Mamma mia, I'm old

I didn't get as much writing as I hoped done yesterday because I hit another one of those annoying specificity points where I had to figure out exactly what's happening. In the big-picture plot outline, this scene was "the heroes confront the villain." When I planned the scene, this section of the scene was "the villain poses a difficult dilemma to the heroes." Now I'm at that point and had to figure out what the difficult dilemma was. That took me the better part of the afternoon, and then it was time to go to the show.

I had a lot of fun on the girls' night out. We caught the train heading downtown, then had dinner at the little cafe in the music hall before the show, and I only knew a few of the people in the group, so I met new people. I think I was the second youngest, and I felt a little out of place carrying my Target purse when everyone else had Coach and Prada bags. Then I had a very disturbing realization while watching Mamma Mia: The "old" characters in the show should be about my age. The daughter in the show is 20, and the mother, her friends, and the men were all supposedly in that backpacking around Europe/being beach bums in the Greek isles phase of life, so you'd think they'd have had to be under 30, more likely mid-20s. Which would make them in their mid-late 40s at the time the show takes place.

However, they don't seem to cast it that way (and I notice the casting has edged upward since the movie, which was cast about ten years too old), probably because most of the punchline of the show is "old people in spandex are funny." The show seems to be set around 2000, since the 20-year-old daughter was conceived in 1979. But the way the show seems to be cast, the "young" generation in the show and the "old" generation are on two different timelines. The young ones are in 2000, 21 years after 1979. But the older ones seem to be in 2014, so that they were in their early 20s in 1979 and are now in their late 50s, supposedly too old to wear spandex and old enough to throw out their hips when they do vigorous dance moves. I guess the target demographic is Baby Boomers, and so the main characters must be played by Baby Boomers, which means they keep getting older.

It does change my perspective on the show to think in terms of it being about people my age, even if it was a generation before mine. I was a child, not an adult, when I was singing "Dancing Queen" into a hairbrush (well, when I first did it while the song was a hit. We won't talk about how old I might have been the last time I did it). Now I'd kind of like to see a production for which the casting people showed their ability to do math and cast accordingly.