— पांच हजार नौ सौ पंद्रह —
My day opened up yesterday when my plans changed: I
was going to see
Sentimental Value, a Norwegian film I am dying to see and which is playing at SIFF Cinema Uptown, but then I got a text from Tracy on Friday evening asking if I had availability to hang out before we get together for Holiday Magic at the Fair on Saturday, December 20. I was out all evening on Friday for the opening night Shobhit's
It's About DAMN Time show (I'll get to that in a bit), so I wasn't able to get back to her until Saturday morning. And then, because she is still resistant to come back into Seattle to hang out for things, we had a lot of back and forth, mostly regarding dates and movie ideas. Her first idea was a documentary at the Grand Cinema in Tacoma, but I didn't want to go all the way to Tacoma on a weeknight—although I later realized we were talking about Monday next week, when I'll be on my Thanksgiving PTO anyway. But whatever, if I have to go south to meet up with her then it's still easier to do it on a weekend, and Sunday November 23 was the easiest day for me to do this.
Anyway, I noted that I could use my AMC membership at the AMC Southcenter in Tukwila, and she was willing to compromise and meet there—technically this location is closer to me (13 miles) than it is to her (over 20 miles) but it keeps her out of Seattle proper, which no matter the context would slow down the trip from anywhere. And then, after I had thought about suggesting it but thought maybe it wouldn't be her bag, Tracy herself suggested we see
Sentimental Value at the AMC Southcenter. I was like:
Oooh! Yes! This appears to be one of those case where SIFF Cinema gets a movie a week earlier than other theaters, as
Sentimental Value doesn't open there until Friday—otherwise I would have suggested we meet yesterday instead. But, I was fine with waiting a week, especially as it'll save me the $14 I'd have had to pay for the ticket at SIFF.
All of this is to say: there are no other movies playing that I have either not seen already or that I have any interest in all this week—all I got this week was
The Running Man, which Laney and I saw last Thursday, and it sucked. So I had a day with no social commitments yesterday, while Shobhit was gone for much of the afternoon, for his Sunday matinee performance.
I spent basically the entire time finishing up what I had originally intended to be Shobhit's birthday present: my tribue video
Shanti and Guru: 2008-2024. I actually had all the video clips and still shots I wanted to use in an iMovie project months ago, but fell off working on it, especially as I kicked into high gear on this year's calendars—which I finished on Saturday. This project basically fell off my radar, and for a bit I thought about saving it to give Shobhit as a Christmas present, except that it's a bit wistful an experience for Christmas, I think. Not that Shobhit will care, but he's already got the regular Christmas gift coming, and I did not give him any other gift on his actual birthday, October 30.
In any case, I had all this time yesterday without Shobhit at home, so it seemed like a good opportunity. Shobhit asked me a couple of times what my plan for the day was, even asking if I was going to catch up on TV. I did not fully decide to use the time to finish up this video until after we took a walk together, walking first to the Capitol Hill Farmers Market, then to the Broadway Market QFC, and then we parted ways when he continued walking to Seattle Center for his show, and I walked back home. Actually I did vacuum the condo first. It had been weeks and the construction guys had been through working on the windows and balcony door replacements since I last vacuumed (and they still have more work to do this week) so the carpet was filthy.
As I noted, the iMovie project already had all the clips I wanted in it. Ideally I would have cut it down to 10 minutes so I could upload it as a single video to Flickr (where they have a 10-minute limit per video upload), and I probably could have done that had I spent a fair amount more time working on it. But, much like the 84-minute video I made as a tribute to Mom after she did in 2020, I knew the target audience for this video (specifically, Shobhit) would not care about a bit of extra footage, because he loved both Guru and Shanti so much. Besides, the unedited project had a length of about 27 minutes so I cut a good 14 minutes out of that: the final length came to about 13 and a half minutes.
I simply uploaded the full video, just as I had the tribute videos for Mom and for Auntie Rose and for Grandma Rhoda,
to my OneDrive account. If you have any interest in seeing it unbroken you can click the link and watch it there; as long as not too many people use the link at once then it should play fine. Otherwise, though, I did also split the video into two parts, a Part One (8 minutes) and a Part Two (5 and a half minutes), so I could upload them to Flickr—and, as you can hopefully plainly see, embed them here. Part One is at the top of this post, and Part Two is at the bottom.
My
Shobhit's Birthday 2025 photo album was already unusually small this year, with just 6 shots in it. Now it's got 8, counting the two files for this video. I also added the two video files to both the
Shanti Passes 2024 album (now 25 shots) and the
Guru Passed 2024 album (now 29 shots).
