31 October 2020 Happy lots of things

[KathyB]

There are several things to celebrate today, starting with Happy Saturday, proceeding to Happy Halloween and then going to Happy Extra Hour of Sleep (except for Hawaii and Arizona). This long weekend is my favorite weekend of the year because I have a much easier time adjusting to this time change than the one in the spring.

Tonight I plan to leave my porchlight off and just chill. I'm thinking that it also sounds like a good idea to get some Chinese food. Happy Chinese Food Night!

[scenicdesign71]

Those sound like excellent plans to me!  Hope they've been working out perfectly.

I've never understood — and rarely even bothered to wonder — exactly how trick-or-treating works here in NYC.  All I know is that, while I do encounter costumed children on the street every year, with chaperones in tow, I don't recall ever once hearing them knock on my door (or buzz my buzzer).  Which suits me fine, though, now that I'm wondering (perhaps belatedly, by a mere 30 years or so), it does make me question how these kids manage to score any candy — is it only my place specifically that they're boycotting? or, more likely, do city kids call only on neighbors they know (in which case I guess there's one small point in favor of my old-school urban un-sociability: Kitty Genovese's neighbors have very little on me)?

In any case, over the past several years I've been atoning for those decades of negligence by helping my boss, when things are slow in the shop, with her annual Halloween project of creating costumes -- mostly out of spit and ingenuity -- for her neighbor's daughter out in Jersey City.  This year the young lady wanted to go as Queen Ramonda from the Black Panther movie, so several hours of my workweek were spent wrestling cheap lace curtains, an inverted lampshade, various kinds of cardboard — and copious hot glue and gold spraypaint — into a (very) modest semblance of Ruth Carter's Oscar-winning design.  (Good to know that I and my boss's combined four academic degrees and decades of preposterously underpaid theatre work are good for something, I guess).

Meanwhile, daylight savings couldn't fall on a better weekend, as I'm facing an even earlier start than usual on Monday, reporting at 4am (as opposed to the usual 6am) to install a graffiti mural — pre-painted on sticky paper in our scene shop last week, when not surreptitiously puzzling over homemade Halloween Afro-Futurist couture — at a shooting location that's almost twice as far from my apartment as the studio where I usually begin my workday.

This early Monday call, after an especially busy week this past week, also makes a handy excuse for taking it easy this weekend: thus far, without leaving the apartment, I've watched David Mamet's Race and David Byrne's American Utopia, listened to Norm Lewis as the Count in a radio-play Dracula (the brainchild, it turns out, of an old friend of mine), ordered Grubhub and napped away a good chunk of my Saturday afternoon. All in the name of resting up and staying healthy for my upcoming workweek, you understand.