Redemption

I lay awake worrying for most of last night, listening to the wind crashing around, and the house creaking and groaning - and just to add insult to injury, the music I didn't get to sing in front of an audience yesterday evening was playing in a continuous loop in my head. This is something that tends to happen in the last couple of weeks before a concert, simply because you've spent so long listening to the pieces and learning them, and I always take it as a sign that I'm approaching concert-readiness, but I also know that the music can keep circling round for at least a week afterwards, and if that happens this time I'm likely to end up digging my own brain out of my skull with a spoon. By this morning I was exhausted, in pain, and very severely Not Happy.

After breakfast though, things began to look up. A couple of months ago I booked tickets for R and me to take the Boy Wonder and his mother to today's Christmas pantomime in Evesham, and though we told L yesterday that we'd far rather waste the tickets than have her driving over from Wales in dangerously stormy conditions, by this morning the wind had reduced enough that she decided they would come. Seeing the Boy's beaming face as he ran across the back yard towards me was enough on its own to redeem the weekend, and though I had low expectations of the performance (and sadly, they were not confounded), we all had a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.

The Regal Cinema, where Aladdin was being staged, has 2-person sofas up on the balcony. I volunteered to sit with B, which gave me the fun of explaining to him what the main elements of the story line were, who were the goodies and baddies, and what we should say when audience participation was needed, while R and L on the next sofa along got the pleasure of watching him gradually get into the swing of things. By the end he was booing and cheering with everyone else, and yelling, "Behind you!", or "Oh no he didn't!", or whatever was required at the time. We were all charmed to see that he joined in with all the dance routines, though just making the arm movements while staying firmly glued to my side.

In the car on the way back to our house for the inevitable dinner of pesto pasta, I asked the Boy which had been his favourite bit of the pantomime, and he said it was the part where the princess had her head put in a box by the evil wizard, Abanazar, who then pushed knives into the box from all directions: he was very impressed by the fact that she'd eventually emerged unscathed. He then asked me if I thought the actor playing Abanazar was really horrible and cruel, or if he was actually a nice person when he wasn't acting, and I said I thought he was probably quite an ordinary person in real life, and just pretending to be horrid when he was on stage. We agreed that if you were going to be in a pantomime, you'd probably have the most fun if you were allowed to play the bad guy.