Shobhit had already met his steps goals for the day when he finished his show, so he asked me to come meet him halfway as he walked home. I did the same on Saturday night. I picked him up at 6th & Pine, then turned around and drove us back home via Olive Way to 15th Ave and back to Pine. In the car, the subject of how I spent my day came up organically, so I said, "I finished what I had originally intended to be your birthday present." It was now more than two weeks since his actual birthday, so I told him right after that, that it had been a tribute video to Shanti and Guru.
Shobhit's reaction was a pretty characteristic "Hmm." When we got home, we made veggie burgers for dinner, and we watched the first episode of season 2 of
The Sandman on Netflix—Shobhit did not remember watching the first season with me, which actually came out over three years ago. He fell asleep for about half of it.
But, after it was over, I asked if he wanted to see the video. I did a screen share to the TV screen via my iMac and through the Apple TV box. I should have done this directly from the original file, and I don't know why I didn't think of that; instead I did it from the upload to OneDrive, which I think may have been why it was slightly glitchy. It played okay for the most part, though.
It's kind of hard to characterize Shobhit's response to it. I think he did appreciate it, and at least once he let out an "Awww." I could tell the video made him miss the cats, which in a way made him sad. So, when it ended, he said nothing at all. That's okay, though. Even though it was an interesting experience to have been the only one out of the two of us to cry at all when both Shanti and Guru died in May and July of last year, respectively (Guru on the fourth anniversary of Mom dying, incidentally) as compared to how Shobhit broke down sobbing when we put Peng down in 2008, Shobhit's been grieving Shanti and Guru a great deal more than I have on a more ongoing basis as the months, and now more than a year, have gone by. He still misses them so much he doesn't even like the idea of considering a new cat, something I have long been openly wanting.
But, if he ever wants to experience how Guru and Shanti live on in the expansive record I have of their lives, he can do it in a 13-minute summar form by revisiting that video, which I find to be kind of eternally endearing, myself. I freely admit to making it as much for myself as for him.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ पंद्रह —
— पांच हजार नौ सौ पंद्रह —
As for the rest of the weekend, I will back up now to Friday, when Alexia drove into town to join me for the opening night perfornance of
It's About DAMN Time, this year's collection of short plays by Dramatists and Actors Meeting Now. This is a fringe theater organization—emphasis on
fringe—that has been putting on performances of short plays since its inception in 1996, and Shobhit both directed and acted in one of them, about a bunch of older people in a memory loss facility.
I struggle with how to write about the show here, because this is a public space. Many, many years ago, I posted detailed critiques of every performance of a similar show when Shobhit was taking acting classes at Northwest Actors Studio, and I held nothing back, even naming names, like a complete idiot. People in the show found my post and read it, and were very hurt by it. My position at the time was that if they really wanted any kind of acting career, they were going to need to be able to take public criticism. I suppose, in retrospect, I could have been more conscientious of the fact that these were students taking classes and they were not yet fully putting themselves out there. On the other hand, wasn't that supposed to be the goal?
Either way, I should probably at least try to choose my words more carefully here. I'll put it this way: Shobhit's play was the most prepared and played the best, and even his cast apparently forgot a line or two, resulting in the others missing cues for moving forward. To all of their credit, no one in the audience clocked that any mistake was made. I only knew that I had helped Shobhit choose mp3s for sound effects and one of them never got played. I later learned that this was why.
As for the rest of the performances, I'll just say they . . . varied in quality. Some of the performances were decent; a lot of them, not so much. One woman delivered all of her lines—and she had many, more than anyone else in that piece—truly like a robot. And overall, I did not find the writing to be all that great. I left kind of feeling like I could have written a better short play than all of these plays combined. I know that's a bold statement, and I've never written a play for production before, so I'm sure it's a challenge. I also know I am a talented writer, though. I probably wouldn't get involved with DAMN, especially if any of them get wind of this post, in which I am honestly being a lot more diplomatic than I could be. (I'll spare you what Alexia said about the show, except that she did also say the piece Shobhit was in was the best.)
This show is happening three nights each weekend for two weekends, which means three shows have happened so far: Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday matinee. I like to come on opening night to offer support, but it did occur to me that a lot of this might be more polished by the time Closing Night occurs. Granted, they
should have it polished in time for Opening Night—and apparently the casts of two of the pieces did not even bother to show up for Dress Rehearsal early last week! This mystified me. Why bother getting involved if you can't actually make the commitments?
