Danielle Blog

Cats!

As I’ve mentioned before, my friend, who I met when I was a post-doc at the U, and I went out for one last supper. This time, we coupled it with going to see Cats.
We had a great supper. It had been raining all week and the sun came out and the weather was beautiful for walking down the sidewalk to Rock Bottom and then to the theater. We almost sat outside, but were a bit concerned that the temp would get too cool once the sun went down more. And she and I are both prone to being cold. The food was great – as always – I got the Jambalaya with no shrimp & extra sausage. It is one of my favorite dishes that I discovered when I was in grad school in Boston and they stopped making their fish and chips out of smoked salmon. I really haven’t had it since then. It was even better than I remembered. Maybe it is because I haven’t had sausage for weeks and weeks….
… well, regardless, it was great.

Cats was interesting. I had no idea that the performers would do sooooooooooooooooooo much dancing while singing! It involved a lot of balletic/contemporary dancing. I was much more interested in the dancing than the singing, oddly enough. I just didn’t find the songs very melodic and the lyrics seemed sort of simple or goofy at times. They are taken from poems by T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” The playbill says that they have not been altered, except for minor revisions of tense or pronoun. “Memory” is a bit of a mash-up of a few poems. I suppose that says more about me and poetry than anything else!

The storyline is basically going through each of these different kinds of cats who each have their own little song and section of the show to describe their characteristics. I, of course, loved the big fat 25 lb black (with small bits of white) cat Bustopher Jones. Girle-girl was 20+ lbs, so I felt particularly heart warmed by this big fat cat.

Here she is, in all of her chubby glory. I had woken her up taking her photo, so this is her irritable look.

None of them were masked cats, which I thought was a bit odd, since it is such a common feature of a lot of house cats. But of course, I’m biased.

I love that last one, because it really shows off her use of her claws of her back feet when she played. That and she loooooooooooved to rip into tissue paper.

… I suppose this is why I don’t have much tissue paper stored up for packing…

Anyway, back to the show. Mr. Mistoffelees had his big number with the recognizable song, so that was fun.
And Grizabella singing Memory was terrific on the reprise. I wasn’t too sure about her singing during the first act, but she really nailed it when she sang the more complete version at the end.

All in all, it was entertaining, and if I hadn’t seen it, I always would have wondered what I was missing. Now, the only show that is left on my I-really-want-to-see-this-someday is Les Miserables. At least, for now.

As for packing and moving details. I finally managed to deal with some stuff and get my utilities set up. And I packed two massive boxes of all of the decorative stuff that was hanging or setting out in the entire house. The framed pieces took up a huge box all of their own. And that doesn’t include the breakables that I’m having them pack.
Once again, I didn’t get as far as I’d hoped; I suspect that this trend will continue, unfortunately. But I suppose it is good to set my goals high, because it keeps me motivated to keep moving. The weather this week is supposed to be in the 70s and 80s and mostly sunny, so doing the garage won’t be as miserable as I was starting to think it might be (when it was raining all week).

Also, since I sent some friends my new name and address, I’ve received a few emails of friends with whom I haven’t spoken in a while. It is nice to get to read those during my breaks and respond over breakfast or lunch. Speaking of, I should email another one of my friends whom I know from the U.

A couple more pics are on Flickr if you have access.