Neat day! Was picked up at 11:30 by Judy S. Also in the car were Susan, Mary Ann, and Julie G. The luncheon was at The Carriage House in Galloway and oh, what a terrific place. It's large, elegantly appointed, and was beautifully decorated for Christmas. Great lunch (chicken Marsala), we each got a Lenox dish, and it was great fun to be with friends and neighbors. I got lots of compliments on my hair and, believe it or not, my outfit. I wore black silky slacks, a black top with a scoop neck, a long white scarf, and silver jewelery--in other words, I was all black, white, and silver. If I say it myself, I looked sensational.
Got home about 4:00 and changed, then just puttered around until 6:30 until it was time to go next door tot Frank and Barbara's. We went to the library to see A Christmas Carol and, oh boy, was it good.
This was NOT the sloppy-sentimental, hoked-up movie or television version*; it was the actual, word-for-word story by Dickens, read by three actors. Yes, read--but also acted and they were superb. One was both narrator and Scrooge, another man the other male characters, and a woman both female humans and spirits. They were dressed in period costume and, of course, didn't just read--they acted.
We talked to them afterwards and found they're located in Jackson. They do two other shows besides "Carol": A Meeting Of The Macabre and "Mark Twain's Wonderful Words." Would love to see the others someday.
*This terrific experience supports my insistence that modified versions of original material is almost always wrong-headed and false. (This includes--in spades--fictionalized true events and "docudramas.") If a work of art is a fine one to begin with--and "Carol" certainly is--to tart it up with additional dialogue, scenes, or modified speech, is like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. When it comes to written material, it's even worse because the aberration is often accepted as the real thing. How many people remember the real story of Frankenstein? I do, because I read what Mary Shelley actually wrote; she never heard of Boris Karloff. Seems to me that "improving" a work to make it fit into a movie or play format, or fictionalizing a true event to make it more entertaining, is almost never warranted. It doesn't improve: it dumbs down and phonies up.