So perhaps I won’t ever make a theatre critic

Because here is what I took away from seeing Caroline, or Change at the National Theatre:

1. I love the National Theatre. I love it so. When I realized that was where we were headed, I was transported with glee because the National Theatre is on the South Bank, and I love the South Bank, it is my most favorite bit of London (that I have seen so far). It has the National Theatre and a Foyle’s bookshop and The Space which is a performance space and people do all kinds of things there, and a modern art museum, and the London Eye and the Globe if you walk down a bit and a grassy picnic place and when I was there in July there were all kinds of people out to earn money, like these people who were painted all gray and held perfectly still and when you put money in their bowls they bowed like little machine statues, and there was a big performance of dancing and singing by a Christian group, and there was a big clown on stilts with fake long arms that would grab little children and do funny tricks (which would have scared me, but whatever), and, and, and, and all kinds of things. (Okay, this is no longer even remotely about Caroline, or Change. Let’s move on.)

2. I knew it was written by Tony Kushner, whom I love because he wrote Angels in America, and I couldn’t remember where it was set. I told Steve Lafayette at first, and then I said Shreveport, but it was actually Lake Charles. But seriously, I was like 90% right, because I remembered it began with L-A, and I knew it wasn’t Lafayette because Lafayette is different to Shreveport, and Shreveport and Lake Charles are much more like each other than they are like Lafayette. Am I right? Is that not so? Because when I explained this to Steve he laughed at me.

3. You know what they said in the play? DO YOU KNOW? They said PEE-can trees. Whatever, PEE-can trees. The word is pə-CAHN. It does not rhyme with WE can! It rhymes with, um, the Don. So if they’re going to set a play in Louisiana they should say the words right. I’m going to call up their dialect coach and have a word with her. And it will be pə-CAHN. Be prepared, Ms. (checks program) Michaela Kennen. You and me have had this date with each other from the beginning.

(Did you catch that reference to Streetcar Named Desire? Not if you saw the movie, you didn’t, because it was edited out of the script! to eliminate the possibility that anybody might have thought that Blanche wanted to be raped. And you also didn’t know about her gay husband. I actually (as you might have surmised) only said that so that I could let you know about the censorship going on behind the scenes at Warner Brothers in the fifties.)

Well, so that’s it. My reflections on Caroline, or Change in their entirety. I think my brain is too disorganized to be a theatre critic; but of course Dorothy Parker’s was too, but she was funny so everybody forgave her.

Now on to the last bit of business. I don’t see enough cute babies. I know there were those pictures of my cousins from last week, and they are very cute and I look at them to cheer me up and whatnot, but there are only three or four of them, and that’s just not enough cute babies in my world. Whenever I pass by a mum with a baby, I walk really slowly to prolong the amount of time that I will have the cute baby in my view.

And you know what I heard? I heard that a certain person over at a certain organization has a baby that is a goddess of adorability. I heard that her cuteness is the stuff of legend, and that her mum has to try very hard to pretend that she just has a normal baby, when in fact she and everyone else knows that her baby is the most perfectly adorable specimen of babyhood that has ever existed on earth. That’s what I heard.

So, you know. Just putting that out there. Not hinting at anything.