Belated thoughts on the end of the Christmas show

The Christmas show has finished. It got a good response from the audiences, and several of the cast have subsequently had random people approach them in real life to tell them how good it was.

At the after party, I found myself unusually willing to get out on the dance floor (especially compared to my usual amount of willingness to do that thing, which is to say, none at all). I attribute this to the fact that the last song-and-dance number in the show started out with choreographed steps then broke off into a free-for-all; once you've been obliged to dance ex tempore in front of a crowd repeatedly over the course of several weeks, doing it amongst friends is less daunting.

The party wound down in due course into a variety of other less energetic activities, many being the kind of thing that only seem sensible when one is a few hours into a party where half the people have been drinking steadily. I steered clear of most of those, having been sticking mainly to the soft stuff myself -- though I did claim the gathering's attention at one point to deliver a risqué folk song I'd accurately surmised would go down well on the occasion -- and at what seemed like an appropriate juncture I started roping in people to play some of the tabletop games I've owned for ages and never have anyone to play with.

We got through a game each of Dixit, which I've played with friends in Perth, and Star Fluxx and Once Upon a Time, which I'd bought after seeing them played on TableTop but never had a chance to actually play before. One of the people I roped in to play turns out to also be a gamer and a watcher of TableTop, which I hadn't known. (In retrospect, I had had a hint; the last time I tried out Story War on this crowd, she'd been the one who knew somebody else who had it.)

I seem to have somehow levelled up in my social life as a consequence of being in the show, too; I've had a few invitations to Christmas gathering from cast members who've never invited me to anything before. (Though to be fair, there's at least one I think would probably have invited me to things before now except for some combination of being unsure whether I'd be interested and being unsure how invitations work for people who don't do Facebook.) One of them has already happened, and went well; apart from general fun party-ness, I got something right by presenting the host with a joke gift that not only got the intended laugh but also turned out to be something he had an actual use for.

Five Other Things Make Today's Second Post

1. I still have the moustache I grew to play the villainous captain in The Duchess of Coolgardie and kept to play the upstanding colonel in the Christmas show; it seemed a pity somehow to lose it after all the time I spent cultivating it, so I've decided to keep it at least until I find out if my next role will need it. It has, however, been trimmed back to a more comfortable size now that there's no longer any call for it to be waxed into points.


2. Yesterday, I finished the first "season" of Doctor Who Legacy. I think I have to admit that I have, despite my earlier doubts, been sucked into the game, and I'm making reasonable progress at picking up the strategies. But I stand by everything I said earlier about the lack of anything resembling a plot and the Doctor Who elements being a thin veneer over mechanics that bear little or no resemblance to whatever Doctor Who thing they supposedly represent.


3. Today, while I was doing Christmas shopping, I discovered that the local toy shop, which I have been in many times before, has a door at the back, which in my defence is really only visible if you look at it at the right angle, that leads into a separate area containing what you might call toys for grown-ups (though the sign actually says "Hobbies"): scale models, miniatures, and a broader range of board and card games than the display on the main floor where every second game is another version of Monopoly. I've been wishing for ages that we had a proper game shop here that sold games like Carcassonne and Dixit and Arkham Horror, and apparently we have had the whole time and I just never knew about it. The same goes again for the local tabletop gaming club whose flyer was on the wall. (Though frankly if the only place they advertise their existence is in a room that makes me want to start quoting the "on display in the local planning office" scene from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have to wonder if they don't really want to be found.)


4. Although I did not sign up for Yuletide this year, the number of Treats I've written after browsing people's Yuletide letters is greater than zero.


5. This fortnight's video link: Wanderers, an amazing short (under five minutes) science fiction film by Erik Wernquist. Watch it in full screen if you can. This reaction post by astronomer Phil Plait is worth reading afterward, but watch the film first. (hat-tip: Rosemary Kirstein, who knows a thing or two about sensawunda herself)