Let's see, where were we?

When I last wrote, Ladies in Black was about to open. The season went really well. Nobody got covid, as far as I remember, or anything else that required them to miss a performance, although it was flu season and there were several interesting infections going around.

Once the season was over, I fell in a bit of a hole for a while. To start with, I came down with the flu -- the way one often does come down with something just after the end of a big obligation that's been an ongoing source of stress, as if the body's going "okay, can collapse now". And it was a pretty big thing that had just ended: not just Ladies in Black, because rehearsals for that started while we were still doing Rock of Ages and rehearsals of Rock of Ages started when we were still doing Female Transport, so in all I'd been in a continual state of Preparing for a Show for something like eight or nine months running. And suddenly I was going from rehearsals multiple times a week and always knowing what was coming up next, to having almost no regular commitments and no clear idea of what my next goal was. It was a bit of a shock to the system.

Another aspect of it, though who knows how large of one it was, was that Rock of Ages and Ladies in Black were both musicals, so for several months there I'd had regular opportunities to make music in a communal setting, and suddenly that was gone too.

I have at least found something I can do about that last bit: an acquaintance was handing around flyers for a new singing group focussing on sea shanties and other traditional songs, so I've signed up for that and went to the first session this week.

Five Things Make a Post

What else?

* The Rep Club's Christmas show will be Nuncrackers, the Christmas-themed edition of the Nunsense series. The club did a production of the original Nunsense a few years ago, and most of the cast will be reprising their roles. In the circumstances, there were only a couple of male actors needed, which made it easy for me to decide that after being in everything else this year it was time to take a break and sit this one out.

* I'm back on track with the monthly reading challenge, having backfilled the months I missed; for June (a book with "All" in the title), I read That's All Folks!, a history of Warner Bros. Animation, and for July (a book with a book-related word in the title), I read Batman/Superman: The Archive of Worlds by Gene Luen Yang. I always find Gene Luen Yang's work rewards the time taken to read it, but I was also reminded of some of the reasons why superhero comics aren't my thing any more. For September (a word associated with light or darkness), I read the novel that Ladies in Black was adapted from, which was a good time in itself and also an interesting study in an episodic narrative being adapted into a more traditional theatrical plot arc. The prompt for October is "an animal or creature in the title", and I am reading Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror.

* Back at the beginning of the year, before I got sidetracked into deciding to re/read all of the Philip Marlowe novels, I'd been meaning to try out a different detective novel: A Few Right-Thinking Men, the first of a series by Sulari Gentill. Having disposed of Marlowe, I finally got around to reading it, and unfortunately didn't find it worth the wait. (One of the problems was that it had a significant dose of first-book-itis, so I read the second book as well, and found it significantly better written but still not what I'd been hoping for.) The description of the series that caught my attention is that it's an interbellum setting with a younger-son-of-the-upper-class amateur detective and his eccentric friends, but written by an Australian author and set in Australia, and tied in to the actual historical events of the 1930s. It was nice having a series like this set in my own country for a change (memo to self: really should try out Kerry Greenwood one of these days), but the historical aspect wasn't what I'd hoped: it's mainly used as a backdrop and a source of colourful supporting characters. The way it uses real people as supporting acts rubbed me the wrong way, and so did the way it threw in bits of history without, it seemed to me, ever really engaging with them. Cozy mysteries have their place, to be sure, but to my mind that place is not "in front of a backdrop depicting the rise of fascism".

* Mumblety years ago, I acquired all of the TV series The Pretender on DVD and set out to watch the whole thing from beginning to end, having originally seen parts of it out of order and missed some key episodes including the series finale. I got through the first two seasons at a good rate, started flagging during the third season, and eventually reached a point where I knew two of my least favourite episodes were coming up, and decided to put it aside for a while. I was inspired to give it another crack this week, and as a reward for pushing through those two episodes I got to go on and watch "PTB", which I missed when it aired and turns out to be a pretty good episode, with a not-yet-famous Bryan Cranston in the main guest role and some important arc stuff including an answer to something I'd been wondering about for years. But now, recalling that the quality of the show continues to trend downward, I need to decide whether I actually want to watch the rest of the series, or if I would be better off setting an October point and moving on to something else.

* Dracula Daily is drawing towards its close. I've learned a lot of interesting things doing it, but keeping up with the conversation has been quite demanding of time and attention at times, and although I don't think I regret it, I also don't think I want to do anything quite like it again in a hurry. Soon I will have a decision to make: when I decided to do Dracula Daily, it was partly with the intention of slingshotting off it to read through Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series (another series I originally experienced somewhat out of order and with bits missing). Now I'm not sure if that's still a good idea; having spent so much time with people analysing the characters in Dracula and discussing issues like the representations of race and mental illness, I think it's likely I'll be sensitive to the places where, if memory serves, Kim Newman doesn't give them as much careful attention.