Seven for Drinks Only

Last night seven of us went out to toast JB's 58th birthday.
First we went to First Printer.  Since we didn't want dinner, they said we could only sit at the bar.  We wanted a table, so we could all face each other.
Next we went to the Russell House Tavern.  Since we didn't want dinner, they said we could only sit at the bar.  We wanted a table, so we could all face each other.
Diane suggested that this was a "dry crawl" rather than a "pub crawl."
We didn't have all night: JB had said he needed to go home at 6 and clean the house and get groceries.
Steve suggested OM, which most of us had never been to.  At last we had a place to sit down.  We got an alcove of comfy benches and coffee tables hidden behind a bead curtain, just like in the movies!  We had 2 bottles of wine, and JB had a martini.  The vegetable dumplings we got were not enough to prevent inebriation.  We convinced JB that he didn't have to go home at 6.

Afterwards Julie and I went to Sue's house to wait for Dave and drink water.  Then when Dave came, he asked us how we spelled "dilemma."  I've always spelled it DILEMMA, but everybody else remembers spelling it DILEMNA.  Interesting.

Dress-Up Op

The Sunday before last  Sue, Julie, Dave, and I went to the Loeb Drama Center to see Clifford Odet's Paradise Lost, a play set during the Depression.  Wouldn't this play ring relevently true in today's economic environment?  In case our audience is too dense to figure it out, let's have the characters in modern dress (but with the 1935 dialogue) and have a couple of characters in the 3rd act wear Enron and AIG tee-shirts.  But, alas, even with good acting this stinker wasn't good enough to survive revival.

All of us, including J.B., who went on Saturday, thought the acting was good and the play weak.  (The Crimson reviewer thought different.)  But we still enjoyed going.  Something about live performance thrilled us more than movies.

This thrill is partly due to Dionysus, the divine patron of theater.  By going to a play we participate in a Dionysian rite.  Any accompanying numinosity should not surprise us.

Theater-going is also a dress-up op: a chance to wear those items too flashy or weird for work.  Of course, people don't dress the way they used to, when the whole theater stayed lit, and you could examine the audience's raiment (such as the lovely presentation gown by Worth, at the right) at any time during the evening.  In 1881 the Savoy Theatre introduced the practice of darkening the auditorium during the performance.*

Even though we aren't visible as much to our fellow theater-goers, we can dress up to satisfy ourselves and Dionysus.  We satisfy ourselves by playing a more festive alter ego, and this makes Dionysus happy.

* Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home:  A Portrait of Life in Victorian England, London: HarperCollins, 2003, page 204