Weekend Entertainments

Friday night was History Boys with desireearmfeldt and fredrickegerman, which I enjoyed more than I've purely enjoyed a play for a long while. Lovely set, great actors, witty funny dialogue with actual emotional involvement.

Saturday, twe and I went to the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool festival (where Wool includes things like angora and alpaca, and thus Sheep includes things like bunnies and cute fuzzy llamas in tutus. Well, just one was in a tutu.) It was an Adventure, in that it was something I'd never done before, and it was Fun, and there was Shopping (I bought a bunch of yarn, some with projects in mind, some not, and also tools for needle felting, which I've been thinking about trying).

Then we acquired charming gentlemen, and had dinner and saw Iron Man, which I adored. Iron Man has never been one of my favorite heroes (and the Stupidity Registration Act thing basically turned him into a bad guy), but the engineer-hero shtick just warmed my heart. My little PHP scripts and turkey-brining hangars and knitted socks all secretly want to be helpful robot fire extinguishers and suits of flying armor. I wish the bad guy hadn't descended into cliche so quickly, because everyone else's dialogue was really quite nice. And Rhodes had a brass rat, yay. :)

Sunday was the Boston Theater Marathon, or "a play every ten minutes, for ten hours." Ten minute plays tend to fall into things I consider errors ("Something should happen", "Don't give all the lines in the play to someone under ten", and "Relevance is not Plot (nor is Irrelevance)". That last might be a special case of the first.) much more often than longer plays, but there were still quite a few fun ones.

(I've been paying more attention to whether things I see pass the Bechdel Test, and both History Boys and Iron Man fail, but I did still enjoy them. Watching the ten-minute plays, I originally was suspicious that the plays with all women in them were more likely to be "women issues" and the plays with all men were more likely to include non-specific things, but looking back at the schedule, I think I'm wrong there. I suspected the "support your best friend dying of cancer" of being a women's-issue thing, but "support your dad dying of cancer" was all men. "The house we're trying to sell has a monster in it" was all men and didn't have to be, but "We're playing cards in the post-apocalyptic future" was all women and didn't have to be. Anyway, I've kind of digressed.)

All in all, a lovely weekend. (And, apparently, I got to confuse both tirinian and mjperson by being in New Hampshire when Mike called ("She's in New Hampshire? Is that normal?") which is always good.)

Needle Felting

Having mentioned that I got toys to needle felt with, I felt compelled to try. Thus, a Sidekick Hexapod, done in needle felting. (The next Octopus will probably get a felted face, to see how that goes...)