Fifty Hours in My Weekend World!

Here is my wonderful weekend in pictures… details on some of this later!

Friday:

Stopped by MSU’s Arts Marathon – 48 hours of non-stop arts activities on MSU’s campus, including music performances, visual art theatre, poetry, dance… you name it…





Then, off to Babes in Arms, an MSU theatre production.


It was a glorious production that could go bigger if they wanted… unbelievable tap numbers… excellent voices… Rodgers and Hart songs… unbelievable (director podcast at the link above)/

Saturday

Dollar-store finds! (The glass and clear plastic jars are for buttons, ribbon; reader-glasses, Styrofoam plates for making stamps and to use as palates and mini-shakers for metallic powders (I’ll have to cover some of the holes!)


The tap workshop with the cast of “Babes in Arms!” Kate, Jan and I learn steps from the show! No, we’re not ready to fill in as understudies, but we do want to contact the teacher, a sophomore, and see if she’ll give lessons this summer. It was more fun than anything! (Remember, we’re the three who did the tap-dancing movie marathon in the winter… is there a theme?)


After dinner (the first cook-out of the season!) a good scrabble game. Is this a tight board or what?


Sunday

Hooray! The city is turning “Jeanie Green” and I love it. (I’m also having allergy issues!)


Our wine tasting group met – I’ll do more on this later with some of our favorites. The theme was the Rhone and all were French wines, mostly reds, but one white and one Rose.

We had to leave before dinner, but hostess Barb gave us our party favors. Aren’t these beautiful? You could use dollar-store salt and peppers for these, too!

Then off to “Avenue Q” – a wildly delightful, quasi-raunchy but ever so fun musical. Anything with Muppet-like puppets is my kind of show! Sort of “Sesame Street” grows up!

Interesting note – Both shows we saw had this plot: Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy gets wooed away from girl by hard-bitten, sleazy showgirl. Boy realizes sleazy showgirl isn’t for him. Boy gets original girl back. Sleazy showgirl reforms into good girl who moves on to a new career.

The difference? Babes in Arms has “My Funny Valentine,” “Blue Moon,” “Johnny One Note,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “With a Song in My Heart.” Avenue Q has “It Sucks to be Me,” “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English,” “You’re a Little Bit Racist (I’m a Little Bit, Too)” and other songs that aren’t so tame but very, very funny.

It’s true – there are only a few plots in the world. They just mix them up a bit!

Gotta Dance! (Tap, that is!)

Well, yesterday we tapped our troubles away.


Not literally, I fear. But for several delightful hours three of us enjoyed the magic of Busby Berkeley, the colorful glamour of Carmen Miranda, the easy, flawless style of Gene Kelly, the shotgun taps of Ann Miller and the glitzy, downright hilarious spectacle of "The Producers" biggest production sequences! It was our Tap-a-thon -- and there wasn't enough time to enjoy it all, so "Tap Deux" will be coming soon, I think.

We squirmed in our seats, feet moving, as we watched some of the best tap numbers on screen and laughed as we watched Busby Berkeley's color film "The Gang's All Here" with Carmen Miranda doing one of the more phallic numbers of all time (imagine dozens of beautiful girls each holding giant bananas, which they waved about in patterns!). Alice Faye crooned beautiful ballads and led into Busby's Polka Dot Polka, which evolved into something with kalaidoscopic patterns that seemed more like something you'd find in the 60s inspired by way too many magic mushrooms! (You have to wonder what Freud would say about Busby Berkeley.) The plot's nothing to write home about -- but how can you argue with Benny Goodman's music and all those production numbers?

We also watched Berkeley clips from "42nd Street" "Footlight Parade," "Golddiggers of 1933" and more. My favorites? Ruby Keeler's "42nd Street," of course, and "Remember My Forgotten Man" with a poignant Joan Blondell and a massive production number. "Shadow Waltz" was pretty amazing, too.

(Actually, we watched these earlier Berkeley movies after "The Gang" and it was pretty easy to see that he picked his methods and style early and stuck with it for more than a decade.)

Time was running out, so we caught Ann Miller tapping "Prehistoric Man" from "On the Town" and then moved onto "Good Morning" and "Singin' in the Rain" -- no one does it like Gene Kelly! We wrapped up with several glitzy numbers from "The Producers."

(I might add that as we were watching these movies, we were also dining on Jan's artichoke dip, Kate's great corn and bean salsa, Trader Joe pastry puffs, and of course, Junior Mints -- all with wine and fizzy water!)

We never did get to Fred and Ginger, Fred and Cyd, Jimmy Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and were chastised by several of the men who joined us at dinner later for not including Shirley Temple or Gregory Hines. ("Tap-Deux.")

We later were joined by others who couldn't attend and some men-folk for Italian food at Bravo (or, for those of us who ate our hearts out on appetizers all afternoon, soup!).

So, my question to you -- any tap favorites we should include next time?