Xanadu

Fio and Husband attended the opening night of the Georgetown Palace Theater's  presentation of Xanadu, a musical based on the 1980s film about a roller-skating Greek muse who falls in love with a hippie artist on the Venice Beach boardwalk.

Opening nights are usually plagued with glitches, but not this time.  The double- and triple-cast actors were terrific, Kyle Kirkhoff and Sara Burke, the leads, were the definition of perfection, while second leads Scott Shipman and Gazelle Garcia have voices to die for.  Fio was especially drawn to dancer Leslie R. Hethcox, whose every move was grace.

The costumes were right on, the sparse sets worked, and the choreography was a knock-out.

But Fio didn't like the play, which reminded her of the over-the-top playlets she wrote in high school. And she didn't like sitting in the third row with first nighters yelling in-jokes back and forth before the play began, after it ended, and during intermissions. And she had a headache.  And she doesn't like the director, who never answered her request for a tour of the theater when WHERE THE HEART LEADS was in the works.

But, other than those things, the show was okay.

Electronic Ignorance Revisited

Will some kind soul out there who has a big heart and an electronic brain explain Fiorella's "stats?"  She discovered them about six weeks ago along the side of her table-of-contents page and has been semi-enjoying them ever since.  But what do they actually mean, except that Fio's strategy of refusing to market herself has actually produced  a couple of faithful viewers?

First, what is the following "Pageviews" as opposed to the one below it?.

Babel Reconstructed May 9, 2013	8
Nice to Be Noticed May 8, 2013	7
Gardening May 7, 2013	7
One-liner May 10, 2013	6
Three More Sonia Snippets                                          4 May 6, 2013 Pageviews today                                                 2 Pageviews yesterday                                        50 Pageviews last month                                     1,952 Pageviews all time history Second, why, according to the ever-changing dailies, does Fiorella usually have more audience in the old USSR than in the USA?  (This list was an aberration.) United States 133 Russia 127 India 16 Germany 9 United Kingdom 5 Canada 4 Brazil 2 Romania 2 Australia 1Oman 1 HELP ME! 36,016