ARE being paid as part of their compensation for having to take photos with tourists on their downtime? I have no idea, but I AM 99% certain that if Lin-Manuel Miranda had happened to have been seated next to me, he would never have experienced someone awkwardly ignoring him as hard as I would have, on account of I have no capacity for interacting with any strange human, much less a famous one. Just... shudder. 

Anyway, here's me not giving a flip that I didn't see Lin-Manuel Miranda with my own eyes!


So, my first stage door experience wasn't a bust, because the vibe was very good, I got all the Lin-Manuel Miranda hot goss that I'd been oblivious to while it was happening, and Sojourner Brown graciously came out and signed my playbill and gazed upon me with all her talent and beauty:


None of the other actors came out, though, because while we were all standing outside, freezing and gossiping about Lin-Manuel Miranda, the man himself was inside, comfy and warm and schmoozing up all of our actors!


Ah, well. Back to the Republican stronghold, then, for shawarma-- 


--and bed. 

Tomorrow, I meet Winnie-the-Pooh! Shall I ask for his autograph and a selfie?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Saturday, October 21, 2023

The Cavetown Concert Made Me Cry

Matt and my older kid both seem to lack the music appreciation gene, so when my younger kid, around the ages of 12-13, started to get really into music, omg I was thrilled. Finally, someone to listen to music with! Someone to make mixtapes for! 

Someone to go to concerts with!!!

Cavetown and Ricky Montgomery are a couple of the kid's OG loves, at the forefront of that first wave of music that she discovered for herself. I love these guys, too, in a complicated mix of nostalgia for that awesome little tween I used to have and genuine appreciation for how genuinely good they both are. Cavetown, especially, is always going to be, for me, the experience of driving to and from ballet daily with my newly-minted teenager, listening to those earnest teen folk-pop anthems on endless repeat. 

I was VERY excited, then, for the teenager and I to join the rest of Central Indiana's emo teens at our first Cavetown/Ricky Montgomery concert. Imagine: mother/daughter bonding to the dulcet crooning of Ricky Montgomery! 

This is an accurate depiction of my level of happiness for the entire evening:

Fun fact: this is the photo I now text the kids whenever I want to enthusiastically agree with something they've written. They both have steadfastly refused to give me any positive reinforcement in any manner for this, even though it is objectively awesome.

In the interests of Family Bonding, we dragged a couple of less-enthusiastic companions with us, but then immediately ditched them when they weren't willing to stand up front with us for two hours before the concert started. Vibe killers, the both of them!


I'm pretty sure I had an out-of-body experience when Ricky Montgomery came onstage, I was so happy and excited. Like, my god. I fell in love with his music during the pandemic lockdown, when I thought that we were all going to die. But we didn't die, and now here I am, at an outdoor concert with the people I love the most, listening to this music that I listened to back when I thought I might never go to another concert again.


I tried taking some videos of my favorite songs, like I saw all the other cool kids doing. But, um, nobody told me that you're not supposed to be loudly singing along when you take your videos, ahem. So please join me in my own combined horror/amusement at the following clip, in which you can clearly hear me both sobbing with happiness and loudly singing off-key to my favorite Ricky Montgomery song:


Bless. My. Heart.

Here are some of my other favorite Ricky Montgomery songs:

 
Most of them are from his pre-pandemic album that I played on repeat all during lockdown. Lockdown Julie would have loved to know this day was coming!


Check out this gross guy, though:


That's a photo of him in between sets, as we're all just standing there, putting his foot directly in front of the teenager's body, then leaning his ass back into her. The teenager immediately got my attention, because GROSS, but we weren't giving up our standing spots for nothing, so I nudged my foot in right beside hers, then, like Indiana Jones switching a golden idol for a bag of sand, I sidled into her exact spot while she took mine.

I waited a beat so that I could experience that, indeed, this absolute nasty asshole of a man was, indeed, pushing his nasty ass against me, and then I said VERY loudly, "Can you stop pressing your butt against me!?!?" 

The nasty asshole jumped away like he'd been slapped when he realized at this moment that he was assaulting not a teenaged girl, but a shouty late-40s woman, and everyone turned to look at us, including his female concert companion, and I gave him SO much stink-eye while he lied about "saving someone a spot," and he left us both well alone after that.

Seriously, though, imagine a world in which a teen girl could go to a public place and not be assaulted in some way by a gross man. If she can't avoid it at a Cavetown concert, of all places, then where in the world IS she safe?

 Fortunately, no other incidents occurred, and eventually, there came Cavetown!


