Rehearsal and Kennedy

I'm beginning to wish I could write , "Ho-hum, dull day," but that won't happen anytime soon. 
After our walk, I grabbed the shears and cut back the Japanese maple.  It had been encroaching on the front walk and I've been thinking of doing it for some time. 
Prepared lunch of turkey breast, rye bread, salad, coleslaw and iced tea in time for Ellen V.'s arrival at noon. 
We had a good conversation that ranged over LETCO, costume mishaps, and the unending tribulations of parenting.  (The last on her end, not mine.  I'm continually amazed by my good luck in how my children turned out.)
As promised, Dave got here about 1:30.  I gave him a cup of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table to go over the skit.  They're both troupers and it went well; Dave is  hysterically funny as a distraught Santa, at times using a huge red bandanna as a handkerchief and loudly blowing his nose into it.
We rehearsed the skit several times--it's very short--then chatted about show-bizzy topics.  Ellen and Dave are considerably more experienced than I am, but at this point, I have some background, too, and we shared topics of our theatre history, something I always enjoy.
They left about 3:30 and I immediately drove to Staples to get ink for the printer, then stopped at B.J.'s for other stuff. 
WIDER IN A WAY:  Settling down at 8:00 with my popcorn and wine, I came upon one of those bug-eyed Kennedy assassination programs on what bills itself as the History (should be "History") channel.  With the usual cheap-thrill theatrics, its main theme was the percentage of Americans who don't believe the official story.  Every few minutes, in between old films (Zapruder's and others) and interviews with those purporting to be in the know, a "statistic" would flash on the screen.  On a black background, large white numbers would start out low, then dramatically increase, showing the percentage of people (in this particular survey) who--oh, ugh,  gasp!--don't think Oswald acted alone and/or the CIA ordered the killing and/or Alaska doesn't really ice over--or something.  For sheer idiocy and waste of time and talent (talent? what talent?), this piece of crap took the cake.  All one needs to remember is that there's a fairly large segment of the population who believe vampires live.  That doesn't mean the official assassination story is or isn't true, only that simply because somebody--or several somebodies or twenty million somebodies--believe or don't believe, has no bearing on its truth or falsity.  I turned the silly thing off after an interminable fifteen minutes.
WIDER IN A MUCH MORE SIGNIFICANT WAY:  Happy birthday to my darling older daughter!