"Awake Ye Muses Nine..."

Just when you convince yourself poetry is dead... our little show about Emily Dickinson is proving to be (somewhat) unexpectedly popular. By dint of SQEEZING we can get 54 chairs in the room, and we've been full to overflowing both Friday and Saturday night. (We made an extra effort to squeeze in one of the locals, and his wife. He's a professor and professional actor. You'll have seen him in stuff here and there.)

There's a bit right at the beginning of the show where she gives her fruitcake recipe. She passes out notecards and pencils and makes the audience write it down as she recites it (yay, audience!fail) and then we hand out samples of cake. (Not the actual cake which includes 8 pounds of dried fruit and 19 eggs). The audience is loving it. One wag at yesterday's matinees come off with "what was after the currants?" We'd prepared the actress for this kind of quizzing so it was fun to see!

A friend of mine came to the matinee and then we went to dinner to try and catch up. I hadn't seen him hardly at all for the last six months. I think I gushed a bit too much about Torchwood... but I am spreading the word. Was showing my ASM parts of KKBB from my iPod last night. And people I have hoooked are hooking other people. Spread the love peoples.

So off to find some clean clothes to wear and think about getting back to the theater for the final performance. Then strike will be a lot of fun as I think I am the only one who knows where everything goes back to. Fortunately I am good at traffic flow, sorting, and staging.

These are their stories...

I was so prepared to hate this week's Criminal Intent after last week's writer!fail WTF-ery. But it turned out to be much better than I thought it would be. Another one of those episodes where they show us the killer in the opening teaser (still unsure how well that works to build dramatic tension for the viewer, but...). Then when he goes all high tech and is luminol-ing the fuck out of the crime scene, I was all like "been there done that. a couple times." But when Detective Nichols goes in to run the case by his old buddy the world famous forensic guy ... WFFG is none other than the murderer. Nichols then has the next 37 minutes to prove it while his partner goes into labor, his boss thinks he's nuts, and Eames is pinch hitting for Wheeler and cracking wise with the snark.

The script could have used some tightening up. The opener had too many artistic shots of the murderer contemplating the ceiling, and other than giving us a good look at the awesome chandelier... didn't do much to advance the story.

Also, I sort of hate when they pull World Famous fellow staff persons out of thin air ... if this guy is so great, shouldn't his name have come up some time in the past eight years the show has been running. I get that it didn't because we didn't know about him until just now... but it still is the kind of thing that makes me roll my eyes.

And I thought Ross (and Rodgers) bought into Nichol's scheme a bit too quickly after that giant rant about how Nichols was solely responsible for giving all of Major Case a bad name... but limited time is limited I guess.

And the only really important thing, after locking up the bad guy... is that Wheeler had her baby (and still had time to crack on Nichols between contractions). It's a girl. Hello there Margo Jane Wheeler.

So onwards to next week and another Goren and Eames episode (their season finale? I think maybe. Then there should be one more Nichols/Eames eppy if I'm figuring right.)