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Chez Abattoir

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I’m starting to feel like our animals are staging their own production of Sweeney Todd around here.

Guinevere is fast.  Really fast.  No squirrels yet but she’s way into double digits with rabbits and chipmunks.  Last week when I called her in at the end of the night, she wouldn’t come.  I looked out into the yard and saw a large furry lump that Guinevere was clearly guarding.  It looked too big to be a rabbit so I slowly made my way out.  It was a possum.  It didn’t look alive but then I remembered that old phrase “playing possum” and wondered if maybe it was really alive.  YA was out at that point and we managed to catch Guinevere and take her inside.  YA stayed in the yard (taking pictures) and within a minute the possum had raised its head and looked around.  Within 20 minutes it had moved to the very back of the yard.  In the morning, before we let the dog out, we checked and the possum was gone.  We figure that it wasn’t injured, but putting on a good show to throw the dog off.

Nimue is also on the rampage.  It’s that time of year when mice try to find a warmer spot (apparently a mouse can get in a hole that is half the size of a dime) and this year is not exception.  Like most cats, Nimue isn’t even remotely interested in the mice after she’s chased them around and then killed them, but it does mean that I’ve come downstairs in the morning to find the little lifeless bodies – several of them in the last week.  Unfortunately, when the cat gets busy during the night, the dog thinks she needs to go down to see what fun is being had without her.  Then there is barking and some mess making.  The last couple of nights, we’ve put up the gate at the top of the stairs to keep the dog from joining the mayhem.

Usually the mouse situation is a short term issue… in a couple of weeks, the mice will have found a warmer spot and the cat will stop leaving us little gifts. The backyard?  It will remain an abattoir as long as Guinevere on guard!

What’s the last musical you’ve seen?

75 thoughts on “Chez Abattoir”

  1. Last week I watched The King And I.
    Sorry to be a Debbie Downer but I sang Getting To Know You to my new flock of Budgies through tears remembering the others that had died. Context made a happy song extremely sorrowful.

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    2. When I come home from work and the dogs are there to greet me, I sing, “Well, HELLLLLLOOOOO Doggies, Well, hello, Doggies. It’s so nice to see you back in townnnnnnn.”

      Musicals have to have a purpose in our daily lives. After all, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

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        1. sorry wes. i always remember the person who said being dead is like being a book on a shelf. people keep picking you up for a while and remembering you. thats kind of goal. to be remembered. live your life like a budgie and you will be successful

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  3. Watched my all0time fave on Netflix a few weeks ago: West Side Story. The last live musical I saw was probably Guys & Dolls more than 20 years ago in Chicago.

    Yeah, I know, I don’t get out much. 😦

    Chris in Owatonna

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  4. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    I also watched Hamilton twice in July which was well worth the $6.37 (with tax) I paid to DisneyPlus for a month membership. The first time I downloaded the lyrics to follow along because I always have difficulty catching the lyrics. Then I watched a second time, paying attention to all the drama and emoting on the stage. I think that musical is some kind of miracle. I don’t know how someone comes up with a hip hop version of the story and pulls it off, but Lin-Manuel Miranda did it well.

    In the summertime I don’t watch a lot of TV or streaming because I put my energy into gardening and outdoor activities. Now that the days are getting short, I will tune in more, I am sure.

    VS, all of Guenevere’s energy must be meant for hunting, as excited as she gets. When we take our girls to the dog park, their is always some rodent which gets treed, and a crowd of dogs below the tree are howling and carrying on dramatically. But there is always one dog who almost gets the rodent. I always think that must be a dumb rodent to hang out in a dog park.

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  5. I’ve seen only one musical live musical performance: the Pirates of Penzance. I’ve seen movies of many more, of course. The Music Man and My Fair Lady top that list.

    Late in the summer I turned fifteen, I contracted polio. They quarantined me, one week in bed, one week in a wheelchair. That second week was when mice came in our home, terrorizing my mother. I laid out a trapline around our home, rolling along it twice a day in the wheelchair to check for furry victims. Got thirteen.