When it comes to Cavetown, my emotions are deep. I literally love him the way that I love my kids' friends. He's easily young enough to be one of my own kids, and I've been listening to him with my own kid since before his voice changed. To me, Cavetown's songs feel like it felt to have that young teen--witnessing a new social maturity, a new and uncomfortable level of self-awareness, those first signs of the anxiety and depression that it feels like all teenagers these days suffer through, the accompanying respect and acceptance of a diversity of people that these same kids are also graced with--how can it have been so few years ago, because it seems so far away?

But look at us now.


Here's "Juliet," with just a little off-key singing on my part:


And here's where Ricky Montgomery came back out and I lost my mind with happiness again:


I really love that they're all just wearing their comfy clothes to perform in:


They're already working hard--I *want* them to be comfortable!

Also, apparently that song was a popular moment to make into a Tiktok! Here's another I found:


Here's where I realized that I was going to cry during this set, too, because all these kids here, and in particular my own kid, have worked so hard and been so brave and look where they get to be tonight:


Thank goodness for concerts. Thank goodness for Cavetown. Thank goodness for a beautiful summer night, and a crowd of young people screaming the lyrics to the song that was your kid's favorite when she was thirteen.



P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Monday, September 4, 2023

I Read Pitch Perfect and Compared it to the Movie


Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella GloryPitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“It is Saturday evening, April 30, 2005, and the stage is empty save for twelve women dressed in identical black pants, buttoned-up black shirts, and red ties. Evynne describes their look as ‘sexy stewardess.’”

So begins the non-fiction book that’s the basis of one of my favorite film trilogies, Pitch Perfect!


I do like this type of non-fiction, and I’ve read several similar titles (Pledged - Secret Life Of Sororities and The Class are two recent books that come to mind), but for me, quite a lot of the charm of the book Pitch Perfect is picking out all the little references that show up in the film Pitch Perfect. I already knew (Thank you, Dr. Google!) that all the competitions were real competitions, but it was super cute to see that Divisi, the female a cappella group from the University of Oregon, IS the Barden Bellas! The movie picked up so many Divisi details, from their “sexy stewardess” outfits with “unfortunate-looking green-and-yellow scarves” to the attrition in numbers that led to their desperation early one fall semester to pick up new recruits, ANY recruits… and then in walks a plucky new girl. When I found their album, Undivided, on Spotify and played it? 

It was like the Barden Bellas were singing to me! In later parts of the book, there’s a very node-like tonsillectomy! There’s a weirdly mean rival group! Even Divisi's much-touted performance of “Yeah,” when I found it on YouTube, had some similar choreography to the Bellas’ show-stopping number at the end of Pitch Perfect.

Here's the famous Divisi number, "Yeah," at the 2005 International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella:

For a fun comparison, here's the Bellas' Pitch Perfect performance:


The chapters on the male a cappella groups didn’t excite me nearly as much, although I still found them interesting to read. Yes, the album Code Red by the Tufts Beelzebubs is impressive--

--and it was interesting to read about the controversy, but… then there’s another whole discussion of their next album, Shedding, and how IT was made, and a list of all the awards that IT won, and we’ve just really gotten into the weeds of collegiate a cappella album creation here.

The chapters on the Hullabahoos were more compelling, probably because Rapkin depicted them as being a LOT more fun… or a lot more of a hot mess. Whichever. Like, a Hullabahoo member literally peed on the Beelzebubs’ car?!? A Hullabahoo knocked into the CEO of the major company they’d been flown out to perform for. The Hullabahoos were invited to sing the national anthem at a Lakers game--and then piddled around their hotel for so long that when they finally left they got caught in a traffic jam and THEY MISSED IT. Just, OMG you guys.

I had a lot of fun ready referencing the groups and performances throughout the book, and I’d totally have paid for an accompanying CD/DVD, even though many of the performances that I found were so impossibly corny that I couldn’t actually watch them. Is there a word for someone singing and performing so earnestly that you high-key want to die while you watch them? But the ready-reference was important research, because some groups were so awesome that I didn’t want to die watching them! “Yeah” is fun and adorable, and the Hullabahoos’ “Royals” is well-sung and surprisingly understated, considering the singers are all wearing voluminous robes in cartoonish prints.

