One of the ways you know you’re getting older is when your family hijack your celebrations for their own purposes. Like yesterday, when my ‘birthday treat’ was to accompany her indoors and the infant prodigy to an amateur operatic thing I’d run a mile from, given a choice.
The thing is, I had to experience Manx amateur operatics professionally in the 1980’s, when I was given a ticket and told to say something nice about it for the newspapers. There was little choice. For reasons rooted deep in the twisted psyche of small town life, many frustrated types spend their days making millions at conservative professions while dreaming of the kind of release only attained by wearing a spangly costume and tunelessly belting out a big show number. The worst thing for a newspaper is that the greatest disparity between the two lifestyles is inevitably found in the biggest advertisers.
So, I know all about this strange and depraved subculture and try to avoid it.
To be honest, the only reason the prodigy wanted to see it either was the title, Beauty and the Beast, and the suggestion that it was ‘based on a Disney film’. It may well have been, if Disney made Friday the Thirteenth.
It was also advertised as a family musical. I thought it closer to a murder mystery, in that the music got murdered and even by the end I hadn’t worked out which of the stars squawking a quarter tone flat was the beauty and which was the beast. I almost solved that one when the beast finally took his mask off to reveal himself as a supposedly handsome prince, the kids at the front screamed and their parents yelled ‘put it back on, put it back on’.
Honestly, we loved it.
Just not for the reasons the cast thought we should have.
9 years ago
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