For as long as I can remember, my grandparents have had season tickets to their local theater. Every year, when the brochure announcing the following season arrived, my grandmother would run around the house gathering up all the necessities: the family calendar, a pen, any relevant family members, and several pairs of reading glasses (Why several pairs? For some reason that I’m sure has to do with the War or the Great Depression or some other time when she had to walk uphill to school both ways in the snow, my grandmother seems to think reading glasses are a lot like pens—you never know when they might stop working, so always best to grab a few extra).
Once she had assembled everything one could possibly need to look at a brochure, she and my grandfather would sit together at the kitchen table intensely discussing the merits of the season’s offerings. Not to decide whether to renew their subscription—they always did—but to wind themselves up in anticipation. Most of the time these sessions would end with them both in tears and unable to talk from laughing too hard--about the time Carol Burnett lost her skirt in the middle of the big number; or the time, while they were still dating, that my great-grandfather had given them tickets to see Carousel, but they got stuck in the "fog," and just had to spend all night in the car; or, most frequently as I recall, the time when the actress did the thing which made that guy do the other thing, which in turn made the other guy do the other other thing (which was, apparently, hilarious).
But it seems my grandparents are far more enamored of thinking about going to the theater than actually going. Because, inevitably, on the day of a play at least one of them would beg off—either my grandma would have to work late; or my grandpa’s back was sore; or, once, we were running low on soup (“What if there were an earthquake, and we had no soup? What then? Then, you would wish I had stayed home to cook for you.”). Which meant that growing up, I got to see a lot of plays. (What to do with an extra theater ticket at the last minute? Invite the grandkid!)
Most of the time, this made me feel like the luckiest girl on the planet. There was, however, the occasional flop. The world premier of a new musical written and performed by mimes, for example, turned out not to be so great. As did a three-hour play that consisted of only one scene—four men sitting around a table discussing Russian politics . . . in Russian (there were English surtitles) . . . and cross-dress (or perhaps Russian kilts have ruffles?). So when my grandma told me that I could have her ticket for Sweeney Todd, a musical about a homicidal barber, I was grateful, but cautious. She assured me that I would love it (“It won a Tony for Chrissakes!”), but I remained skeptical—after all, this was the woman who thought singing mimes would be a good idea. Of course, I needn’t have worried. I did love it. (It turns out I love pretty much everything Stephen Sondheim has ever written.) Which I hope explains why when I read this headline this morning about a murderous dentist, my first thought was less along the lines of “Oh no!” and more along the lines of “Yay! A sequel!”
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