Sweeney Todd

REDOUBLE MY EFFORTS, I hollered.

RECOVER WHAT I'VE LOST, my mother hollered back.

I think my motto is a bit more attainable, seeing as my mother decided on hers after having an appendectomy.

We were doing a lot of hollering because we were late to the opera. I tore through her closet and grabbed a dress from a few years ago, because opera gowns aren't in the home renovation budget. We flailed around with tiny binoculars and posed for hasty pictures and then shoved each other into the car without eating dinner, at which point my mother checked the tickets and realized the opera started an hour later than we thought. I yanked the car over into the Burger King parking lot and we ate chicken sandwiches in velvet shawls with our pinkies up.

 

fancy-hands pose

The usual crowd of men in nice jackets and ladies in poofy skirts was peppered with youths in steampunk formalwear and rockabilly victory rolls. My favorite ensemble was the woman in the naval-plunge dress who painted her eyebrows in like Frida Kahlo to confuse people as to where to look. There was also a man in an iridescent green and gold velvet jacket, and another man in a formal suit with his hair up in a bun, wearing a dozen giant silver necklaces. Truly fantastic. But we didn't see any crocs this year.

My mother made me pick a drink while we waited for curtain call, so while everyone was swanning around with wine glasses, I spent 15 minutes trying to hide a Bud Light with a paper napkin.

 

I added graphics through an app, and now our faces are glamorously blurry. 

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Sweeney Todd is a lot of fun, not least of all because the chorus goes, "There's a hole in London and it's filled with SHIT," and old ladies huffed out mid-performance clutching fistfuls of pearls when Mrs. Lovett sang about pussy pies. The set designer had to make a barber chair that swung around, collapsed into a slide, and dumped the actors down a hole in the floor. The extras could barely contain whoops as their corpses flew out of view. It was beautiful.

And that is the first recreational outing I've had since last year. Cussing, blood, cannibalism, and giant dancing rats.

SPEAKING OF WHICH.

While typing this on my lunch break, there was a rattling next to my elbow, and the wizard mouse busted out of the trap. Right in front of me. In broad daylight. I scrabbled to catch it, but it escaped down a crack. Irritated, I finished my banana, then went to my cupboard to find a tea bag, and the wizard mouse flew out of my bag, past my face, and around the desk.

This mouse.