Sunday, Jan. 23

Up around 7:30, but skipped my exercises today. Mother came over mid-morning, but we didn't do much for the morning. I washed a couple of loads of clothes, and programmed the DVR for the week's shows and movies, planned the menu for the week, and read the Sunday newspaper. Mother sliced cold boiled chicken to add to dressing from the freezer (leftover from Thanksgiving), and washed sweet potatoes for the oven.

Around noon, we had the chicken and dressing, and baked sweet potatoes with asparagus and canned cranberry sauce. It was a satisfying meal.

Afterward, we changed into Sunday clothes to go to the college about a mile down the road, where Hubbie and I served as ushers for the Civil War reader's theater. While there, the lady manning the box office (at whose home the community theater board meets each month) asked us to return to the college next Friday morning to accept money from the teachers accompanying school groups to a special performance of the play, since she is unable to do it. We agreed to do this.

Unfortunately, this play is not being well attended. Only around twenty people showed up Friday night, and not many more Saturday night. Today, around fifty attended. One of them was a reporter from another county, who remarked to me how surprised she was to see how small the audience was.

I asked this reporter to send me a copy of the article she writes, which I will pass on to our community theater board historian (same lady who manned the box office, and who is also the board's treasurer), and she agreed.

The play began at 2 p.m. and lasted about two hours, including a fifteen minute intermission. It was an interesting production, and the author of the play did a great job of plowing though documents and diaries from our museum, national battlefield archives in two states, historical society archives in two states, and the Lincoln library, to cobble together a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and semi-end. I say semi-end, because this is the first of three reader's theaters dealing with the Civil war in our area, so this one ends with the hint that the Union soldiers will once again occupy our town.

The story is told from the viewpoints of two young women diarists, two Union soldiers, and two Confederate soldiers, with two narrators...a man and a woman. Before the production began, musicians from another state performed six local songs of the period on CD. The songs were written mainly by soldiers during periods of boredom. According to the playbill, it has been said that "the soldier's life is mostly boredom punctuated with a few moments of terror."

A slide show of maps and photos illustrated the information imparted by the readers, who were dressed in period costumes. Except for risers, there were no stage props beyond a period desk and chair, at which one of the young ladies sat and pretended to record in her diary as she spoke.

The author is a retired history professor who was my instructor when I attended the college where he taught. He has also served on the community theater board with me, and we have both appeared in theater productions. He is a friend, and he worked very hard and for a long time to mount this production. He fully expected to fill the 400-seat theater for each of the five performances, though those of us on the board knew this would not happen. The only time the theater will be filled is on Friday, when the schools bring students (who I'm sure will be bored to tears). I hope he won't be devestated by the low turnout. Maybe he can blame it on the several other events going on around town.

I enjoyed the performance, and I think Hubbie and Mother enjoyed what they didn't sleep through.

Later, Hubbie did the honors of making French toast for our supper, and then we watched the 2009, R-rated movie, "The Hurt Locker," starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, and Guy Pearce. This four-star movie, about an elite squad of soldiers who disarm bombs in the midst of combat, was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first female director to receive an Oscar. The film itself won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2010.