Just got back from watching a Panto (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) that a colleague, Julia, wrote, produced and directed. A Pantomime is a traditional British Christmas show for children, usually based on nursery tales and featuring stock characters in costume who sing, dance and perform skits (www.freedictionary.com)
It's all quite fun. When the nasty queen announces her evil plan, the crowd hisses and boos. When good triumphs over evil- the audience cheers.
There's the standard
Character - "Oh no you don't"
Audience: "OH YES YOU DO"
Character "Oh no you don't"
Audience "OH YES YOU DO
With other variations such as "Oh no you can't", "Oh no you won't"
When one of the characters tells a sob story, the audience empathise with an "Awwww" . The character capitalises on this by gesturing to the audience to say an even louder "AWWW"
Then when the lead character states that they are scared of spiders and bears and asks the audience to helpfully warn them if they see anything like that; said spider/bear only appears when the character's back is turned. The audience goes wild and point frantically "There, it's behind you", by the time the character turns around the spider/bear has 'disappeared'
Us Brits love innuendo - which flies over the kids heads, but gets all the adults chuckling. For example in this panto, they did go on about the size of the Woodcutter's 'chopper'
I really admire people like Julia who do things like that. She's putting her talents of writing, directing and playing music to good use. I'm getting bored with all the 'partying' - it's become same'ish for me. The same music, same crowd. The Valentines, Swinging Sixties party is next week, and after that I'm calling it quits - for at least a couple of months.
Inspired by Julia, I'm going to revive guitar playing and my singing, put a band together to perform an acoustic gig at Crisis Open Christmas. It's 10 months away, so it can be done. I've done a solo performance which went down a treat the last time. I can still do it on my own again, but I think I'll need more people to make it more interesting. I'm hoping to persuade Mike, who is a gifted bass player and singer to join up. I'll need a percussionist, a soprano, and an alto. Perhaps another guitarist.
Yeah that should be different
