Don't let the cave-in get you down

I'm writing up a new copy of the book for Amadeus (so that there's actually a separate one, rather than all the blocking, the lighting and the sound cues all jumbled into the same script) and I've consistently been writing 'exists' instead of 'exits'. So, lots of 'Salieri exists upright,' etc. It eventually starts to sound a little defensive. Mozart exists, dammit! Stop trying to get him to leave the stage!

Sleep patterns are utterly destroyed. I also think I have shamed my grandad with my inability to drink hard liquor from before noon onwards, even on Christmas.

So the girlfriend and I have been watching a surprising amount of Disney lately, which included a first-time watch of Princess and the Frog (which I have been dying to see since it came out) and a rewatch of Lilo and Stitch, which I only watched for the first time less than a year ago.

What I'd noticed in the other films we'd watched recently (Beauty and the Beast, Alladin, and Cinderella) was how similar many of the families - the ~good~ families - were: one child plus an eccentric and well-meaning father, usually a short chubby dude. Usually with facial hair? Strange.
( Cut for tiny round men! )

So although Dead or Missing Parents are a staple of Disney (because you need to be an orphan to be a main character, which gives me hope for great and exciting things in my future) I like that in Princess and the Frog and Lilo & Stitch the families are a bit different. A supportive and competent mother figure? A growing-into-being-a-mother-figure figure?

( Cut for adorable families, omg )

And Lilo & Stitch holds an extremely dear place in my heart, since I can project on both main characters: Lilo for being That Kid and Nani for having to suddenly deal with caring for a younger sibling. Slightly different, since my brother was only a few years younger than me and I was nowhere NEAR as responsible as she was, but still. I clearly need a Nani and Lilo icon.

Also, gotta say, having an American around is pretty useful for films like this. Well, a lot of films, really. You know that way cartoons like to exaggerate things? I used to think that American school sports were the equivilent of underground bunkers built to hide out from bullies, like they had on Hey Arnold! one time. (Or maybe it was Doug.) So having someone to cuddle into who can also pass me on tidbits like, 'that's a bottle tree! they grant wishes' or whatever is nice.

So, it is the Easter holidays, and I just got back from a week-long jaunt through a TINY FRACTION of the hundred million awesome free things you can do in London. It was essentially museumarama. Well, museums and churches. AWESOME.

We stayed with my uncles in St Albans. One of my uncles was a masterchef contestant and made us up little tarts and quiches to take into town with us so that all we had to pay for was transport. HOW SWEET IS MY FAMILY. There were two occasions on which money changed hands: one totally worth it, and one which makes me kind of sick to my stomach. We spent a tenner to explore St Paul's Cathedral - we climbed right up to the Golden Gallery, which it turns out is 280 feet up, can only be accessed by twisty metal steps you can see though, and is OUTSIDE. So you wind up clinging desperately to the side of one of the most famous cathedrals in the world hoping to god your glasses don't get torn off your face by the wind and wishing you didn't have to climb all the way down.

The other payment was £6 be locked into a 'comedy club' and have horrendous 'stand-ups' talk about rape to the ten whole people they'd managed to lure into their basement lair. I'm not joking. There were four comedians and one - umpire? Guy-who-introduces the others? - and all but one of them told jokes about rape and domestic abuse. Collectively they got about three laughs the entire night but none of them thought to KNOCK IT OFF FOR FUCK'S SAKE. Urgh urgh urgh I don't even want to write about it any more, it was awful. We thought we were going to die.

Apart from that, though, the whole week was excellent.

The biggest surprise was really enjoying the art galleries. Art just isn't something I ever seemed to gel with. The old stuff is all pictures of saints crying or ponds at sunset and the new stuff is all molds of people's faces cast with their own blood and kept frozen with a special machine. (Okay, that one is kind of cool.) But my girlfriend isn't as profoundly ignorant as I am* so, you know, turns out a lot of the boring old stuff actually have sort of cool stories behind them. Also, I've become a fan of St Jerome's bitchin' red hat. (Google isn't. I can find any awesome pictures of it. Sadness reigns.)

Then there was the Wellcome Museum which we'd never heard of, with an exhibit on personal identity (mostly to do with gender and science) and another on the history of science; carvings from Assyria in the British museum; the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum (for this one, we met up with an aunt-and-uncle and their kids: the three year old did pretty well with the ANIMATRONIC T-REX which I have seen a hundred times and will always find awesome); How Formula One Racing Will Save the World at the Science museum and supermodel!Jesus at St Martin's in the Field.

I don't doubt that people get sick of it, but God. I need to live in London someday.

* One: History in Scottish schools should be subtitled The Triumph of the Welfare State. Two: I did not go to a good school. I was taught about the extension of suffrage and a bit about Beveridge's Five Giants and that's about it. The closest we got to world history was the Weimar Republic, over and over and over again. Three: I try to read a lot, but honestly, most of it goes... well, not in one ear and out the other since you read with your eyes, but something along those lines. It doesn't lead to the most well-rounded understanding of the world.

So, wow. My girlfriend is American (and delighted about the healthcare bill, since she can now actually get healthcare in her own country again). She showed me the reaction to it on her facebook friend page and... wow. A lot of people out there are angry about the idea of letting people access medical care.

ANYWAY. What a lovely weekend I had! We wandered back down to Hometown to visit my grandparents. My gran is pretty much bedridden - she's hooked up to oxygen 24/7 and has a hospital bed in the living room because she can't walk more than a few paces any more - so we arranged a very hasty ~beauty salon~ which mostly involved me clipping my gran's nails and L. braiding her hair. (We are not the girliest of girls).

We also went to see Fiddler on the Roof, as performed by my old youth theatre! Which was awesome. Firstly because it's amazing to watch these kids that I remember as awkward children up on stage being genuinely fantastic, but mostly because it was genuinely fantastic.

I didn't know the show at all; okay, I've heard a few of the Shoggoth on the Roof songs, but that's not much help. Somehow I spent the first twenty or so minutes convinced it was set in America.

L: The accents didn't tip you off?
ME: I thought they were immigrants!
L: What about the set?
ME: I thought it was, you know. Like Gangs of New York.
L: Even when the girls got told to go out and milk the cow?
ME: REALLY REALLY OLD NEW YORK.

Look, when you have fifty Glaswegian children on a single stage doing Russian accents with various levels of authenticity, it's difficult to make these kinds of judgements.