When Shobhit got home from the show on Saturday night, I asked him how it went, and he said it was worse than Friday. Uh oh. This included his own piece, in which apparently a couple of the actors who are having trouble remembering lines had written lines on their hands. Shobhit contends that relying on that kind of crutch only makes things worse, and I'm willing to bet he's right. On the upside, when he got home from yesterday's matinee performance, he said it was the best show of the weekend.
I asked him how many actually-paid tickets were at the matinee show yesterday though, and he said: two. Christ. That's a bummer. When we were at the show on Friday, it was hardly sold out, and I assumed a good number of the people in the audience was just cast and crew from other shows not currently being presented. Shobhit confirmed this, but when I asked how many paid tickets had come on Friday, he said there were about 12. That was more than I might have guessed, honestly.
There was a bit of unprofessional bitchiness in the transition between Shobhit's piece and the one that followed it on Friday, though, with a guy in the next one snapping at Shobhit to keep the table prop out and not taken backstage. Shobhit did not know this because none of this got covered when the cast of that piece did not show up for Dress Rehearsal. What a mess. And I haven't even mentioned the guy snapping, "Strike the chairs!" twice, loud enough for the entire audience to hear, right after the snapping about the table. What a mess! Shobhit actually talked to that guy, both because he was bothered himself and because the other actor from Shobhit's piece who had been trying to help with the table was really angry about it. I guess they got a genuine apology, so that's good. But, Shobhit was also correct in noting that any paying audience members on Friday were not likely to recommend to the show to others after seeing this.
I was sure happy to hear the show went better yesterday, but bummed that it had to happen when they had the least number of paid tickets. We can only hope that all the shows go better next weekend.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ पंद्रह —
As for Saturday, I spent the afternoon with Laney, who came to the Braeburn to watch the original
Avatar in the theater. I kind of forgot how incredibly thrilling and entertaining that movie is, which makes it easy to enjoy in spite of its White Savior tropes and wild cultural appropriation. We both had a really good time. She'll come back to watch
Avatar: The Way of Water, which she has never seen, in a few weeks, and then we'll be all boned up to see
Avatar: Fire and Ash when it releases later in December.
As I already noted, I otherwise spent Saturday finishing up this year's calendars. It's always a relief when I get those done. I've even placed the orders for all but four of them: one to ship to Uncle David and Mary Ann in Australia; 12 to ship directly to me so I can wrap them and present them in person on or near Christmas. The four that will ship directly to Spokane or Idaho (Christopher; Nikki and TJ; Tristen) or in one case Olympia (Becca—theoretically I could hand deliver that one but I have no idea if she'll come to Dad and Sherri's, or more likely Gina and Beth's, on Christmas and I'd rather know it safely gets sent directly to her), I'm waiting to place the order until December 10. I don't want them to get the packages an entire month early like they did last year.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ पंद्रह —
One last thing about the weekend: Shobhit will be visiting his mom in India over New Year's and into January, and he booked his flights yesterday. This is basically the same scenario as last year: Shobhit's brother, Puneet, is visiting the States to see his daughters on their holiday breaks. Puneet is the only one of Shobhit's siblings who still lives in Delhi, which means this leaves their mom alone for some time. Shobhit's going there so that their mom can be looked after for a bit, although it still means she'll be fully alone with none of her kids nearby for about a week. Last year Shobhit flew out on Christmas Day itself, so he did not come to Olympia for Christmas Eve (when he had his last day working at Total Wine & More) or Christmas Day; this year his flight goes out the evening of December 26, so he should be able to come to Olympia for the holiday this time. He then doesn't come back until January 16, so he'll be out of town a solid three weeks.
We also booked a few other things, just things to do around the holidays—or, well, we have tickets to a couple and still need to book a third soon. We got offered free tickets to
Elf: the Musical at the 5th Avenue Theater on Sunday November 30. That's the same day Gina and Beth are coming up for a Seattle Christmastime Tour, so it will be a busy day. Shobhit also bought us tickets to something called "
Revelry! A Night Of Drag And Other Shenanigans," which will be a fundraiser for local queer youth organization Lambert House, on Thursday December 11. Both of these shows would be two new holiday events for my "Holiday Events Calendar" that I did not even know a week ago I would be doing.
The final thing is "Christmas at Butchart Gardens," tickets for which are available now, and I'm really glad I thought to look it up last night when Shobhit and I were talking about this stuff. I just need to hear back from the hotel, where I sent an email asking about dropping off our luggage before we check in if we can't check in until 4:00, before we finally decide what timed entry ticket we should book at Butchart Gardens.
I think that covers all the events of my weekend well enough. I should maybe get some actual work done now.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ पंद्रह —
[posted 12:37pm]
