Don't go in the woods!

Today was the latest Reading Out Loud Meetup, and the topic was scary writing:  the event title was "Don't go in the woods!"  We ended up going on for a full two hours!

I read the chapter in Huckleberry Finn where they find a corpse in a floating house and the one in Tom Sawyer where they're digging for buried treasure; Hemingway's "On the Quai in Smyrna" (about Greek refugees leaving Turkey); Robert Louis Stevenson explaining how Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out of his dreams; Christina Rosetti's poem "Goblin Market"; and T. Coreghessan Boyle's "Greasy Lake." (About which, remind me not to move to the U.S.!) The others were reading Poe poems, part of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and some Kafka.

We used Chromecast to watch a Youtube video of Pacific Overtures on our downstairs TV.  That's a 1976 kabuki-style Stephen Sondheim musical about Japan being opened to the west in 1853, and this video is of the original production!  We saw the first part, but couldn't make the Chromecast thing work later on.

Thursday at the opera rehearsal we were getting measured for costumes amid much confusion.  This year they're giving The Marriage of Figaro a Pop Art look, with everyone wearing wigs that are black on one side and white on the other, and it looks like I'll be the Andy Warhol type! We've been learning our few numbers from that show, along with the opening number from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, for the fundraising show the week after next.

We got the DVD miniseries The Night of... from the library, but couldn't get past the first episode!  It's about an Arab student in New York City who meets a fast girl and ends up getting charged with murder. Reminded me of the New York movie A Most Violent Year, which I couldn't sit through either: we get to watch things get worse and worse... (Remind me too not to move to New York.)

I've finally quit those Vikings and Throne games, and started another town-building game called Golden Valley.  And I finally gave up on getting past Level 1880 in Candy Crush Saga and went back to playing the early levels. (I see myself as the Son Goku of Candy Crush Saga--that's the young martial-arts prodigy in Dragon Ball.)