After
posting yesterday about most of what I did over the weekend—accompanying Shobhit to his doctor appointment late Saturday morning; The Great Figgy Pudding Caroling Competition Saturday afternoon with Shobhit; riding the Federal Way Link Extension with Laney on Grand Opening Day Saturday late afternoon and early evening; watching
Avatar: The Way of Water with Laney at the Braeburn Condos theater on Sundayy afternoon—I totally spaced mentioning what I did on
Friday night:
A Klingon Christmas Carol at TPS Center Theatre with Shobhit!
This morning and early afternoon, I caught up on my draft of "Part One" of my "Christmastime in the Northwest" travelogue email. So, I will paste here what I already wrote about this in that email draft, to save myself some time and energy:
Oh, look—another show I got free tickets to!
A Klingon Christmas Carol, at TPS Center Theatre. Okay, those of you who are Trekkies, just bear with me for a moment, I'm going to speak to just the other people for a bit. In Star Trek lore, the Klingons are one of the major adversaries to the Enterprise (that's a spaceship—keep up!) crew, and, I suppose, all of humanity. At least, this was the case early in franchise history; later they became "complex allies" (thanks to Google AI Overview for that phrase—there went a ton of wasted water!), hence the existence of one on the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not that those details really matter in this show—only that they are a race preoccupied with honor and warrior culture, onto which Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol is grafted.
I never watched much of the many different Star Trek TV series, but, as a massive movie buff, it is likely unsurprising that I have indeed seen every one of the motion pictures multiple times. And actually there is a line from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country that I find directly relevant: "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon!" It seems Klingons have a bit of history laying claim as the original source of classic literature from Earth, and indeed A Klingon Christmas Carol, or Klingon Long Night's Song as it is presented in the script, is claimed to be the "predecessor" to the Dickens classic, presented "in the original Klingon."
I knew going in that A Klingon Christmas Carol is performed in Klingon with English subtitles projected above the stage. But, I did not realize it is not entirely in Klingon: all the Klingon characters only speak Klingon, but we do also get a Vulcan narrator, ostensibly giving a lecture at the Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology, who narrates in English. Anyway, the show was fun, but you probably do need at least a cursory knowledge of Star Trek lore to get it. The show we went to had an audience maybe 30% full, but it was pretty enthusiastic and enough for the players to feel appreciated, I think (or I hope, at least). Speaking all that Klingon has to be quite the challenge.
Shobhit informed me that night that he actually auditioned for this show.
Shobhit and I walked downtown and then to Seattle Center on Friday evening to get to that show; we arrived several minutes early so he could do a few short minutes of work in the TPS office on the 4th floor. That "office" fascinates me, as it has a desk and modern computer monitors right by the office door, but the space is otherwise a long, narrow, windowless storage space filled with clearly years of theater supplies of every imaginable sort (or: clutter, depending on your definition). I found a bin of rubber duckies, countless boxes of disinfecting supplies, a Bumbershoot poster from many years ago, some music stands, and some past-year Gregory Awards, to name just a few things off the top of my head.
We then went down to the ground floor Center Theater to check in for the show. We did have assigned seats, which were in row F I think, in the center section, with a great view of the stage. But, in the middle of the first act, Shobhit had a bit of a coughing fit due to his lingering cold (which I also have, just not nearly as bad), and we had people sitting directly on either side of us. When intermission started, Shobhit apologized to the woman on the other side of him for his coughing, and she was almost shockingly chill about it; I rather worried about how uncomfortable he might be making people, myself. So, still, we moved to the side section where almost no one was sitting or the second act. Ironically, he never coughed once in the second act.
I managed to get an 11-shot photo album out of that event, which was a lot given how few photogenic things there were around, and of course I could not take photos during the performance. We did ride the Monorail downtown after the show, and we snagged the very front seat, allowing me to take video of the full, one-mile route—over which I added a Christmas carol sung in Klingon that I found after some extensive searching on YouTube. That and a still photo I took of our reflection in the Monorail front window alone added two shots to the album.
And that now covers Friday, and the rest of the weekend, and today so far—when I am taking the day off, trying to take it easy, but I will walk downtown with Shobhit in a few minutes. I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that I promptly left my umbrella on the train at the very first new station Laney and I got off at on Saturday. Goddammit! I really liked that umbrella, which was clear. Well, today we're going to see if umbrellas at the Army Surplus Store will be worth buying.
I'm feeling pretty productive otherwise, now that I'm even caught up on the holiday travelogue. Tomorrow night I shall make blueberry cashew banana bread for our "Foraged Feast" event at the new office on Wednesday, which will likely be the final event I cover in "Part One" of my travelogue. I like to have that and Thanksgiving in the same photo digest email. And hopefully by Wednesday my own coughing will be minimal—I woke up this morning coughing more than I did yesterday, but it has since subsided significantly.
[posted 2:08pm]
