Theatricalities

I seem recently to have lost my ability to actually keep my diary up to date – I always seem to be writing about things that happened several days ago. So to continue that trend:

On Saturday lytteltonwitch and I went out to Kirwee to see Mothercat perform in the Selwyn Short Play Festival. She was really good, and ended up winning the prize for Best Actor – congratulations Mothercat! The plays were the usual mixed bag that these sort of amateur festivals bring out – some were really good, and some were completely abysmal. I was in complete agreement with all the prizes the judge awarded, which is unusual to me, but the good plays and actors stood out so much that it was obvious which would have to win.
Supper was included in the ticket, but instead of the usual trestle tables of food and a free-for-all, we had to queue (for what seemed like hours – there were 140 people in the audience, and we were near the end of the queue, so we were getting pretty hungry (and sore feet!) by the time we finally reached the front) and they gave us each one sandwich, one savory, one slice of pizza, one cake, and a cup of soup. I suppose they thought that way they could make sure nobody would take more than their share and not leave enough for others, but it was a very slow and inefficient way of doing things, and I heard a bit of grumbling at our end of the queue that it wasn’t moving faster. Oh well, it’s the first time they’ve done supper at the festival, apparently, so I suppose they’ll improve the system a bit next year (even having two queues instead of one would have helped!) now they know it doesn’t really work.
I released a few books around the community hall before the plays started: A Reader’s Digest condensed book; Shakespeare’s King Henry V; and What Katy Did Next by Susan M Coolidge.

Last night I went to see the movie of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – I was a bit apprehensive seeing it, because of Hollywood’s propensity to not “get” British humour, but it wasn’t too bad. There were a lot of cringe-making moments, of course, and I spent the first 15 minutes or so thinking “I’m going to hate this”, but eventually I started to enjoy it (ironically, I enjoyed it most when it started to depart from the “original” story (as much as you can call any version of Hitchhiker’s the original story) – I think because it felt sometimes like they were trying to recreate scenes from the TV series and failing). It was never as laugh out loud funny as the books or radio series or TV series or game or… but there were some nice moments that were worth a grin (and some lovely in jokes that only a fan would pick up on). It did feel a bit like it was written by a committee though, with different scenes being written by different people – it felt oddly disjointed, like it couldn’t make up its mind whether it was going to be a Hollywood blockbuster (with obligatory gunfights and love scenes), a direct copy of one or other of the various versions of the story, or a tribute that captured the feel of Hitchhiker’s without necessarily being strictly true to any of them. I’m still not sure whether I actually liked it or not, but at least it wasn’t as bad as it could have been…

Had a few nice catches over the last week or so: Safari Adventure has been continuing its adventures, having been caught in Auckland, and is now on its way back across the Tasman (for the third time!) to Canberra. Another convention release, Richard Scarry’s On Vacation was caught and taken to America, and Paddy’s Puzzle, which Skyring released in San Fransisco, was caught by another Australian on holiday there!

I also caught a few books myself – not wild catches, but ones that arrived in the mail: littlemave sent me Stancliffe’s Hotel by Charlotte Brontë, which I’d had on my wishlist since I’d seen discussions about it on the BC-AUS Yahoo group; cratclif sent me The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman as a RABK; and Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella arrived from Jassy-m (I’ve ended up with this one through a series of confusions – originally I’d signed up for the bookring for it, but then the bookring seemed to have stalled (Jassy-m received it in November last year, and then nothing more was heard from her for months), so aussie-rose offered to revive it with a second copy, which she sent to me via Mundoo at the NZBC convention (are you confused yet?). However, in the meantime Jassy-m reappeared, and PMed me to tell me I was next in the bookring and she was sending me the book. I PMed back to let her know I already had a copy and she should skip me and send it to the next participant (Skyring) instead, but obviously the PM never reached her, because she sent the book to me anyway. So I’ll be sending it straight back over the Tasman again to Skyring…)

Currently reading: The Savage Girl by Alex Shakar