An afternoon with Bob

Jim and Bob, back in the day.My good buddy from high school days came to Riverside yesterday. He has a friend who is appearing in the musical A Little Night Music that's running at Community Players right now. Bob emailed me last week and asked if I'd like to see it with him. Sounded like a great way to spend an afternoon.

The play was so-so. The songs were clever and fun but the show just doesn't hang together very well. There were some pretty funny moments which probably weren't meant to be funny. In one scene the young man in the play was trying to hang himself. The "hanging tree" was a branch that they lowered from the ceiling. It looked more like a perch for a very large parrot. For the big show-down scene between the two older male characters this guy brought out a tiny statue on a pedestal that was supposed to evoke a garden space, but really just looked like a tiny statue standing in the middle of the floor. The women in the show did a lot of walking around, holding up their long dresses. That looked pretty weird to me. Back in the day when long dresses were in style if women had had to hold them up that much they would have been saying, "Hey, we need to hem these dresses up a couple of inches."

The other kind of quietly hilarious moment came when the old-lady-in-a-wheelchair character came out. Damn, she looked awfully familiar. I looked her up in the program and her name was Janet Hodge. I didn't know a Janet Hodge but I knew a Janet-formerly-Schrader-formerly-Lang. Yep. It was Janet, Dad's second wife. From her bio in the program it looks like the old bitch has been busy. I tried talking to her after the show but she was swamped by her adoring fans.

It's interesting to me that almost no one in the cast was from Riverside. This ain't no small town. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people who live here who could have done a much better job in some of those roles. So, what's up with that?

After the show Bob had a hankerin' for Mexican food so we went to Olivia's for dinner. The food was good and the conversation was great. We had a lot of catching up to do. After that we came back to my house and split a bottle of wine. It was so nice spending some time with Bob. We talked about our kids, our health (y'know, middle-aged stuff), what it's like to be single at this time in our lives (he's recently divorced), and (ugh!) dating. He's tried it and is pretty fed up with the whole process. I'm pretty sure it's not for me. Like WAY not. Right now I'm more interested in meeting new people and making friends.

It was a comfortable, warm visit. Bob says there's lots of fun stuff to do in Long Beach so I'm going to go visit him one of these weekends. He's doing Inherit the Wind at the end of August. I'll go see him in that.

Thanks, Bob! I had fun.