Demophobia

Am I afraid of crowds?  I don't mind being in a crowd watching a parade, but last year when I visited London there was one point when I left the theatre after seeing The Jersey Boys and there was a crowd of hundreds so huge that they filled the whole street. (I don't recall what event they were there for.) And that really did frighten me.

I thought of this because I went to karaoke last night at the Office and there was quite a crowd getting together for some party.  And they rather unnerved me:  they crowded the bar so that I was a long time ordering a Coca-Cola there.

I was there with Lillian's Karaoke Meetup group, singing "Always Something There to Remind Me" and "If You Could Read My Mind." She gave me a candle holder decorated with Christmas reindeer.

This afternoon Nancy filled in for Ivan at the Acting Meetup.  She had one exercise where two people were given an Alice Munro book, someone gave a page number and they had to start a conversation from a line of dialogue on that page.  When I did it I suggested using my copy of Ivanhoe, and the result was a scene where I was a guy who thought he was a mediaeval knight.  My last line was "Do you know where there are some windmills?" Later we did these scenes in pair with the dialogue "You came," "I had to," and "You shouldn't have," only as part of different genres.  My pair got to do it as horror, which was pretty fun.