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No sitter today, so I had both kids all day. I took A. to her annual checkup; everything pretty good there. They now let you make next year’s appointment as you exit this year’s appointment. I’m not sure whether that’s a new thing — certainly it is the first time I had the spare cognitive capacity when exiting one of these appointments to stop and actually do that. So, yay! Once less thing to remember! It’ll just pop up on my calendar one day and I’ll go, oh, gosh, we need to do that. _One_ day, because I took a risk and scheduled back to back appointments for my kids.
We had lunch at home, and then went to T.’s day camp doing Bye Bye Birdie. The woman running the program really wanted me in the auditorium / on stage with T. still, which there was no way in hell I was going to do with A. there also. I was more polite when I had told her that on the phone a few days earlier. The sitter — who in a previous career was a special ed aide — was doing that for I think one day the previous week, because T. was being himself and asking nonstop questions and then arguing with the answers. I told T. in a lot of detail that if he asked too many questions or argued with _any_ directions, we were going home and he would not be finishing the camp. We addressed as much of his questions as we could before going, and agreed to discuss it further when we got back home. I figured that should fix it: either we stayed or we left, but I wouldn’t be needed. And I wasn’t.
CCHS cafeteria and auditorium were _aggressively_ air conditioned. A. and I were freezing in the caf, so we wound up in the auditorium anyway. (Yeah, I know: I forgot about indoor weather and left the jackets at home. I won’t do that again! Taking her hair down helped warm her up, and I also forgot snacks. But I had some gum, which got us through until it was time to go.) I _really_ do not like Bye Bye Birdie as a musical! I read a bunch of critiques later in the day. I get the attraction of doing it with kids: you basically have two roving, dancing choruses (the Girls and the Boys), so everyone gets lots of stage time, but while there are solo performances, they are contained (this was a highly abbreviated version of the book, and One Last Kiss is replaced with One Last Dance). But OMG the biggest song — the one just about everyone knows part of, Put on a Happy Face, is reprehensible! It is everything we are complaining about with women being required to suppress authentic emotion and enact a positive public emotional tone in order to help _everyone else_ manage their emotions. _How Lovely to Be a Woman_ is exactly NOT the feminist anthem one might hope it to be! The only job in that song is to pick out a boy and turn him into the man you want. An awful task to contemplate — but worse that it is the defining task of a woman.
If I could be _certain_ that Albert singing Put On a Happy Face was intended to be satirical, okay. But everything I read in the book and see in performances that I watch on YouTube suggests the satire is partly at the young woman being devastated by someone she doesn’t know going off to war, and possibly partly at Albert — if the young women weren’t devastated, he would have no career salvaging opportunity to exploit. He truly is killing the goose laying the golden egg. If I could be _certain_ that Kim singing _How Lovely to Be a Woman_ was satirical, okay. But what I see being satirized is Kim thinking she is a woman when she still had braces a couple years earlier.
Etc.
Male theater critics (and movie reviewers, with respect to the 1963 movie) seem to be able to enjoy this thing in an unreflective way. Women theater critics — fewer in number — are much more circumspect. They don’t like it, but they are cautious in how they condemn it.
I just think it’s sort of gross, and I guess I’m happy that no one involved in this production has any awareness of this. Because if they knew it was gross, and they put it on anyway, that would definitely be worse.
Also, the songs are so flat. Ugh! But again, makes it a lot easier to put on a show with a limited range in the music. Far less demanding of the performers, opening them up to a lot less shaming laughter or criticism.
We had lunch at home, and then went to T.’s day camp doing Bye Bye Birdie. The woman running the program really wanted me in the auditorium / on stage with T. still, which there was no way in hell I was going to do with A. there also. I was more polite when I had told her that on the phone a few days earlier. The sitter — who in a previous career was a special ed aide — was doing that for I think one day the previous week, because T. was being himself and asking nonstop questions and then arguing with the answers. I told T. in a lot of detail that if he asked too many questions or argued with _any_ directions, we were going home and he would not be finishing the camp. We addressed as much of his questions as we could before going, and agreed to discuss it further when we got back home. I figured that should fix it: either we stayed or we left, but I wouldn’t be needed. And I wasn’t.
CCHS cafeteria and auditorium were _aggressively_ air conditioned. A. and I were freezing in the caf, so we wound up in the auditorium anyway. (Yeah, I know: I forgot about indoor weather and left the jackets at home. I won’t do that again! Taking her hair down helped warm her up, and I also forgot snacks. But I had some gum, which got us through until it was time to go.) I _really_ do not like Bye Bye Birdie as a musical! I read a bunch of critiques later in the day. I get the attraction of doing it with kids: you basically have two roving, dancing choruses (the Girls and the Boys), so everyone gets lots of stage time, but while there are solo performances, they are contained (this was a highly abbreviated version of the book, and One Last Kiss is replaced with One Last Dance). But OMG the biggest song — the one just about everyone knows part of, Put on a Happy Face, is reprehensible! It is everything we are complaining about with women being required to suppress authentic emotion and enact a positive public emotional tone in order to help _everyone else_ manage their emotions. _How Lovely to Be a Woman_ is exactly NOT the feminist anthem one might hope it to be! The only job in that song is to pick out a boy and turn him into the man you want. An awful task to contemplate — but worse that it is the defining task of a woman.
If I could be _certain_ that Albert singing Put On a Happy Face was intended to be satirical, okay. But everything I read in the book and see in performances that I watch on YouTube suggests the satire is partly at the young woman being devastated by someone she doesn’t know going off to war, and possibly partly at Albert — if the young women weren’t devastated, he would have no career salvaging opportunity to exploit. He truly is killing the goose laying the golden egg. If I could be _certain_ that Kim singing _How Lovely to Be a Woman_ was satirical, okay. But what I see being satirized is Kim thinking she is a woman when she still had braces a couple years earlier.
Etc.
Male theater critics (and movie reviewers, with respect to the 1963 movie) seem to be able to enjoy this thing in an unreflective way. Women theater critics — fewer in number — are much more circumspect. They don’t like it, but they are cautious in how they condemn it.
I just think it’s sort of gross, and I guess I’m happy that no one involved in this production has any awareness of this. Because if they knew it was gross, and they put it on anyway, that would definitely be worse.
Also, the songs are so flat. Ugh! But again, makes it a lot easier to put on a show with a limited range in the music. Far less demanding of the performers, opening them up to a lot less shaming laughter or criticism.