  

While I enjoyed what I read, I really wished we could have dug deeper into the inner workings of some of these musicians, something that I totally get possibly wasn’t an option, because, you know, they’re real humans and we don’t necessarily get to own their thoughts. But some of these singers clearly had a LOT going on that impacted and was impacted by their a cappella passion, and I’d love to hear more about how an obsessive passion like that affected them. Lisa Forkish turned down her dream school for YEARS to sing with Divisi, but then later… she finally went to that dream school! What helped her decide to move on? Ben Appel was the music director of the Beelzebubs, and then all of a sudden, he had to leave the entire school to get help with his mental health. Surely, his all-consuming a cappella commitments did NOT help with his struggles… or did they? I’m very interested in the world of extreme hobbies, and I would LOVE to know.

The only real problem with Pitch Perfect, and the reason why it’s a three-star book instead of a five-star one for me, is Rapkin’s use of offensive language regarding gender expression and sex preference. There's a whole "funny" story that hinges on a homophobic slur that Rapkin himself writes--he's not even quoting anyone!--and Rapkin really needs to say that he’s sorry. Just because of that, I was stoked to see that in chapter eight, he makes fun of a poster that a Divisi member makes by hand, in which “a cappella” is spelled incorrectly--and then in chapter twelve, who is it who writes the word “a capella” in his very own book? Why, none other than Rapkin himself! Check your spelling AND your homophobic language, Mister!

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Monday, June 19, 2023

Day 2 in England: In Which I Meet Chaucer, Eat a Disappointing Lunch, Cry in Front of Van Gogh, and Do Not Loudly Sing Along to Six (Although I Do Loudly Sing Along to Riptide)

OMG it had felt AMAZING to lay my head down at the ripe old hour of 7:00 pm (2:00 pm Eastern Time!) the night before, and I almost felt rested, even, when I woke up at 7:00 am and decided that I'd rather figure out Tim's coffee maker than get a little more sleep.

Hallelujah, for I figured out Tim's coffee maker AND his TV, and by the time the kids were up and about I was two cups deep, eating cold leftover curry on Tim's couch and watching "Breakfast" on BBC One

Plans for the day were as follows:

  1. 9:30 tickets for Westminster Abbey
  2. lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt under St.-Martin's-in-the-Fields
  3. National Gallery
  4. Trafalgar Square
  5. 5:30 tickets for Six at the Vaudeville Theatre

9:30 Tickets for Westminster Abbey


I think we probably spent more money than we needed to on public transportation. Our AirBnb was pretty near Battersea Park Station and Battersea Power Station and I thought we'd use the train a ton, especially, since it zips right into Victoria Station. But I think this is the only day we used the train to get across the river, and only because the bus we thought we were taking to Battersea Power Station unceremoniously dumped everyone off a few stops early and we couldn't work out when/if the next bus was coming.

The 7-Day Travelcards that we bought were probably worth it this time just for the convenience, but next time I think I'll just add money to our Oyster cards and do Pay-As-You-Go. 



I won't even tell you the bus/train/Underground route that we used to wind our way through the city to Westminster, because if you know London you'll probably be horrified at our inefficiency and inability to read a map, and I did absolutely almost get hit by a bicycle because I looked the wrong direction before crossing the street, but eventually I got my magic moment, climbing the stairs out of Westminster Station and seeing Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey all sitting there, pretty as you please in the bright morning sun.





My teenager had an extremely busy spring (says the parent of every teenager ever), so I didn't get a chance to sneak in much work to preview Westminster Abbey or its historical connections. We're planning a longer study back at home, however, probably making good use of Westminster Abbey's own teaching resources for much of it, so hopefully we can both do a ton of context-building to make what we saw more meaningful. I mainly wanted to see Geoffrey Chaucer and whatever I could see of the chapel of Edward the Confessor without going on their special tour, and other than that I just wanted to look at all the pretty things.

Fortunately, there were so many pretty things!

It might be interested to adapt this People in Christian Art lesson to make it more rigorous for AP Art History, and then have the teenager complete the stained glass activity. 




I hadn't anticipated how much of my time in England would be spent crawling around on the ground, but I had to get my photo taken with all of my heroes!

I was more interested in the burials than the memorials, so I didn't get a photo of Isaac Newton's nearby memorial. It's pretty great, though, with a relief sculpture featuring fat, naked babies doing science. 

I love that his equation is his epitaph

I found my man Chaucer! After going "YAY!" a lot and getting my photo taken, I was all, "KIDS! DID YOU KNOW THAT CHAUCER ISN'T BURIED HERE BECAUSE HE'S A POET?!?" And they were all, "OMG Mom yes we know he's buried here because he worked here they didn't have a Poets Corner yet in 1400 you've only told us this 4,000 times please stop now." And then I was all, "RIGHT! IT'S THE BURIAL OF SPENSER THAT GAVE THEM THE IDEA! LET'S GO FIND HIM!"


