Welcome to an Arts Micro-Vacation

This weekend I spent in New York City. I don’t usually spend a full weekend in the city, especially not in the summer months because of the heat and even worse humidity. It’s often crowded and space, as rare as it normally is, becomes nearly impossible to find.

But really, that’s New York in a nutshell.

So, why did I choose to spend a weekend wandering around a city that I typically avoid during the burger of tourist season?

I decided to take the opportunity to see a couple of plays. I got tickets to see To Kill a Mockingbird months ago (because any sooner was near impossible in my price range). Then, about two weeks ago I saw that Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Cox would be in the play, Betrayal, on Broadway. It was an opportunity I didn’t want to waste.

I felt it was too hard to do my usual commute back and forth into the city, so I opted to just stay the night. I call it a micro-vacation.

The plays were only part of the trip. I now had ample free time to do a few other things - like eat in Hell’s Kitchen (Maria Pia is one of my favorite restaurants in that area), see some of new exhibits at The Met, and enjoy my wanders around the many parks (Central being my favorite).

It’s calm and peaceful and everything is set to my pace.

This also isn’t the first micro-vacation I’ve taken this month (last weekend I was in Hershey with a friend). They’re a nice indulgence when I can’t get far away from home for a long period of time.

This trip has been centered around the Arts. The Art of the Stage Production, The Art of Fashion (The Met has a really cool exhibit on Camp right now that was really cool and informative on the history of LGBTQ+ culture), The Art of Food, and The Art of Adaptation.

I don't think that last art gets as much attention as many of the others. Adaptation takes an already created work and transforms it. In this case, I'm referring to the play To Kill a Mockingbird.

My introduction to the story was like many American high schoolers, by reading the novel for English Lit. class. I think it says something about the books that they were making us read that I still think of it as the "happiest" book we read that year. To be clear, this book is not "happy" in the slightest, just happier than everything else we read in 9th grade.

It wasn't that much later that I saw the movie with Gregory Peck as the too prefect for this world Atticus Finch. Both the book and the movie are excellent. The movie definitely does the book justice, though I recall it leaves a number of scenes out.

The play has a very different structure from the book and movie, but this is an adaptation that I think does both justice in a time where a few updates needed to be made. Jeff Daniels is excellent as Atticus Finch, showing both his strengths and deep flaws as a white man living in the south during the 1930s. He even gets called out several times on his actions by the family's black house keeper, Calpurnia, which I don't remember happening in the movie or the book.

I thought the updates were needed and I found myself frustrated by Atticus, more forgiving of Jem, and enjoying the non-linear story telling.

Which brings me to the other play I saw. I went into the play Betrayal only knowing that it was a play about an affair told in reverse, also Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Cox were in it. I enjoyed the acting and the story, but I didn't understand at all why two of the characters started having an affair (even at the end when it showed how the affair started).

I won't spoil the story, but I admit I had a hard time relating to the characters. The only character I somewhat sympathized with was Tom Hiddleston's Robert, though I might have also sympathized with Zawe Ashton's character, Emma, with a few more scenes providing context to some of her claims.

Charlie Cox's character, Jerry, was just an all around clueless B@$%@#d.

I think the coolest part of the play was how time was portrayed. They had a circular revolving stage (one ring on the inside and another on the outside) with only two chairs, and later a table, as the set. As time moved backward the circles would turn and there would be a projection of how far back in time we had gone in the story. There was also a lot of excellent shadow play with light projections and use of the circles to show how all of the characters orbited around each other.

My final thoughts on the weekend are from while I was at The Met. I got to see the incomplete masterpiece of St. Jerome by Leonardo Da Vinci, which was cool, a very cool presentation of music and visual landscape of Iceland called "Death is Elsewhere" which was projected on screens surrounding the viewers, and an exhibit on Camp.

I honestly knew nothing about Camp before I went into the exhibit. It's history and evolution are closely tied to the history of (mostly male)  LGBTQ+ culture. It's an Art of Fashion and Self Expression. Though I don't think I could pull off any of the looks, I was fascinated by everything I saw.

It was a fun weekend and I experienced a lot. I'd recommend any of the plays I saw and the exhibits at the Met. Also Hell's Kitchen is a must for people who like good food.

Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Welcome to a Childhood Dreams

In the early 2000s there was a TV show on the Travel Channel called "Great Hotels" hosted by Samantha Brown. My sister and I loved the show for a variety of reasons. Some of our favorite episodes included her trips to the Disney Hotels where she also got to check out one of the parks, any time she went to Hawaii, and her trip to The Hotel Hershey where she spent the day at the Hershey Spa.

