That the Small rain down can rain*

Wetfalling from the brokensky: we had actual rain overnight, the first measurable water since April. Not enough, not by a long dry chalk, but yay. I have explained to Mac that he no longer wishes to go outside, for fear of damp paws.

Also, it is raining books hereabouts: I have dropped off trade paper copies of Being Small at Leigh's Favourite Books, our local Sunnyvale store. Anyone in the South Bay desiring a copy could address themselves thereunto. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a demand, if she sold out and had to ask for more...?

...Aaand there was something else I meant to tell you, but I no longer remember what that was--

Oh, wait. Yes, I do. Internets, I am compelled to confess: I broke Cathyn. We had non-yoga-related dinner last night, and both he and Laina approved the ghost pepper/quince/rosewater jelly, to the point where I sent them home with the prototype to spread on toast for their breakfast. (Also I poached more quinces in a rosewater syrup, purely for the sake of making more; the actual quinces are a by-product here. I fed my guests on by-product, it was almost embarrassing.) But I also served a ghost pepper salsa with the black-bean chilli - and it was too much for Cathyn, for all that he is from New Mexico and quite robust in his preference for spicy. He had to fetch a glass of milk and everything. Um, whoops?


*I love it that I can be totally confident that y'all saw exactly what I did there, I am just sayin'.

There's a hole in the world like a great black ... bombsite?

All through my teens, I got to see a lot of Shakespeare: at Stratford mainly, and in Oxford college gardens, and elsewhere. So I grew up thoroughly comfortable with the notion of old plays reset in other contexts: Hamlet in a nuclear bunker, Much Ado in the age of steam, more than one in the British Raj, yadda yadda.

But I am thinking back and thinking hard, and I haven't seen much other work apart from Shakespeare's revisited in that way; and of modern works by living playwrights, hardly any. Which is one reason why I'm really interested to see this:

"SWEENEY TODD at TheatreWorks" (Watch on YouTube)

As everybody has probably picked up by now, Sondheim is one of my mancrushes; I have loved him and all his works since I was a teenager, and I'm still ridiculously impressed by the guy. And Sweeney Todd of course is a favourite, how not; and it may be the one piece I've seen revived most often, just because it is the one piece that is revived most often - but I've never seen it reinvented, it's always been presented as written, as Victorian (1846, Wiki tells me) as its source material.

Until now. And now I not only want to see (and shall see, yay!) this new production that shifts it to the Blitz, but I really, really want to know what Stephen thinks about that...