I do kind of regret that I didn't sign up for the Verger's Tour that would have let me see inside the shrine of Edward the Confessor, because you really couldn't see a thing of it from the outside:
Here's a 15th century stone screen blocking the shrine from the view of us poor folks. 

Can't see him past Henry III, either. 

Fortunately, I COULD see Elizabeth I!


Here's the tomb/memorial to the little princes Edward and Richard. Is there anyone who isn't fascinated by the mystery of what happened to these little guys after they were abducted by Richard III? Considering that he had their uncle and half-brother executed just for being around them, and they were never seen again after the summer of 1483, their remains are probably these bones that were discovered in the Tower of London... BUT there were apparently the bones of two other children also discovered at the Tower of London at one point, so who are those kids?!? AND in their mother's tomb in St. George's Chapel in Windsor castle there are apparently actually four children's coffins... but only two of her children are named as being buried there, sooo... 


Random and awesome Westminster Abbey vibes:





He was only buried there until 1661 because that was when Charles II ordered that his corpse be disinterred and hung on a gallows and its head displayed on a pike. Lovely!

Lord Byron! It's weird that they included his place of death on this monument, because he's not even buried there. He's buried in his family vault in a church in Nottinghamshire, as is his daughter and my heroine, Ada Lovelace. I would have LOVED to have gone to pay my respects, but it's a lot farther north than we went.



The Coronation Chair is high-key gross.

Lunch at the Cafe in the Crypt under St.-Martin's-in-the-Field


One of my teenagers is hella emo, and we all like doing things that are sort of sketchy, so I thought a great place to eat lunch would be the Cafe in the Crypt below St.-Martin's-in-the-Fields. It's a cafe! In a crypt! You can eat right on top of tombstones in a crypt!


And to be fair, that part was pretty cool, but alas that we were starving, because the food was SOOOOOO gross! I got what was supposed to be a vegan ploughman's but what I think was actually a pimiento cheese sandwich on just absolute acres of dry bread. And then Matt's very mayonnaise-forward sandwich came with an incomprehensible mountain of steamed cauliflower, which, there isn't technically anything wrong with a bland mountain of steamed cauliflower, I guess, but we decided that we probably all needed the vitamins so we rationed it out between the four of us and then we all had to eat some bland steamed cauliflower. 

But we did get to eat our cheese sandwiches and steamed cauliflower on top of tombstones like I'd planned, so there was that.

National Gallery


I wasn't super revved up about the National Gallery, but I figured since we were right there (and it was free!) we might as well pop inside. And thank goodness we did, because it was awesome!

It was surprisingly difficult to look up a list of must-see exhibits in any of the museums (it's almost as if they don't want you to visit their museum just to see the iconic pieces, but instead to explore and discover and let yourself be surprised, ahem), so fine. We explored and discovered and every time we turned a corner we were surprised by something marvelous. 


I was surprised and thrilled to see Van Gogh! Real Van Gogh, even, and more immersive than Immersive Van Gogh! I guess I should have expected to find something of him there, but I hadn't, and I was delighted to tears to stand in front of his chair. 

Tangent: The National Gallery website is a terrific resource for a homeschool art history study. You can download the artwork at a decent resolution for studying and making flash cards, and many of the webpages for specific artworks also include extra resources to build context and depth of understanding. The page for Sunflowers, for instance, also features a 30-minute lecture on the painting and Van Gogh's life--I've watched it, and it's great! I learned that Gauguin was a terrible person, and now I'm also pretty sure that he and Van Gogh were lovers. Like, *something* happened in that yellow house, and it sure as hell wasn't all in Van Gogh's head!

I immediately requested two of these books from the public library. Can you guess which two, lol?


Trafalgar Square


When I was finished crying over Van Gogh and surreptitiously taking photos of books in the gift shop (it feels so rude to photograph something specifically because I'm not going to buy it there, but maybe that's just my social anxiety talking), we had a little time left to sit and take in the vibes of Trafalgar Square:



It was a perfect day, with sun and blue skies and a light breeze to show off the mild temperature, just the way it would be every day of our trip. Every day, Matt or I would comment, boomer-like, on the beautiful weather, but we never seemed to jinx it, and my teenager was vocal about never getting the grey fog and gloom that her little emo heart had been promised. 





