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brief theatre performances on a cold December night
Saturday, December 13 2025
[REDACTED]
After the usual Saturday morning routine in the living room, I went upstairs and revisited the serial reading code on my I2C slave, which was still fairly buggy. After an hour of two with that (and much consultation with ChatGPT), it was working better, perhaps even good enough to be the basis of a slave-based real-time serial parser. I then did further cleanup of my ESP8266 command system, which is becoming a very important system of low-level remote control.
This evening Gretchen and I drove up to Hudson to attend an event at a bar featuring a series of seven ten-minute plays. The reason we knew about the even was because Ken, our neighbor up Dug Hill Road off Lorenz Road, would be an actor in the first of these plays. The plan was to meet Ken and his wife Laura at Baba Louie's Pizza and then go see the performances. But Ken and Laura were running late, so we arrived in Hudson well before they did. And then only Laura was able to come to dinner.
I am not into live theatre at all and don't really feel like I have all that much to talk about with Ken or Laura, but Gretchen likes them and she likes live theatre, so I did what a spouse does. At Baba Louie's, Gretchen ordered a large pie with vegan cheese, tofu, and then other toppings split into two halves: mushrooms and banana peppers for me, tomatoes and spinach for her. Laura said she wasn't very hungry and initially only ate a single slice. But a Baba Louie's large is pretty small (perhaps due to shrinkflation), and that one pizza wasn't quite enough. Well, it would've been enough, but Laura kept encouraging us to get a second one (because she secretly paid for the meal).
Some of our dinner conversation, the part not about television program production, was interesting, particularly a story about Laura's daughter's teaching job at New York City charter school. The school is one of several with a militaristic ethos, forcing children as young as six to sit still with their hands folded in front of them. It sounded like a hellish place to be a child and a fairly hellish place even to be a teacher.
Then venue for the theatre performances was at a bar called Park Theater. Processing people was going slowly when we arrived, so the line stretched out onto the sidewalk in what was pretty brutal cold. With our tickets, we each got a playing card that qualified us for one free drink (though Laura, being comp'd due to her husband being one of the actors, received no such card, so Gretchen bought her a drink).
The seating was on folding chairs that became rather uncomfortable over the following hour and a half. I fully expected to be miserable the whole time I was there, though at least I would be miserable with a drink in my hand (in this case a glass of red wine). But I found the first play (the only one featuring Ken) was engaging enough that I didn't start daydreaming about the many other ways I could've been usefully spending my time. His play featured him as the male half of an estranged former couple randomly running across his former girlfriend at an international airport near Paris. The girlfriend is initially very much not happy to see him, but by the end of the play their flight to New York has been canceled and they've decided to spend a single night together.
The three plays after that one were all very good, particularly the one just before intermission. It featured two women sitting around gossipping as they fold dish towels, and it was full of brilliant relatable moments.
After intermission, the plays weren't as good. The first of the final three was set in an apartment where a washed-up old party girl sits by herself, unable to watch the Peewee Herman Show because she hasn't paid her cable bill. She is played by an actress with several alarmingly misshapened facial features caused by overly-aggressive plastic surgery, including a biologically-impossible nose only a half-inch-wide at the nares. She falls asleep and then a cat burglar sneaks into her apartment. The two end up having a drink together and the burglar even manages to pirate the Peewee Herman Show. After that, there was a very weak play about a woman with a dying child and then a goofy final play about some hard-drinking elves hanging out at the North Pole on Christmas Eve.
Of course, at the end of the show, Gretchen wanted to chit chat with a number of people, including a woman who had given a positive portrayal of abortion in one of the plays. I always feel so useless while this is happening, since I have nothing much to contribute but am occupying physical space. (This can be a real issue in a claustrophobic theatre venue.) When we finally made it out to Warren Street and were walking through the cold back to our car, Gretchen expressed a little irritation in how obviously impatient I am when she's trying to hob nob (that's a my term for it; she would call it something else). I apologized and said I would try to do better in the future. But I said that it is hard for me, since most people bore me, and I don't pay enough attention to what they are saying to be able to comfortably talk with them.
Gretchen drove us back homeward mostly on the east side of the Hudson, that is, through Germantown and past Tivoli. As we approached the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge, I mentioned how high in the sky it had seemed when we'd seen it off in the distance from Kingston Point, nearly three and a half miles to the south. As we were about to drive on it, I referred to it as a "ribbon in the sky." Gretchen was impressed that I was referencing Stevie Wonder, her favorite musician. But no, I was just putting into words what it had looked like when seen from below at a distance. She proceeded to find and play "Ribbon in the Sky" on whatever music app she's using these days.
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