It's been 3 times in a week with the tears of people in the vicinity

Incident #1:

We went to see Home on Broadway with Casey who had gotten tickets at an exteremely affordable price. She's excellent when it comes to getting tickets at an extremely affordable price. Usually the deal involves making yourself available with correspondingly extremely short notice... like the tickets are for a show that starts in three hours. But yeah. That's why I heart living in NYC.

Anyway, Tom and I go to the show. It's good! Casey goes to lots of shows and has a clear plan for how to properly commemorate the event:

Casey's photos of Home on Broadway

In contrast, here's the photo I took:

Photo I took to commemorate the evening

 

Clearly one of us is better at commemorating Broadway performances we have seen. 

You be the judge.

Here's the main point of all this: During the curtain call, I notice that the older gentleman in the row in front of us crying real tears. He's wiping his face. And my heart went out to him because I could see how the performance might hit you, especially if you were in the thick of the subject matter. It was easy enough for me to view it all from a remove. I didn't live through Vietnam or the draft or the story of Muhammad Ali or other conscientious objectors or maybe just being stigmatized and losing everything because society does dumbass things that inflict harm on people.

This was the first incident with tears last week.

Incident #2:

On Saturday we went to the Marc Cohn show with Stacie and Andy. Stacie is a big fan and I think during/after this show my Marc Cohn fanhood increased to an all-time high. Marc Cohn is the "walking in Memphis" guy in case you are scratching your head.

The show was at City Winery. The venue there has long tables that you sit at to watch the performance. Many people have dinner and drinks. It's very civilized. We were seated right next to an older couple who seemed friendly enough. In any event, the woman apologized profusely when she dropped her butter knife and got butter all over my shoe.

Fast forward to the middle of the show when Marc Cohn dedicates a song to his longtime friend David Crosby who recently died. He said the song went out to Judy and Jim in the audience who had known David well and were very dear to him. All of a sudden, the woman without a butter knife began kind of quietly sobbing because yeah. She was Judy. Stacie has a way with people and patted her and gave her a tissue and Judy calmed down.

Incident #3:

This went down yesterday. It was Swedish Midsummer, which, you gotta know is the second biggest holiday in Sweden after Christmas. I mean, it's a thing. There's a huge Midsummer festival in Battery Park every year and we've been there every year for I'm going to say the past twenty years.

So yeah, there's the whole dancing around the midsummer pole that goes on. I love it. We're out there every year hopping like a little frog, slipping on the ice like a fox, barreling around like the priest's little crow... I've learned to ask no questions. One of the dances features the part where everyone bawls hysterically. Here's a video from a few years ago... the bawling is preceded by some bread baking in case you're wondering why everyone is banging on the ground. That's dance for baking bread.