Saturday, October 29, 2022
We were off to Minneapolis again tonight, this time to MN Orchestra and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I was delighted to see many of the orchestra members in costume. My favorite was Boba Fett playing mallets. Unfortunately, he wasn’t out yet when I took this picture. The conductor was dressed as Jack Skellington and opened the second half wearing a Jack head and hands. It was fun to see those long skeleton hands conducting. (He popped them off during a few measures of rest.) There were lots of audience members in Halloween wear, if not in costume. I saw one little Spiderman, and his mom was wearing a Wonder Woman costume. I will admit I would not be comfortable wearing a Wonder Woman costume to a concert. I feel like I would be cold (it could happen).
There were lots of kids at the show, which makes sense when you think about it. I hadn’t thought about it and was surprised as we walked in. There was a little girl about 5 or 6 sitting next to me. She did a good job paying attention and not being too loud. I was impressed. I was not as impressed with the sound engineer guys that were near us. They were talking through most of the first half of the first half of the show. Luckily, Keith’s less hearing side was facing them and he didn’t notice. I think what really bothered me was that THEY SHOULD KNOW BETTER. Eventually, they slid their chairs apart and went to sit in front of monitors and control panels.
The first time Keith saw Nightmare Before Christmas it was newly on video and he rented it with the boys during an evening I was gone. He did not give it a very good review and it went back to Video Update without me watching it. The first time I saw it was in 2004 while we were in Disneyland. The Haunted Mansion has an NBC overlay from September through December and that’s when we were there. We went through it and we didn’t get it, because no one really knew the movie. The men (some were boys then, I guess) didn’t remember it and I hadn’t seen it. That night, we got the DVD from the front desk and watched it in our room. We were pretty excited by it – and really, really enjoyed the Haunted Mansion overlay after that. I do not remember falling asleep before the end, but apparently I did, because I didn’t remember anything about the movie after intermission tonight. I am not a frequent movie faller-asleep-er, but given that we had spent the day at Disneyland and I would have been on my hotel room bed while watching, I am not too surprised. Maybe we all fell asleep, and everyone else has watched it since…
They had the captions on, so I was very busy watching the orchestra, watching the movie, and reading the captions. I really struggle not to read captions if they are on, so I had to work to not get stuck just reading. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
No one can avoid reading the captions. Jim Trelease (a very smart author, lecturer, champion of reading aloud to children, champion of reading period, etc.) promotes having captions on permanently as one way to improve reading ability. His top advice is read aloud to your children, your friends’ children, children you pass on the street . . . You get the idea.
I have spoken to several high schoolers about their difficulties in reading lately – obviously makes school challenging. I will promote captions as a way to practice.