This was a travel day mostly. We packed up early in the morning. Our plan was to take Rafiki, Ellen’s dog down to Ashland with us, so that Ellen and Mike could show Sherry and Giles the wineries of the Willamette Valley. Over the years Rafiki has become very fond of her cousins, as we call Edie and Eli, and she jumped in the car without any hesitation. It is a pretty long haul from Portland to Ashland. The dogs were pretty good about the cramped quarters during the five hours in the car, so when we pulled into Ashland we decided that they deserved a trip to one of the best dog parks in the country. All the dogs immediately ran to the back of the field to get their feet wet in Bear Creek.
Our housing situation in Ashland was a little odd. We rented a house in Ashland last year from a woman named Shoshannah. This year when we contacted her to see if we could rent the house again, it turned out that the dates were not available. So she offered to rent us her own house for our four days in Ashland. It was located in a nice, quiet residential neighborhood and had a stunning view of Bear Mountain from the front porch.
The sofa on the front porch quickly became our favorite place to be. It also had pretty good 3G reception, so I planked myself there with my iPad.
There is a fenced in area in the front yard, so I planked the dogs there. I thought it a nice place to spend some time, but the forlornly look at me as if I had put them in the kennel.
We went to the local supermarket to get some stuff for dinner and we had a haircut at the same time. Our fellow adventurers arrived in the early evening, and they had barely time to unpack their cars before we had to take off for our first play She Loves Me.
I have to admit that I had never really heard of this musical before I saw it. The Wall Street Journal review, where I found the picture above, gave this background on the production.
First seen on Broadway in 1963, "She Loves Me" is based on "The Shop Around the Corner," Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 screen version of "Parfumerie," a Miklós Laszló stage comedy that was later filmed as "In the Good Old Summertime" and "You've Got Mail." The setting is prewar Budapest and the plot is a clockwork farce: Amalia and Georg, two love-starved members of what used to be called a "lonelyhearts club," are sending each another anonymous mash notes without ever having met. Then Amalia lands a job at the perfume shop where Georg works, thus triggering a string of comedic complications that lead to the happiest of endings.
I did not much care for the movie, but that’s because I find Jimmy Stewart particularly grating in the lead role. But I liked this play a lot, and I thought the staging was particularly clever.
Tomorrow we have two plays! Reviews will be forthcoming….
