Good luck finding any underlying theme or structure to this post.

The other night I went to see a play, but it was cancelled due to technical problems. This was at a community center rather than a Theatre per se, and they were really sheepish about it but didn't seem to have any sense that it could be fixed.

When I did The Goat at BFT we didn't have a cast party, but we had something much better; Becky, a Grand Old Lady of local theatre, hadn't been able to see the show due to health problems, so after closing night we went to her home and did a reading for her. It was wonderful. We discovered so many lovely nuances in the text and performance when we didn't have to project to the back of the house.

So I'm all for low-fi staged readings and such. It has such intimacy. Maybe the cast of last night's cancelled show could have just read the play to us. It was Diary of Anne Frank, not Cats, for pete's sake; it doesn't hinge on spectacle, but on people interacting. It could have worked.

* * *

Today I'm livin' on the edge: I'm drinking a different kind of tea. I usually do Irish Breakfast, but V. Richards, the boutique grocery across the street from my domicile, was out. So I'm trying Lapsang Souchong. Reading the cover copy on the box about how they saturate this tea with wood smoke in China gave me visions right out of Ernest Bramah. I haven't tasted the stuff yet, but I got it brewing in my cup, and they weren't kidding about wood smoke. I can whiff it, and it's almost overpowering. I like tea that pushes me around, so that's promising.

* * *

One sip later: I'm teetering between the Ernest Bramah and the Sax Rohmer. Misty mountains, fiery torture. What does it say about me that when I think of China, I think of decadent bogus Victorian honkies? Visions of the heathen chinee and Warhol's technicolor Mao are what leap to mind. I know better, but my brain doesn't. A bit like the Tony Millionare character who says "I'm not gay. But my hiney is!" I'm not racist against Chinese people; I've just got a head full of these corny and sensational ideas about China. I LIKE corny and sensational ideas, so it's hard to brush them aside with any force.

Anyway, I've never smoked, but I suspect this tea might be useful for people who are quitting. I feel like I just inhaled campfire smoke, only without the coughing.