You're in the army now!

The show is sold out again tonight and tomorrow night, all tickets bought and paid for. I had wanted to go a third time to see the second cast again, and especially as tomorrow is closing night, and from my experience with amateur productions, closing night is the best performance of all, with the most extemporized lines, the most chances taken with the most reckless abandon. I think I was also hoping to get an invite to the cast party, considering I'm friends with the musicians and the teacher of several of the actors. But it looks like it is not to be. Sigh.

The bridge, which was partly rebuilt last fall, has developed some bobos. They apparently used some innovative material for the road surface and it is not responding well to the traffic and changes in weather. This spring there were two huge pot holes in the eastbound lane, one at each end of the span, and now the bridge is down to one lane as workmen try to repair the damage. During working hours there are people with arret and lentement signs letting through streams of cars in opposite directions, and at night they have one of those traffic lights set up that take forever to change.

Buddy Boy's doctor's appointment was for 8:30 this morning in town, which is a whole five minutes (half an hour on foot), and yet Hubby was so anxious that we leave early to make sure that he not be late. At 8:10 I was reading the comics and he was needling me to go already. The digital clock in the car said 8:12 when we pulled out of the driveway, and 8:15 when we arrived at the clinic. There had been no stopping at all, we were waved through right away, and we felt rather stupid sitting there waiting for the receptionist to open up her glass-windowed booth while the town's elderly and not so elderly (we met Dr. M there) waited to see the technicians for their blood tests.

Finally it was 8:30 and I left Buddy Boy in the capable hands of the intern who would be giving him the once over. For his participation in this Great War film project, he needed to be declared fit as he and his fellow actors will be doing the following:

carrying deactivated rifles for military drill
faux firing and weapons training with deactivated rifles
bayonet practice
sleeping in canvas tents in wool uniforms
making camp fires
eating basic WWI diet consisting of bread, jams, stews, meats, etc.
maintenance and mending uniforms
reconaissance (hiking) in the woods
using hammers, nails and saws to make basic wood structures
serving and hauling warm food in large pots
physical training, calisthenics
marching in fields and on roads in parade formation
throwing fake bombs at targets

That's just the training part. Then they are required to do more fun stuff for the actually filming, including running with heavy packs and deactivated rifles, digging foxholes and lying in them, climbing ladders out of and jumping into trenches, crawling on mud, sleeping on the ground, generally pretending that they're on the front in the European theatre. He'll love it, if I know my boy.

Anyway, he passed his physical, which didn't take the whole hour set aside for it, so we played backgammon at the Java (best two out of three, he won), then went to Costco where we bought too much stuff, as always, including two big boxes of blueberries because I promised my son I would make him a pie.

The weather is glorious. I think I got too much sun on my back and shoulders walking to and from the university (where I tried and failed to buy a ticket for tomorrow night's performance), but I'll live.

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