Surprise Showers

It was just cloudy when I got up around 9 this morning. I read The Trumpet of the Swan and wrote in my journal for a while before making blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I'm still catching up on running all of the DVDs, videos, and CDs I bought during vacation or took out of the Haddon Township Library on Friday. Did Spider Man Turn Off the Dark while eating.

Hoo boy. This multi-million dollar stage extravaganza was incredibly controversial during its Broadway stay, mainly due to the dangerous special effects required to bring the title character and his antagonists to life and the fact that the director Julie Taymor left before it debuted. Its music was also said to be pretty bad...and I'm afraid the detractors were mostly right. While there were a few songs I liked (especially "No More" with Peter Parker and one of his girls - Mary Jane? - wishing they were someone or somewhere else, and Peter's "Boy Who Fell From the Sky"), most of them sounded too much alike. I also wish they, you know, told us what the show was about. None of these songs or the liner notes told you what was going on. Did it even have a plot?

I'm going to go with the critics on this one. Superheroes and musicals just don't seem to mix - the 60s show It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman didn't even last as long as this did. Maybe this worked better onstage with the special effects. The cast album is only for huge fans of the show, Spidey, or U2.

Work was busy with people buying things for graduation parties and barbecues the entire afternoon. For once, we had plenty of help and lots of teenagers and college students around to take customers. One of the boys was called to go in for me so I could go home - I had no relief and still had a line.

When I got home, I changed into regular clothes, then played Super Paper Mario for an hour and a half. I did get a bit further. After I defeated a mechanical dragon to end Chapter 1, I revived Princess Peach with soup from a restaurant on the bottom floor of Flipside (the main city). I did a little flipping between perspectives to open the portal to the next round. As she did in Super Mario Bros 2 for the original Nintendo, Peach can float if you hold the 2 button down (this time via a parasol). I'm now working my way through the swamp-themed Chapter 2.

Hit the bath after I finished with Mario. I was reading A Song In the Dark, about the musicals of the early sound era, when I heard rain pattering on the porch. That was something I didn't expect. It wasn't even supposed to be cloudy today, just partly sunny. At least, it didn't last long. It was long gone before I got out of the bath.

After I dried off, I had the last of the tuna salad and snap peas for dinner while listening to the first Unsung Musicals CD. It's a shame this series of collections of songs from flop musicals is long out of print. I picked most of mine up from a small shop in Ocean City and love them.