Cinderella and Tooth-hurty

Our Spring Break vacation was a little shorter than it normally would have been, because I had purchased two tickets for Cinderella at the Gammage Theater on Friday the 13th. We had to go home or sell the tickets, and I didn't want to sell them. I was excited to see Cinderella, because it was newly re-vamped Rogers and Hammerstein, and I love a good modernized classic.

As Dan and I walked from the parking garage to the theater, we saw dozens of little girls dressed up as princesses. It was precious, and it made me think how nice it would have been to take Gwen and Asher. I consoled myself by remembering that I bought four tickets for The Phantom of the Opera in May. 

The theater was packed. Before the show, a voice announced that Cinderella would be played by a different girl and that Madame (stepmother) would be played by Fran Drescher. The audience went wild. I could not believe that so many people were that excited to see "The Nanny" perform. I'm pretty sure she hasn't been in anything since the 90's. The crowd gave her lots of love through the night. But I digress.

The show was very well done, and the sets and costumes were amazing. The actors were wonderful and funny (oddly the Prince's herald was a stand out performance), and the choreography was great. There were of course a few things that bothered me: the prologue singing was very disjointed and everyone had crazy vibrato for that song, the people who re-wrote the book went a little crazy and decided to make the people vote for a Prime Minister at the end, etc. Despite those few bothersome things, I enjoyed the show. It was sweet and magical and they made this crazy love-at-first-sight story believable somehow.

So it was a good show, but sometimes when I see a good show I get this strange feeling. It's a mixture of sadness and jealousy and having missed my calling. It is as if someone is dangling some beautiful thing that I love in front of me, and I cannot have any part of it. I loved the show, and I was so glad I went to see it, but I kept thinking things like "I'm too old to play Cinderella now, if I ever could have. I'm too fat to play anyone but the bigger stepsister. I'm too settled into my life to even audition for anything like this..." And I know that it is okay and that my life is pretty great, but I just get a little wistful and melancholy to see people living my dream. I was even jealous of the set designer. 

Anyway, it was a lovely night.

(PS, start this video at about the 53 second mark to see a medley of Cinderella songs. I WISH Santino Fontana was our prince, but the replacement sounded a lot like him.) 

The next weekend we took the kids to see the new Disney Cinderella movie, which we all liked. I thought the "be kind and have courage" thing was a little heavy-handed, but it isn't a bad message, so I was okay with it being repeated ad nauseam. The casting and the performances were great. I would buy the DVD. 

Before I sign off, I just need to mention that my tooth hurt for a few days so I made an emergency dental appointment on Monday the 23rd, for 2:30. TOOTH-HURTY. I mean, if you are going to have a root canal where the local anesthetic isn't really working because your tooth is so infected, that is the way to do it. It took a few hours because they had to break off my crown to do the procedure and get to another cavity in between my teeth. I just kept thinking "Better me than Dan, he would hate this." and "I would totally go through this in proxy of my kids, especially Ezra. If there was a way to transfer his tooth issues to my mouth, I would totally do it." They shot me full of anesthetic every ten minutes (because I kept feeling what they were doing, ouch), so my gums felt like a pincushion the next day. But I didn't even need the pain meds they prescribed. That was nice. 

PS I don't know how this happened, because I just had my teeth cleaned and x-rayed and everything was fine. Sigh.