Last night Caitlin and I went to see a local production of Sleeping Beauty, which was done in the style of an English “panto”, a broad, almost vaudevillian comic approach to the play. Lots of singing and dancing and outlandish costumes (the “night witch” was played by a young woman who stands about 6’ tall without the 5” stiletto-heeled black leather boots she wore, to accompany her very brief dress criss-crossed by straps and belts of all sorts, all set off by the bullwhip she wielded with great accuracy – I wonder what all the kids (or fathers) in the audience thought of her). Caitlin just rolled her eyes at the corniness of much of it, but I enjoyed the closeness of watching it from the 2nd row, having previously seen it last month from about 12 rows back.

Books: The Man Who Tried To Get Away by Stephen Donaldson. (I’m letting the Posturing of Fools rest for a few days to see if I feel any pull to keep reading it. The evil, status-obsessed boss did, however, just get into a nasty situation and there was some mildly interesting erotic activity, so perhaps it will draw me back in again after all.) I picked up this book at the library because I thought the author’s name looked familiar, although I did not recall that he was the writer of a fantasy series in which the hero was a leper. I remember trying to read the first book in the series and getting bogged down in all the fantasy trivia, which seems common to books of that genre. This story is a mystery with a cranky protagonist, an isolated hunting lodge, a monstrous winter storm and lots of mayhem so far.