Oddly Fond Memories...Halloween Edition

Disclaimer: I didn't see the piece I'm about to describe at Halloween. Disclaimer #2: my Edgar-Allan-Poe-loving uncle should go see a show like the ones I'm going to share with you.

I was just browsing through my feeds when I came across a post on Design Mom that got me all kinds of nostalgic. This quick review of the show Sleep No More sounded brilliant to me from the word go. Come to find out, I followed the link and the original show was created by the company I watched ages ago during my student days in London: Punchdrunk. These people are genius.

Back in 2008 when I was on my semester abroad, one of our classes was about theatre. We got to see Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wannamaker as the leads in Much Ado About Nothing at the National Theatre, we saw Anton Lesser in The Vertical Hour, and amongst all the others, my personal favourite was The Masque of the Red Death by Punchdrunk at the Battersea Arts Centre.

The whole building was taken over for the show. When you came in, you were fitted for a cloak and a mask, after which you were allowed to spend the better part of three hours roaming freely around the building. A series of vignettes from Edgar Allan Poe stories were played out and the entirety of the inside of the building was unrecognizable. One minute, you were walking down the staircase of an eerily lit ballroom; the next you were hiding in a cave in the woods, rifling through the possessions of some deranged hedge witch. If you took yourself back across the ballroom (past the violent and impending scene of rape) you could make your way down to a cellar in which either Fortunado or Madeline Usher would have felt right at home.

via, the NY Times

Basically, remembering this whole experience, I can't believe I'm not in a position to just head to New York for a long weekend with the Husband to go enjoy seeing Sleep No More. It would make my day to do something like that again: the whole thing was such a bizarrely romantic experience...though I mean that in the most creepy and Gothic sense of the word.

by Sara Krulwich, via Print

by Sara Krulwich, via Print

by Sara Krulwich, via Print

Anyone else ever done something like this? Anyone want to? Anyone willing to sneak me out to NYC for 36 hours so I can go see Punchdrunk again? Please?

Mommy Monday: Back to Baby Group

Today was Ethan's first official day of baby group! We already knew most of the kids and their mums from before, but this time we're in the group officially...not as hangers-on attempting to gate crash the wait list. E, naturally, made a great impression on all the mums by simply flashing a cheeky grin to display his big blue eyes nicely. It also helped that he was one of three little boys who decided that pirate-themed shirts were the way to dress today. I decided that the first day of the new semester of play group required some nice duds for me as well.

The t-shirt, I must confess, belongs to my sister. That said, I think I'll be finding my own version of the stripey tee very soon. I need more horizontal stripes in my wardrobe. The jeans are the same as last time (my other pair have worn some very inappropriate holes in them...) and the shoes are actually the pair I bought to wear with my wedding dress. It's always nice to find another excuse to wear white shoes once you have them. The bracelets I am only assuming are from Accessorize: they were a gift from the Husband before he was The Husband. They came as part of a larger package for my 22nd birthday back when we were still temporarily on two different continents.

And, remembering my insistence on the details, I decided to get with it and paint my nails again today using this inspiration from my Pinterest pages:

via, exPress-o

...close enough.

Obviously, my French manicuring skills could use some work. That said, I really like this sort of look. I'll have to keep brushing up on my terrible make-up and manicure skills so that I can do stuff like this more often.

Now if only I could build my wardrobe appropriately to rock a few things like these...

via, HATCH

via, StyleCaster

via, Encore! Life

Woo and Wow

First, the woo:

Let's go the generic route and explain what I mean by "woo" with an appeal to a dictionary. A quick peak at The Skeptic's Dictionary says...

Woo-woo (or just plain woo) refers to ideas considered irrational or based on extremely flimsy evidence or that appeal to mysterious occult forces or powers.

Here's a dictionary definition of woo-woo:

adj. concerned with emotions, mysticism, or spiritualism; other than rational or scientific; mysterious; new agey. Also n., a person who has mystical or new age beliefs.

So, sitting at my dad's house with E today, I decided to watch a bit of TV while the boys were out at the shooting range. Martha Stewart was the least offensive thing on...I mean, compared to an insanely pretentious house show on HGTV (whose master suite needs a second master suite contained within it? It's like pretentious matryoshka dolls.) and the ever-irritating Bobby Flay trying to prove that he can do anything better than anyone, Martha making curry was a great alternative. And then the woo came.

My alarm bells started going off when Martha stared the camera in the eye and gave us an appeal to antiquity: "What would you say if I told you that most of your aches and pains could be cured with a centuries-old method of healing you've probably never even heard of?" I'd say, just because it's old doesn't mean it's safe, or effective. She then unveiled a glass-sided hive full of bees. Oh yeah: medicinal bee stings. All backed by some anecdotal evidence from a random, long-dead farmer who essentially said, "So there was this one time I was stung by a bee, and it made my knee stop hurting, because it had been hurting real bad before, but ever since I got stung by that bee, I've totally felt better." And this was demonstrated by an acupuncturist who makes her own homoeopathic dilutions of bee venom.

Martha, you make me sad.

Now for the wow:
My son is hilarious. Granted, the video I have is highly biased since he's surrounded by his family, but I think my point stands. E finally met his Auntie Victoria the other weekend as she graduated from Wake Forest, and I think she's easily replaced pretty much everyone as his new favourite person. I only hold my place in the hierarchy because I have the food. Anyway, V could keep Ethan in hysterics for ages...which in turn sent the rest of us into a giggling fit of epic proportions. Just take a look:

The Best Cure is More of What Made You Sick

The shadows have grown long and the sunlight now streaming through the leaves and into the bedroom window has softened with the waning day. Bags and boxes and clothes are strewn across the floor with a sense of neglect and abandon. The bed is unmade; covered in papers and assorted odds and ends of clothing that managed to migrate from the floor or on top of the suitcases. I am sitting on a cheap IKEA stool cushioned by a cheap IKEA pillow, with another - even cheaper - IKEA stool holding my papers and box full of pens, hi-lighters, and Post-Its. Such is my life.

I can now say that I actually feel as if I'm back in school. The past 5 hours have actually been spent attempting, and sometimes even completing research. I've read articles on JSTOR, Project MUSE, the websites for the Tate Britain, V&A, and NPG, and even - true to my undergraduate form - Wikipedia. There's something satisfying in realising after 2 highly intimidating seminar sessions that perhaps I'm not as hopeless as I thought.

After hours of reading on everything from Godfrey Kneller to mezzotints to Banyans and writing copious notes on such, you'd think I'd unwind by watching mindless TV, right? Not so. Only I could somehow find solace from hours of reading and writing by doing even more reading and writing! What sort of reading and writing? Oh, of course only the mindless sort.

Reading: the latest Dan Brown novel which is making the rounds through all of my flatmates like a communicable disease during fraternity pledging.

Writing: my blog. A beautiful exercise in being simultaneously informative and self-centred.

Perhaps, though, as a special treat I'll browbeat teh interwebs into cooperating long enough to let me enjoy the latest episode of Private Practise before my back permanently sinks into a hunched-over position signalling my regression from life as a fresh-air-breathing, Regent's-Park-running Human Being to life as a bleary-eyed, indoor-dwelling, internet-database-researching hermit, otherwise known as a Graduate Student. Or perhaps, after months of prolonged exposure and close contact, I'll become fused to my laptop in a creepy sort of symbiosis only previously seen in Disney's latest epic fail, Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End. Or maybe it's more like the Borg in Star Trek...I'm not sure.

yeargh...no onomotopoeia is sufficient to convey

such thorough disgust.

At least I have 2 pages of nicely colour-coded notes to show for my efforts. And no carbuncles yet...