Chaos, Cruelty and Corruption

Everybody else is talking about Iran, so I think I will skip it. Except I will ask one question: What if, after bombing Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Japanese emperor had said, “We aren’t at war with the United States. We are just at war with Pearl Harbor”?

Now, let’s leave the war behind, and move up alphabetically and discuss water. On our way yesterday from the Metro to the Shakespeare Theatre, Edie decided she would like a bottle of water. We stopped at Fresh Baguette to pick one up. The clerk with “trainee” on his shirt said “Sure” and rang up the sale. It came to $6.16. I knew that was absurd, but didn’t say anything, following my motto “Anything for Edie”. Plus, I didn’t want to be late for the show.

Digression: Edie says that she has never known that was my motto. I believe she should start paying a little attention. End of digression.

The clerk trainee then told us they had no cold water and asked if that was okay. We said it was. But then he told us that they had no water at all. So we said we wanted a refund. The clerk trainee didn’t know how to do that, so he went back into another room and brought somebody who was a full-blown clerk. He was sort of grouchy. He was fiddling with the computer and told me (standing there quietly) to “hold on”. He grew more grouchy when I responded “sure, to what?”

When we got our refund, I discovered that we were charged $6.16 because the clerk trainee thought we wanted two bottles. Maybe, in fact, we did. I am not sure what we wanted, although we only ordered one. He may be a very talented trainee clerk.

We had one more chance. A bottle of water at Gregory’s. $3.25. We then crossed the street to the theater and saw that if we had bought the water in the lobby, we would have saved a quarter. (For those of you who have not used cash in a long time, a quarter is 25 cents.)

You may remember that the day before yesterday, we saw Berlin Diaries at Theater J that had, at times, two actors, male and female, playing the same role on stage at the same time. Schrodinger’s cast, I guess.

I went into Theater J hopeful on Saturday, and I went to Shakespeare Theatre yesterday, hopeful.

At Shakespeare, we saw a version of Frankenstein, sort of. But it was only the Frankenstein story if you closed your eyes and didn’t listen. Yes, Victor Frankenstein creates an new creature, but he doesn’t tell anyone and his unnamed creation may or may not have killed his six year old brother, or it could have been the young boy’s nurse who did it. After all, she confessed and was executed.

What else happens? Frankenstein marries his sister. Well, she was adopted. We don’t know why he wanted to marry her, but we know she wants to marry him because he is the only man she has ever met. They have a child (a surprise to him somehow) and put her in an orphange because Victor is sure his creation will kill her, but his sister/wife takes their daughter out of the orphanage six years later and the show, because Frankenstein is totally bonkers, turns into Who Killed Virginia Woolf as the couple goes unto atomic war mode. But then the Victor-made artificial man comes to the rescue and it is possible that everyone lives happily ever after, except you can’t be sure because the lights go out, and you go home.

In Berlin Diaries, the playwright started with her great-grandfather’s book and tried to build a play around it. In Frankenstein, the playwright started, I think, with a concept about the relationship between men and women, and then tried to frame it around a book. I don’t think either succeeded.

Chaos, Cruelty and Corruption.