life isn't real you know

Friday night the roomies and I laid low; we watched Bee Movie and ordered pizza. Saturday definitely made up for this. I was really excited to have my friend Bethany come into the city for a visit! (we went to Spain together and she is student teaching outside the city) It was so good to see her and be able to hang out for a few hours. We went out to eat at an Italian restaurant where we were able to reminisce on times we ourselves spent in Italy together! It was great meal and the rain even let up enough so we could walk back to my apartment where the mini-reunion was made a bit bigger when Gerrid showed up as well! He was with us in Spain and had come to the city for the weekend from his school in Michigan. So we got to catch up for a bit before we all went our separate ways for the night. It was too short and seemed to only make me miss mis amigos de Espana more... we need another big reunion :)

After this gathering, Janice, Betsy, and I went to a free play downtown called Cleveland Raining. This theater is a smaller project that 'showcases playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean backgrounds.' This was really just a "staged reading" I guess which means it was portrayed uniquely with lack of props and effects. It is not always like this but I think it still worked. The narrator was sitting in a chair stage left and read everything in the notes such as "act 1: jimmy sits on the floor, mick walks in...." The only props were: four chairs center stage strategically placed to appear as a car (a VW bug to be exact), some stage boxes with various purposes, and two chairs stage right to act as the porch. The four actors were never without their script binders, sometimes reading directly from them though still portraying the actions/emotions well enough for the audience to be connected. The opening is quite intriguing as the two main characters overlap their monologues, making neither fully comprehensible but also not leaving one feeling confused. The storyline is basically: Jimmy and Mari are both abandoned by theirr parents, and are now trying to make it on their own and deal with their past. Jimmy had a dream for a year about a floating in a VW after a long rain in Ohio and after spotting the very vehicle in a junk yard he bought it and hired a mechanic to help him make it seaworthy. So knowing that plotline, you can guess that it was in fact funny in its ridiculous dialogues. But again, under the comedic layer there were some more serious issues being dealt with, them as Korean Americans, dealing with loss, and how we are all connected. This blog's title is actually a quote from the play, they had a few good thought provoking lines like that. I was reminded of a Nicole Kidman film "Dogville" which also used minimalist props and actually used painted outlines with labels for most things (a bush was a circle labeled: gooseberry bush etc). So having previously appreciated that film, I found myself again attracted to the lack of stage design.

After this Janice and I realized that we hadn't really eaten supper and decided that we would order Chinese and get a movie. We felt so 'big city' when we got chinese food delivered to us like that :) especially at 11:30pm! we happily ate our chinese feast and watched a movie not getting to bed until something like 3am. It was a lovely day

Sunday we of course slept in! After eating quick lunches we went downtown shopping on State Street. Janice needed some tennis shoes so Susan and I just came along for the fun. We all went home happy a couple hours later; I found a really cute spring/fall jacket at H&M. The rest of the night we successfully did absolutely nothing :) Don't let anyone tell you different: life is tough.