Ghosts of Christmas past

[pecunium]

Maia, her family, a friend, and I, went to see "Edward Scissorhands" at the Ahmanson Theater last night.

It's a modern ballet. It was pretty good (much better than I expected. I'd seen the card, and the idea seemed strained). It wasn't, however, incredible. I suspect it won't linger in my list of, "gee that was great," shows.

It had moments, the drifting of snow, when he was carving, the clever use of serial scrims to provide for layered visualisation (fantasy, simultinaety, and inner thought) and really good display of blood; which absent the ability of film to edit the scene, is hard to do on stage, and harder to make believable.

The dancing was variable. There were some stock elements (it seems all teen "gangs" dance like the Jets of West Side Story) and some things which were predicatable, but there were a couple of pas de deux which rose to the superb; though what come to mind is how impressed I was at the lead managing his appliances.

But the part of the evening that lingers is from intermission.

I saw a face. I don't know, but I'm fairly certain I knew her. It's been 10 years since I saw her last, and 11 since we were, casually, dating, and she was four rows up and 30 feet over, so I'm not positive, but I'm fairly certain.

It was too late in the intermission, and our seats were too good (center of a long row) to make getting over to make the difficult declaration, "Excuse me but are you..." which was complicated, in my mind, by her not using her given name (which she didn't care for, as it is no longer fashionable, and hasn't been since my grandmother was a girl) and it's possible she's not using the same name now, as she was then.

So I had all the odd thoughts, and mild regrets (We stopped going to places we might see each other just because, and that happpened after the dating had ended) of losing touch.

I'm not wistful at the "might have been." I don't seem to suffer from that much (hell, at this point there are too many might have beens. If I wallowed in those, I'd never get out of bed). I was just wishing I'd stayed in touch with her, figured out how to make the effort and not seem to be chasing after romance.

Which, of course, led me to ponder all the other acquaintances whom I'd like to know how to contact again.

Maybe that colored the end of the show (it certainly distracted me for the first part of the second act).

I don't know if it was her, in fact, but last night I certainly saw her.

Comments

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

There's a gibbet on a wild hillside road near here that's something of a tourist attraction (in that maybe a couple of thousand people a year stop there) I was passing ome Saturday and was so certain I saw my first wife standing there that I almost put the car into the forest.

It wasn't her, of course, but I certainly 'saw' her. Memory can certainly tie you up in knots, can't it.