Category Archives: General

Flow

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We watched a movie on Saturday night and another one yesterday. Saturday night was a very cute coming-out and coming-of-age movie called Dorian Blues. Better than your average such movie. I recommend it as a rental.

Yesterday was Walk the Line, which I liked more than I thought I would. The difference between Walk the Line and Brokeback Mountain is that in Walk the Line, the lovers actually use the fishing gear they bought.

Yesterday I also had a training session at my gym. My trainer has been teaching me how to use free weights, and this week I’ll start a new workout routine incorporating them. He also gave me a boost of encouragement: he told me that shorter guys can build muscle easier than some other people can. That was good to hear.

On Saturday night, Matt and I had dinner at the Waverly Restaurant (our local neighborhood diner – it’s always nice to have a local neighborhood diner) and discussed what we’ll do about housing and whatnot as of next summer. We’re likely staying in our free housing (which we get from Matt’s job) at least through then. After that point, we may actually need to (gasp) pay rent. What will we be able to afford? Will we have to move to another neighborhood in the city? Oddly, almost all our friends live in the triple digits, but I really really like living where we do. Will I have to get a higher-paying job? And what do I really want to do with my life? Am I satisfied with it right now? Do I expect too much out of life?

Saturday night’s restaurant talk led into the usual Sunday blues, which I’m pretty sure I wrote about recently. I think I need to start planning a Sunday activity ahead of time, so I have something to do. I thought about going to a concert at Avery Fisher Hall yesterday, but for some reason I didn’t. I can never figure out what I want to do on Sundays, because I worry too much about trying to fill the time in the most enjoyable way possible before beginning the five-day work week again. But maybe if I do something that will let me experience flow, I won’t experience the Sunday blues as much.

I did feel better late yesterday afternoon once I sat down and put Walk the Line into the DVD player. Sitting around watching a movie seems like such a lazy activity. But it worked. I felt better.

I need to not be so hard on myself.

Grey Gardens: The Musical

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Last night we saw Grey Gardens, the new musical based on the classic 1975 documentary, and loved it. If this were on Broadway instead of at Playwrights Horizons, Christine Ebersole would be a lock for the Tony.

Matt had the good idea of renting the documentary last week. Neither of us had seen it before (actually, I saw the first 15 minutes at a friend’s place last year, but that was it), and, after a while, I totally got into it. The story of a nutty elderly woman and her nutty middle-aged daughter stuck living together in a creepily co-dependent relationship totally reminded me of my maternal grandmother and my mom’s sister, who lived together for a long time as adults in an absurdly messy house. The movie is simultaneously entertaining and haunting. And it enhanced the musical experience, because we were able to catch many references to the film, some of them subtle.

The musical is unconventional, but it mostly works. The writers constructed the first act out of whole cloth: it takes place in 1941, thirty years before the events captured in the documentary, and the songs are mostly 1940s pastiche. The act goes on a bit too long and there are too many diegetic songs, but the foreshadowing of future events is eerie at times. The second act, more experimental, is a largely musicalized version of the documentary; thirty years have passed and everything has fallen apart. I think Sara Gettelfinger, who plays the daughter, Little Edie, in the first half, was miscast; she seems too sane to turn into the loopy 1975 version of Little Edie, played by Christine Ebersole. And I wasn’t totally convinced by Matt Cavenaugh as Joe Kennedy, Jr. in the first half and as Jerry, the teenage “Marble Faun,” in the second half. But Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson were fantastic, and they totally make the show.

It’s only running for another month, so if you want to see it, get tickets now.