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  6. daughter is a musical theater major at loyola and is dealing with online performance lessons. my music room got a workout last fall when she was home for online learning. this year she is back in chicago doing her online learning from her brownstone. because she is in the know we discovered broadway hd and for $5 a month or something you can binge watch broadway plays past present and now virtual performances are being developed to do stuff behind plexiglass and with video cameras as the vehicle.
    couldnt be better. last saw a tribute to joel gray at the theater where she was interning over the summer. she got in a play that will be done in october or so and i will find out if i get to go see her or how they will handle that.
    my critters are in attack mode but they are almost always in attack mode.
    the cats are indoor cats but one is a high alert door monitor and is currently dedicated to getting out to explore above all other things on the planet. he gets out way too often because he is so good at getting out in a split second and we have slow door shocks and he scoots out in a nanosecond. he is so stunned to be out he tends to wait to be discovered and shooed back into the house and he goes in as quickly as he goes out. the other night i had the motorcycle parked outside the fornt door when debbie and spencer took the dogs for a walk and i had left the key in the on position so the headlight was on. i got the report and told them to simply shut off the key. three hours later my maniac wife was looking for the cat which she does 24/7 since we started living in cat escape mode about 6 months ago when stay at home provided a greatly increased number of opportunities for the cat and she couldnt find the cat. well actually this happens fairly often. the cat is in a bedroom or in a corner of the basement or somewhere and turns up after a quick sweep of the perimeter but on this occasion it was nowhere to be found. debbie spencer spent 30 minutes looking and calling and flashlight shining in all the dark corners. checking the front yard and the back the garage and the closets and finally it turned out the cat was out in the front yard. the mice coming in has them on high alert. we had a chipmunk in the other night. the cat sits in the corner waiting the rustle of little critter feet coming out of the wall. dogs are always on watch . squirrels and chipmunks and yes possom that are playing possom are part of the deal. they are so proud when they are successful that it keeps them going for the hundreds of failures the experience between success stories.

    the new musical standards are so different from rogers and hammerstien. i like them lots but they are a whole different premise
    starting avbout the time of the book of morman or the spelling be the way the sentance structure is set up for the lyrics seems to have gone elsewhere

    the he may not be a man some girls think of as handsome rhyming pattern seems to have been replaced by words on a melodic line that dont bother to rhyme. i enjoy the structure but miss the old craft (as suggested by my sing songy efforts at peotry here on the trail }

    getting a little lengthy here. results of time in the waiting room down at rochester

    might be time for a minnehaha book club social distance effort before the freeze. i read whatever the two last damn books were before we all disolved into a slow fade in march.

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  7. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/the-best-musicals-now-on-broadwayhd

    falsettos was my last musical. it was great.
    looking at this list i have the rest of my free time slotted for september.

    i love musicals. as a kid i used to bounce ont he couch in the basement and play my fair lady and oklahoma, camelot and a stack of vinyl over and over and over. i have a feeling i could fix a lot of what ails me if i started that up again.

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  9. Do operas count? I’ve been watching a lot of live streams from the Metropolitan Opera during the last month or so. I’ve seen roughly ten operas, a couple of which I had never seen before. My favorite was Lucia di Lammermoor. One thing has become abundantly clear, sometimes you are better off NOT knowing what they are singing about.

    Probably the last live musical I saw was Theater Latté Da’s production of Into the Woods, or perhaps Sweeney Todd, probably four or five years ago. I’m really blown away by the talent Latté Da consistently assembles for the works they stage. One of the many reasons I consider myself lucky to be living in the Twin Cities.

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  10. Hi-
    Our newest dog, Bailey, shes a hunter. I think she’s bored; she doesn’t have anything to herd, so she’s hunting.
    She tangled with something when she was about 6 months old, we think maybe a raccoon, (plus we think the older dogs set her up. “you can take it! Go ahead, we’ll be right behind you! ((snicker snicker)). ” )
    So anything bigger, deer or coyotes, she’ll bark but she won’t engage until she’s got back up.
    When I go to the barn at night to get corn for the chickens, she’s in the feed room and I’ve seen her snatch sparrows out of the air. It’s crazy.

    I can’t remember the last musical I saw live.
    Hamilton was wonderful. Everything about it; the dancing, the lighting, the costumes, the movements… not to mention the music and acting.
    I was supposed to have a production of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ this summer. And missed Something in Chatfield; I can’t remember what they were even doing.
    A production of ‘Evil Dead, The Musical’ has been postponed. I’m not much for horror movies, but this one is just plain silly and fun.
    I bought a membership to the Broadway Touring shows at the Orpheum. Wanted to see Hamilton and ‘Hadestown’. Hope we get to see them at some point…

    I kinda miss the Met in HD movies. Just to see the scale on which they do things. And I miss movie theater popcorn.

