on with the show

Been in bed most of the day (well, on the bed, I didn't really bother getting into it) with a whopper headache. When is it a migraine? I don't know. Anyway, it was bad enough that I had to leave church after the sermon (even though I was on piano this morning) and was pretty much asleep all afternoon. Still, it's so good to have the opportunity to just sleep all day.

Dave's brother Andrew and his family were staying over last night, as Andrew was running in the City to Surf today. It was great to meet them all, though I didn't really spend much time chatting to them; the room was very full (six visitors altogether, plus me and Dave) and so I just read in my room for a while and then got ready to go out. Mum asked me where they were all going to sleep and I said I had offered options and they all said not to worry about it, so I didn't! They were all gone by the time I got up this morning, so they were really not any trouble at all.

I took a liking to Dave's niece, Tabitha, who is very cute and has a very charming smile. I heard her saying to Dave when I was in my room, "Where's your mum?" and Dave, knowing she meant me, kept saying "Grandma? She's in Orange." Eventually, exasperated, Tabitha tried a new tack, "Where's that girl in the black dress who lives here?" but then got all shy when I poked my head round the door to say hello. I love seeing how childrens' minds work, how it takes them a while to piece together abstract concepts like how people relate to one another - the 'girl in the black dress' is an older female who lives in the same flat as Dave...therefore...she must be his mother! (she hasn't quite worked out yet that her grandmother and Dave's mother are, in fact, the same person)

I left them all eating pizza and went to the Seymour Centre to meet Brett and Em. While standing around outside I also unfortunately caught a glimpse of an ex boyfriend I really don't ever want to see again and panicked, so we hurried inside and took our seats for the Balmain Light Opera Company's production of Into the Woods. It was okay - a bit patchy, really, with some great performances (notably, Jack and Little Red Riding Hood), but some less great performances. By the second act the wheels really seemed to have come off the whole thing; people were singing out of key, weren't able to hit the big notes, and I don't think they carried off the all-important emotional aspect of it. But the second act of Into the Woods is much darker, and is always going to be harder than the first, which has a lot more jokes and is setting up the whole fairytales colliding thing. I also found the set a little offputting - they could have done things a lot more simply and effectively, but instead had some pieces of the set that worked, and others that looked very panto.

But still, it was good to go out and see a show. We have decided the three of us will start going and seeing more theatre again, as I do miss it. The next one I want to see is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Belvoir St. Brett is keen on A Midsummer Night's Dream with the STC, but I've always been a bit ambivalent about that play. And it took very little convincing to get Em thinking it is a good idea to see Miss Saigon, and perhaps to go on a road trip to Melbourne to see Phantom and then, next year, Wicked. How I plan to finance this, I have no idea, but it's always nice to dream...