Good-bye, Mary Poppins!

The show is now over, and I get my life (such as it is) back. At the Sunday evening performance, I got a chance to sort of actually watch the show. There are big gaps between chorus numbers, so I was able to sneak into the auditorium and stand at the back to watch a few of the other scenes, enough to get a sense of what it really looked like and sounded like, and then I was sitting in the front row of the chorus, so I could see the TV monitor for the rest of the show, and I knew the music well enough that I wasn't glued to my folder. The kids did a really good job, I think, and I was really impressed with some of the technical elements. I tend to get a bit weepy from live theater, probably feeding off all that emotion, and the end of the show when Mary Poppins leaves is a bit of a tearjerker, but last night I was sitting directly across from two of the little sixth-grade girls in the chorus, who were in their chimney sweep garb, ready for the final bows. They were watching the end of the show on the monitor and just bawling their eyes out -- probably a mix of crying about what was happening in the show and realizing that it was all coming to an end -- and watching little girls cry was making me cry worse. They've already decided that they'll be doing the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella next year. In addition to singing, this was my first time to be a "patron of the arts," as I helped sponsor the show. I consider that sort of a business expense as a young adult novelist to be involved in teen activities.

But for now, I'm really looking forward to not going anywhere tonight. I really got on a roll with writing last week and passed the 1/4 mark on the book Friday night, so now I seem to be picking up steam. It's a lovely spring day, so I plan to work on the patio as much as possible. I originally typed "plan" as "play," so my brain may have other intentions. But my productivity will likely be vastly improved by the fact that my recording of last night's Once Upon a Time failed and it's not up yet OnDemand, so I will have to do something today other than bitch about it at length. I will confess I checked OnDemand when I got up this morning because the plan was to watch before yoga. It still wasn't up after yoga. If it's available at lunch I'll have to make a decision of whether to watch it then or make myself wait until the evening as a reward for working, but then all the quality bitching will already have been done. Except the 20 minutes I did get to see of the beginning was actually reasonably good. I'm sure they'll have managed to completely fail to pay off everything they set up and they will have spent large amounts of screen time on things that ended up being meaningless, but the opening of this episode showed promise.

Otherwise, I need to work on my taxes because I'll probably need my tax return for last year to qualify for a mortgage. Wheee!