There were some excellent moments of people-watching in Trafalgar Square--a guy sitting on a bench steadily working his way through a massive bag of KFC; a couple taking turns filming each other's reaction shots for their socials--but my favorite was this busker, who did a beautiful cover of "Riptide," and then, when it was clear that everyone had loved it, did it again!


5:30 Tickets for Six at the Vaudeville Theatre

Six at the West End was one of the dream items on my lifetime wish list, and now I've accomplished it! 

2019 was a magical year for musical theatre, with Beetlejuice, Be More Chill, AND Hadestown all premiering on Broadway (along with my sweet little cinnamon roll of a terrible musical, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, bless its heart) and Six debuting in the West End. 

I long to see all of them, but Six is the first!

The Vaudeville Theatre is a short walk from Trafalgar Square (my travel planning is, as always, a thing of beauty), and I was extra stoked that Six had an extra-early show on this day, because jet lag is real, y'all. But a 5:30 show meant that we could be cozy in our seats in the air-conditioned theatre by 4:45, have a drink of water and a leisurely time in the bathroom--

Notable bathroom signage

--listen to the Tudor-sound covers of pop songs (after humming along absently to one harpsichord number for a couple of minutes, I asked my teenager, "Is this... Havana?" Reader, it WAS!)

Weirdest thing that happened on this day: We were sitting calmly in our seats waiting for Six to start. Some of us might have been quietly napping, even. Ever alert to Other People's Business, however, I was instantly awake and engaged when a very polite kerfuffle began a few rows ahead of us. A couple had arrived at their seats to find two people already sitting in them, and instead of making a fuss, had simply gone and told the usher. 

So then the usher came back and asked the people sitting in the seats if he could see their tickets. Finding all this digital reservations and tickets and booking numbers and crap on my phone was a continual nightmare the entire trip, so I felt for the woman as she fumbled with her phone, but hallelujah she did finally manage to produce her tickets and show them to the usher.

And then the usher was all, "Ma'am, these are tickets to Back to the Future: The Musical."

To be fair, Back to the Future IS currently playing in the West End... but not, you know, in this theatre. Or at this specific show time. So then the usher and the people in the seats had a fascinating back and forth in which the usher tried, and failed, to ascertain what show, in fact, the people thought they had purchased tickets for vs. what they were trying to see. Did they buy tickets to both Back to the Future and Six but got the showtimes mixed up? Did they intend to buy tickets for Six but accidentally bought tickets for Back to the Future instead? Vice versa? Also, how had they even gotten into this theatre in the first place, considering you had to scan your tickets at the entrance? Did they have Six tickets that they scanned but then accidentally pulled up their Back to the Future tickets when they went to find their seats? Does the Back to the Future theatre even have the same seating arrangement?

None of this was resolved, and instead the usher managed to persuade the couple to leave their seats and come with him to figure it out elsewhere. And then the new couple sat down and to my knowledge, even though everybody heard the whole thing, nobody proceeded to gossip about it AT ALL. So I felt like I couldn't, either, but then it's pretty much all I talked about for the next week, and I'm still curious.

If you have any information, please leave a Comment below!

The production did a clever thing by announcing that you could take pictures during the encore song. I'd imagine it cut way down on bootleg photos during the rest of the show.

I was so excited during this show that I'm pretty sure that my soul left my body at times. It was amazing, and if you ever want to meet up sometime for chips and salsa and a pitcher of margaritas, I'd love to tell you all about it. The teenagers are also familiar with the cast recording and have their favorite wives, so it was fun to compare our opinions about the performances and who we liked best. We all agreed that we're not really the power ballad sort, so our favorites were Anne of Cleves and Anne Boleyn, with Anne of Cleves 100% stealing the show. 

My teenager has a decent background re: Henry VIII thanks to being a homeschooler and, frankly, from listening to the Six album so much, but this will be another area of interest that we hit harder at home for her History and Culture of England study. It fits in perfectly with both of her major themes of Place-Based Study and Creative Interpretation. To add to the latter, I kind of want to show her The Tudors, but from what I remember it's actually super porny--but so was Henry VIII, I guess! Let me know if you've got more ideas for creative interpretations of the Tudor period that don't involve quite so much on-screen sex.

It hadn't really felt like a super-packed day, but it had definitely felt like a LONG day, so tbh we were all pretty thrilled to take the Underground and the bus back to our AirBnb for an early night. Matt picked up pizza, and I ate, watched British TV, and fell sound asleep within the hour.

Next up: the British Museum and Buckingham Palace!