One Venus; Two Moons

Last Saturday I saw 20 Million Miles to Earth, one of those classics I hadn't seen, in a colorized version.  (There are many sci-fi and camp classics I haven't seen and some I'll never see.  I'm not a camp-expert manqué who needs to speak authoritatively on every flick in the genre.)  William Hopper, aka Paul Drake, crashes his rocket in the sea near a Sicilian village.

He and his plucky crew had been exploring Venus, but he and a Venusian creature are the sole survivors of the crash.  The creature is still in its egg, but it quickly hatches and grows to enormous size.  The action shifts to Rome.  The big green Venutian and the Italian army battle in the streets and do significant damage to the Forum and the Colosseum. Naturally, they had to kill the creature at the Colosseum.
I liked the colorization.  The olive green army cars were especially attractive.  William Hopper's hair was the color of ripe wheat.

Next I had dinner with Mary at the Café Luna, an appropriate choice since we were going to see Moon for the Misbegotten afterwards.  So we did see Moon for the Misbegotten afterwards, as per our plan, at the Central Square Theater.  We both enjoyed the performance and thought the acting was great.

Then it was about 11pm, and I was surprised to see the number of people standing in line for various restaurants.  But I am usually not on the street that late.  We saw some excellent costumes including a guy wearing a horse's head.  He was smoking, and the cigarette would light up the head.

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