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  12. Our wild tortie can’t seem to remember that windows have glass, because she continues to see things move outside like birds, butterfly, leaves, and in winter snowflakes, and she runs full tilt toward them and smashes into the windows. If we let her outside she would hurt herself through her exuberance.

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  13. I must add that the first live musical I ever saw was Oklahoma at Concordia Moorhead. The Ado Annie/ Will kissing scene was done very well! I had no idea Lutherans could be do passionate.

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  14. The last live musical I saw was “Dear Evan Hanson”. Prior to that, I have seen a bunch: The Book of Mormon; Hamilton; The Lion King (twice here); Phantom of the Opera; Les Miz; Wicked (once in Chicago, once here); Pirates of Penance (in London with Peter Noone of Herman Hermits fame in the lead); Beauty and the Beast (on Broadway, in the cheap seats); Show Boat; HMS Pinafore (Guthrie). I am a season ticket holder for the History Theatre and have seen a number of musicals there – the best, of course, being “Glensheen”, which I have seen twice. I have also seen a few top notch high school productions at both Southwest and Washburn High Schools – namely “Into the Woods”, Les Miz”, “Bye, Bye Birdie”, “In the Heights”, and “42nd Street”. Can you tell that I LOVE musicals?

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    2. I’d love to see “Pirates of Penance,” though it’s probably not as much fun as the original. 🙂 Or in the right hands, I guess it could be. Give Monty Python a crack at it.

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        1. I did too. And I think the very first baboon outing I was on was an outing to the Guthrie to see HMS Pinafore. I was pretty new to the group when I took on the task of organizing the outing. Turned out to be a bit like herding cats.

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    1. Saw it in Minneapolis first time it was here. Brought three of Tommy’s kids to the show. The first live theater performance any of them had ever seen, and probably also the last.

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  17. Last musical I watched, and second to last, is Mary Poppins Returns, or whatever is the name. Before that is a long gap of a couple decades. Despite directing and performing in them, I am not much of a fan. I saw one way and another about two too many versions of Oklahoma. Former students in key roles , and they asked us to come. Aside from those Oklahoma‘s, last play I saw live was a musical I find weak, Bye, Bye Birdie, directed by an idiot named Clyde who was asked to take over directing after two rehearsals. First director and musical director had a big fight. He jumped in cold, making up blocking as he went, which showed, at least to me. Did have some fun. Birdie was good actor with weak singing skills, but he could do cartoonish riffs on Elvis. And he was only 5’ 6”. Clyde make him disappear into chorus when they mobbed him and did have him play lower not higher than others and actor did a good job of hamming a small man trying to overcompensate. Clyde mostly blocks this from his memory, ending his theater involvements with that book.

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      2. Mostly spoofing. I was in fact a good director. I had not thought about that play in many years until I read this post. I never did theater again for two reasons: 90% because two big changes in my life took all my free time from being used for theater. 10% because I was worn out on dealing with unreliable cast members. I just don’t like the book of Birdie. Wish I had ended directing a play I liked. Kiss Me Kate would have been fun. I would have liked to do the play version, more a review, of Spoon River Anthology. I am very fond of the book Spoon River, despite it being dismissed by serious literary critics. It would not have excited the community. Oh, how I would like to direct Skin of Our Teeth.

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        1. I wrote a rather surreal play based on people’s reaction to Wizard of Oz. Set on the Iron Range. Lots of offbeat pieces of humor. Only about 30 minutes. I would love to stage that. More a closet drama but could be staged quite simply. The elements of theater are characters in the play, even design and stage management. Author and director are the two biggest characters who are only voices.

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    2. Yes. I really am fatigued. The gallbladder surgery recovery was not painful, but I have no energy. The Smokey,hazy days are rough, too and every weather change is painful.

      Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. That is so difficult to accept.

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  23. The last musical that I saw was at the Asolo Repertory Theater. It was The Sound of Music and it was just absolutely incredible. I saw Sweeny Todd there too and it also had music and singing. What an amazing show!
    One of my dogs caught a possum once. It played dead. It took some convincing to make him let go but he finally did. It dropped to the ground I got the dog away from it and it jumped up and ran away. It had huge teeth! I checked my dog to make sure he was okay. I don’t know how he caught it.

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