"Bad Books" at Round House Theatre

Content warning: brief gun usage, off stage death of a child, off stage injury, reference to abortion.

"Bad Books" is a timely play about a mom who comes to visit the librarian about a book that she recommended to the mom's teen son. 

The play is done in the round, with the stage slowly rotating. The set had books around the edges of the stage, and in a circular overhang. All of those books have been banned or challenged. 

The book the mom objects to is fictitious, but the title and cover, since the mom admits she didn't finish reading it are - juicy - enough to make it clear why a parent might have concerns. 

The show is done without intermission, and has several book references, including "Charlotte's Web". Hilariously a spider dangled from the ceiling in front of my and my friend's seat during part of the show. 

The show is done with two actresses, one who plays the Mother throughout, and one who plays the librarian, the boss, and a fellow parent. 

Some of the big things happen off stage, the mob spear headed by other concerned parents whipped up by the mom's social media posts, attacks the library, but much of that is recapped later. I still teared up at one point, but it does rely on the audience's investment in the two performances to get to where they've gotten emotionally. 

It's easy to nitpick, but as someone who has librarian friends, I thought there wasn't enough mention of the schooling and training that librarians go through. Though in my possibly biased opinion the librarian does prove her bona fides in other ways. 

I've talked before about conversation plays, plays designed to provoke conversation after, and I think this show has a very clear conclusion it isn't afraid to make. But it might also spark some great conversation in the ways any great story would. 

Three Interesting Things

1. I happened upon this fascinating look into the woman who invented at home pregnancy tests.

2. The UK cartoonist who was placed in an ICE prison has given an interview about the process. 

3. James Roday gave a wonderful account of how Val Kilmer's character Chris Knight inspired his portrayal of Shawn Spencer.

Orientation

I went to university in Scotland, and at the time they did an overseas student orientation. I mention this for two reasons. One, foreign students in the US right now are being treated badly. For me, as a DC resident, with no state school option, going to the UK was actually one of my cheaper options. (DC residents have a few more options these days.) 

One thing that's worth noting is that foreign students pay not only full tuition, the foreign student rate is between two and three times the regular student rate. (For those of you wondering how that was cheaper for me, well, the UK student rates have gone up a bit post Brexit, but also, have you seen US tuition rates?) 

So universities often rely on some foreign students, both for diversity of thought, and also the higher rate they pay. 

But one of the targets of this anti-diversity pro-segregation movement is orientations that single people out based on who they are. 

So, in my orientation, I met other new students, including one who turned out to be from near me. I got a tour of the town, got some info on some of the students' traditions, and got to hang out and eat some food. 

I got kicked out bright and early on dorm move in day, so ended up hanging out with the RAs as they checked everyone in because what else was I going to do. Which means I met most people in my dorm as they rolled in.  

So when my roommate, who had grown up just an hour away arrived, who had several classmates she'd gone to high school with at the university and in the dorm arrived, I was already there. She later told me it seemed like I already knew so many people and so much stuff. 

Did those two days give me a huge advantage? Not really. My roommate learned her way around pretty quickly. And we all found our people for the most part. The friends from university that I still keep in touch with are all Scottish. 

But, those days helped me settle. Gave me some faces that when I ran into them later I could say hi, and chat. Two of the Americans I started with the same year ended up leaving. One of them skipped orientation and ended up leaving because he was lonely and didn't feel like he fit in. One hit some academic snags. 

The orientation wasn't the whole reason I succeeded. But it helped give me a start. Helping people find others who have similar backgrounds isn't just so they can only hang out with those people. But goodness, some days after you've been told the third patently untrue thing about the States, knowing where to find someone who will roll their eyes on your behalf is useful. 

The idea of the melting pot assumes that everyone wants to end up tasting like everyone else. (Okay, that metaphor got a little weird, but work with me here.) Sometimes people are somewhere, a job, a university, to do their thing the best that they can, emphasis on their thing. They can learn without melding or changing into some other thing. So finding places they can find others who appreciate some culturally specific things helps them succeed. And helps the institution hang on to the knowledge, and let's face it the money, it needs to keep going. 

The Labeling of Things

One of my favorite things about people is the way we feel personally victimized by the weather. (Why yes, there is rain in today's forecast.) Humans have created years, and then subdivided years into quarters, and assigned each quarter a season. Are there any studies that say that seasons last three months in every single part of the globe, or even any? Not that I'm aware of. But once we assigned these things, we then are consistently affronted when the weather does not cooperate. We track highs and lows. Create charts and data visualizations, and judge whether the weather has fallen into our expectations. 

It is spring where I am. We have had warm days and cool days. The cool day that follows a warm day always feels so much cooler. On one such day a gentleman on a street corner yelled, "The weatherman lied," at the sky. 

Everyone seems sure the weather where they live is more unpredictable, more changeable than the weather everywhere else. Climate change has, of course, affected when and how weather changes. 

But given there's a Mark Twain quote about weather changing unpredictably, it seems weather has been befuddling us all for at least a century or two.  

Hope the weather is within expectations for you today. 

What game are you playing?

There is a family story that goes along with today's but of overthinking about the phrase playing chess not checkers. 

Many summers we would go visit my grandparents in southeastern Connecticut. That stretch of Connecticut required fancy antennas and/or cable to get more than two TV stations unless the wind was blowing a certain way. One of the two channels that came in pretty well was PBS, which meant my grandparents were happy enough since they could watch their nightly news show. 

For us children used to a larger diet of TV, this led to a lot of boredom. So, in an attempt to stave this off, there were a lot of evening games. We played Taboo, gun, gin rummy, double solitaire, crazy eights, and once or twice hearts. (One of my cousin's relatives tried to teach us bridge. I called it reverse hearts and she was not pleased. We did not play enough for me to have retained much.) 

So one night we are playing crazy eights. And my mother lays all her cards down and yells, "Gin!"

We all stared stunned, hoping this was a not very funny joke. And then realizing our mother is basically sleepwalking at this point, so we just kept playing around her. 

So when people say someone is playing chess not checkers, I understand that the point is chess requires generally more long term strategy than checkers. But I also wonder. It hardly matters what chess strategy you are using, if the game you are actually playing is checkers, you are going to lose.