Yesterday I went to the most recent extravaganza of my mom's musical theater troupe, the Prime Time Players, at the Seymour Center, Chapel Hill's community center for the 55+ set. Generally I go to see what mom has been working so hard at and to support her. Over time they have been getting better, which I have historically attributed to the fact that they've been working hard at it for increasingly long amounts of time.
This show was a compendium of Broadway hits from the ages, going back to the 40s. I was surprised at how many of them I knew. I've seen many of the performers before, so I've been getting to know them too. I found myself thinking things like "I should really watch the movie version of My Fair Lady again." Then came a couple of tunes from Fiddler on the Roof, and when this rather pretty woman who was about my age was doing a duet of "Do You Love Me?" with a somewhat older guy in the Zero Mostel role, I found myself, much to my embarassment, crying, as he kept asking plaintively if she loved him and she kept listing out all the shit she'd been doing for him around the house for 25 years. Eventually, she confessed, after thinking about it, "I do." A few decades into a marriage, I get it. Those wasn't just shtetl shtick.
It occurred to me as the show went on that one of the reasons I know many of the songs, probably, was from seeing high school productions of them back in the day. And that, moreover, since many of the performers were more or less my age, that they were probably people who had done high school musicals and that therefore many of my friends who had been in plays in high school were good candidates for my mom's theater company.
This was most unsettling. I was edging ever closer to being in mom's core demographic.
........
This morning I went to one of the worst AA meetings I've been to in years. The culture of the meeting has always been an open show of hands or just people piping in when their spirits move them. This time the guy running the meeting kept picking out people and/or going down rows. There are meetings where that's how it's done, but this is pointedly not one of them. After half an hour or so he tried to move to a more open format but he couldn't tolerate more than 15 seconds of silence before he'd call on someone.
About a third of the people there left early. The only reason I didn't was that there were all these newcomers there who come in to this meeting in vans from a rehab and I didn't want to cut out on them. I left feeling pissed but was at length able to reclaim the day.
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