Halloween Day

Happy Halloween to everyone. Hope you had a fun day, with only the scares that you wanted.

We were up around 7:30 this morning, but I skipped my exercises to get ready to go to a town about an hour and a half away, where we joined Hubbie's daughter, son-in-law, great-grandson, and a friend of the great grandson for lunch and a performance of "Dracula," at a dinner theater.

We opted out of having lunch at the theater, and went to a local buffet restaurant instead. Mother chose pork roast, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, and coleslaw. I also chose pork roast, but with mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, green beans, and coleslaw. Then Mother had strawberry shortcake with angel food cake, and I decided on the peach cobbler with ice cream. The ice cream reminded us of snow ice cream.

The play was not as good as past performances we've seen in that theater, but it was entertaining enough. The most striking thing about the play was the awesome set....the inside of a huge castle, with realistic looking oil lamps mounted all around the "stone" walls.

The walls of the castle opened outward on tracks built into the stage floor, and the upper portions lifted up to reveal two rooms...a bedroom on one side, and the cell of a madman on the other. Round mini-stages were built onto the lower portions of the open-out walls. Various scenes were played on these stages.

A large window that opened inward was built into one wall. Stage smoke blew onto the stage from this window when Dracula entered the bedroom of the lead actress.

There were some well-choreographed fight scenes in the play, and the madman threw himself into his character, but there were a few glitches, too...early on, swords clattered noisily to the floor backstage, the sound system squealed a couple of times, and a large rolling set piece representing a seaside cliff missed the exit space when being pushed offstage in the dark and banged loudly into a wall.

Mother commented that these oopses "took the magic out of the performance."

The play ended about 4 p.m., and we all lost no time heading to our respective towns. We were home about 5:30.

Had a light supper later, and then did the usual...watched TV.