As soon as I saw the Hershey Spa episode, I knew that one day I would have to go and be drenched in chocolate.

This past weekend, I got to fulfill that dream with a friend of mine.

It was amazing.

Though we didn't get to stay at the beautiful 1933 Spanish and Italian influenced hotel (or as my dad calls it: "an example of American Imperialism at it's finest"), we did spend an entire day at the Hershey Hotel Spa. One day I hope to stay at the hotel (if only so that I can go to their outdoor pool area and slide down the two water slides) and have the whole amazing experience, but there are only so many excursions I can do at the moment.

A day at The Hotel Hershey Spa was well worth saving up for. We decided to do one of their garden and herbal packages and ended with a lovely chocolate message. By the time I was finished, I was a happy pile of goo. Basically I had turned into butter on a fresh baked roll in July. Plus my skin is so soft, it's amazing.

The experience was so much more than I expected. Not to mention the muffins are some of the best I've ever tasted and I could eat as many as I wanted.

I admit that I could gush about the experience throughout this post and turn it into a free advertisement for Hershey, but that's not entirely the point.

This was a wish fulfillment that I've been dreaming about doing for years. To some people it might seem silly or unappealing, but not all dreams have to appeal to everyone. I have a lot of dreams and wishes I have on my Bucket List. When I tell people about them, sometimes they're very encouraging, other times I'm straight up told I'm a weirdo and asked why "anyone would want to do that?"

They're still my dreams and wishes - most of which I have to work very hard to fulfill.

It took me years before I was able to have a spa experience like this, but the little kid in me is extremely happy. I'm extremely fortunate and lucky and I hope to continue to cross those items off the Bucket List.

Even as the Bucket List gets longer and longer as time goes by.

Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a message. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y'all like hearing from me.

Welcome to the Patterns in Hindsight

How many TV shows or movies have you guys watched and known exactly which characters aren't going to make it to the end? Or what about the crime shows that have you figuring out who the killer is in the first 15 minutes?

I've been watching a lot of Murder, She Wrote lately, and it has a fairly formulaic structure. Within the first few minutes a problem is introduced and the wacky group of characters are introduced. It's in these moments that I can usually pin point whose murder J B Fletcher is going to be solving. It takes me another twenty minutes or so to figure out who did it. 

The killer and the person killed are nearly always introduced at the very start of the show.

This formula can be seen in a lot of other crime or mystery based dramas. Heck, even my beloved Scooby Doo uses it. It's rare when we have no idea who's under the mask. 

It's even easier to pick up these hints when watching multiple episodes at a time. Until I actually started binge watching Murder She Wrote, I almost never picked up on the subtle clues that were peppered throughout, but once you know what to look for (usually a throw away line about some important piece of information that the character in question shouldn't know about) that leads to picking out the killer way before the big reveal. 

Horror movies follow a similar patter that has now been deconstructed to death (let's conclude that this pun was intended). Cabin in the Woods is the most famous modern example. The iconic Scream even has a scene where the character Randy lists all of the rules that keep you alive in movies. Since Randy follows the rules, he gets to live to the sequel.

Re-watching these movies, I start to pick up on the hints of what led to a person dying. Either they broke one of the cardinal rules of horror movies ("don't have sex, don't drink or do drugs, and never, ever say you'll be right back") or they made a mistake that led them right to the killer.

Real life isn't entirely like horror movies or 60 minute mystery shows. The hero isn't always around to stumble across a dead body and piece together the clues like a prefect puzzle. Real life is messy, chaotic, and even senseless.

However, that doesn't mean that there aren't patterns that don't emerge when horrible events do occur. Humans like patterns, our brains are built to recognize them (even when they aren't there, but that's another blog post). It could be a person's search history, the posts they tweet on Twitter, the groups they like on Facebook, or if they're on an FBI watch list. 

These patterns that our brains detect have helped our species survive and thrive. It's why some people are extremely intuitive and know when to listen to their "gut". It's why we sometimes get a creepy feeling that tells us that danger is around in an otherwise perfectly normal setting.

I sometimes feel like Sid and the cameraman trying to tell Randy, who's screaming at movie Jamie Lee Curtis that Michael Myers is right behind her in a movie, that Ghost Face is behind him with a knife. I can see the danger, but there's nothing I can do about it. I can't change a story that's already been written.

But isn't that how some of us who watch scary movies or murder mysteries feel when we know what's about to happen? We've figured out who and where the killer is and can do nothing to help the victim. We're just watching events unfold on a screen, wishing, praying that our favorite characters will survive. 

We know the patterns and unless we're willing to do something about them, the horror movie killer will keep coming back.

If you liked this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y'all like hearing from me. 

Until next week.