Sunday Musings

Another Sunday, but this day I won’t have any Cardinals football to agonize over. They played last Thursday and won in a defensive slugfest with the St. Louis Rams. So today I’ll just wander around in a few subjects I’ve been saving.

Like Brian Crane's always funny Pickles with some wisdom about women and cats, in this case, old forgetful women and cats who live for mischief.

Last week we went to the Arizona Broadway Theatre for a Christmas treat, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, and were we ever treated. When we first signed up for this show, I thought it would be just a Christmas filler in their Season 10 lineup. It was so much more than a filler. The sets again were extravagantly complex for such a tiny theatre; the costuming continues to confound me with the number of costumes and props that have to be created for each show; the singing was very good, especially that of the two leads, Nathan Brian and Julia Mosby; the choreography was very good, especially in the extended tap number with the ensemble. I still can’t understand how a relatively small theatre group can find so many tappers that can do more than fake it; I thought tap was a dance that was outdated, not so, as the fifteen in the ensemble demonstrated. The story was a bit corny, but then, what can one expect of a plot that was first seen in the Crosby film sixty years ago. The one weak voice in the cast was that of Patrick Graver, whose singing was slightly sharp on almost every note. The show merits five stars from me and almost all of the audiences of the mainly full-houses for the show’s run.

We finally got to see the final episode of Gracepoint. Thank god. Neither of us could stand the show, but we just had to watch all ten episodes, gritting and grinding our teeth as we watched it. Just like a bad novel you’re halfway through but you’re too stubborn to do anything but finish it. Anna Gunn, the softly sexy lady from Breaking Bad, deserved better than to be in this mish-mash thriller about a dead boy. There were too many red herrings involved (but they should really be called “red sardines” for their tiny lack of necessity). And David Tennant, who plays the detective called in to Gracepoint to lead the investigation, was possibly the most irritating character ever on tv. He played the same character in the British series called Broadchurch, and I’m so glad I never got around to seeing that one if he was as irritating in that as in this American version. The only thing that would be worse than these ten episodes would be if they decided to do another ten episodes.

A word or two about our skies yesterday. We got up to heavy fog, something we couldn’t remember ever having seen before. And later, these hairy, scary skies. We’ve lived in the Valley of the Sun for just over twenty years now and neither of us has ever seen skies that looked as threatening as these. We were getting the tail end of the Pineapple Express that hit California so calamitously a few days ago—towering black and dark and gray thunderheads all around the Valley, with curtains of rain coming down almost everywhere one looked on the horizon. If I had to imagine what the day would look like on the morn of the Apocalypse, this would be it. The only things missing were the four horsemen, but I kept expecting to see them riding up and over the White Tank Mountains. I’m sure the folks in California also expected to see them as the mud and rocks came pouring down from the hillsides above their homes.