Busy weekend

Though Pablo seems to think my quietude over the past week is because of a lack of anything to blog about, it just tain't so. Last weekend was busy but fun, since a good friend from one of my past lives was in town for a library-related conference. Despite unexpected road traffic, perfidious restaurant reservation-takers, drizzly rain, and general confusion, a good time was had by... well, at least by me. (Hope you get over that cold real quick, Good Friend!)

Views and mini-reviews:

I probably won't be headed back to the Blue Nile in the near future. Its unusual fare and manner of presentation (no silverware!) are interesting to experience once, but not so captivating that I'll be coming back on my own behalf.

The Firefly Club, on the other hand, does warrant future visits for its jazz music and classic nightclub atmosphere.

If you're planning to go to the Real Seafood Company in A-Squared, don't believe their telephone message-taker when he says that reservations aren't needed. We ended up waiting for nearly an hour after hearing that. What other people were eating looked good, but all we were able to get were appetizers at the bar.

Perhaps that's just as well. Perhaps pangs of hunger help one appreciate the Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht's and Kurt Weill's sardonic 1928 musical remake of John Gay's startlingly modern 1728 play The Beggars' Opera. I'd like to think so, anyway.

I visited The Performance Network's theater a while back when they hosted a dramatic reading of Not About Heroes, a two-man play based on the writings of Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It's a small theater. The audience is quite close to the stage, and there's little room for lavish, Broadway-style productions. The Performance Network players turned this to their advantage by doing an intimate, small-scale version of The Threepenny Opera. Some actors portray multiple roles, and one doubles as showman/announcer, introducing the play, barking out the titles of upcoming musical numbers, and opening and closing the curtains with great sweeping swashes of vaudevillian gusto. The musicians are visible on stage, sometimes supplemented by a member of MacHeath's gang who conveniently happens to carry an accordion, and are occasionally directly addressed by the actors. The Threepenny Opera is a play that's quite aware it's a play, and this production uses that fact to great advantage, combining it nicely with the shock-value of lyrics like The Ballad of Sexual Slavery; MacHeath's and Jennie's romantically nostalgic duet about "that bordello we called Home Sweet Home,"; and the Cannon Song in which two ex-soldiers boisterously reminisce about how much fun it was to slaughter any fellow "who looked brown or yellow".

As readers of this blog know, I perversely enjoy irony and bitterness and satire, so it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed this production immensely. It's great black-comedic fun. I'd see it again, and I recommend it to anyone else who happens to be in the area.

After that, we closed the evening with coffee and tea and tapas at... well, where else? (The music was a bit too loud, and the service less than stellar, but it just wouldn't be right not to go there, under the circumstances.)

Busy summer

Meanwhile, it looks as if I have a busy couple of months ahead of me. I was offered a part-time reference job at a public library about 30 minutes' drive away. This means I'll be working about 60 hours a week and juggling competing schedules through the end of June, but the alternative is to be unemployed and without any income whatsoever come July. Or to make a good impression in one of the two interviews scheduled for tomorrow (one with another local public library, one with a big 'ol private research university way down south in North Carolina.)