Ok, it's been a while but I have genuinely been busy. There.com is taking HUGE amounts of whatever I designate as free time, and lots of school trips eating into the remaining hours of the recently hectic days.

Which leads me into my first encounter with an opera. I managed to score my first evil laugh and amazingly long death scene, all in the first ever try! I sympathised somewhat with the children who were watching, when I tell you that I now know why people invented guns. It was so they could make other people die quicker. The reason I say this is that Macbeth got himself stabbed in the er.... well, general area of his body. Hope I'm not spoiling it too much for anyone that might be about to embark upon this musical rollercoaster ride. Anyway, Macbeth staggered hither, and thither, then a little bit hither again, and thithered a bit, before he graduated to stagger, wobble, hither slightly, then collapse. This took a long time, and at first we all thought he may be looking for a contact lens or something. So the sigh of relief washed through the opera house, like a freshly opened rooftop door in a fart filled elevator. It was short lived as Macbeth exuded the now familiar first few booming notes of what was to be a lengthy examination of ones own terminality at such times. Such times being, covered in no blood, with no gaping stab wound, all alone in an unconfirmed dark (possibly wooded) area, with nothing for company, except the hushed busy-ness of an ancient smoke machine (funny how Shakespere never mentioned those much?) and a perfectly fashionable opera singer hair do.

Now I am hoping that our Macbeth did not mistake the rousing applause for his very talented singing. As one of the biggest cheers of the night went up when he finally, and I mean FINALLY expired.

Another weird thing was a little screen way up at the top of the curtain, with subtitles projected onto them! I was not expecting any help, just getting the general idea of who wanted to stab who, and who was trying to bed who else.

I really liked the scenes containing the whole cast. Such as times when there were villagers and guards all together giving it something along the lines of
# The king is here
# He is so great!
# We are all saved
# Hope he's not late
etc

At that moment I would have payed a huge sum of money to have these very same people (anonymous villager/guard/ghosts 1 - 37) to follow me around, singing every moment of what happened to me every day. What a thought! Would take me all day just to get out from the supermarket because of the rotating flower formation of people all looking up at the camera, and closing crecendo, showering fireworks onto the assembled masses. Are you still with me?

This is probably doable, but we shall see. A definate 'back burner' thing as they seem to say around here.