Last Sunday, my mom, my Aunt Chris, me and Audrey went to see Ok!ahoma! at the Er!e Playhouse. I was ... not super excited. I'm just not that cultured; I don't love plays, and I was worried about how Audrey might act. She's fine sitting through a movie, though, even a non-animated one, so I figured we could give it a shot.
We arrived just a few minutes before showtime and got settled. Oddly, the playhouse had a movie screen in front of the curtain and was showing previews/ads. Eventually the orchestra started playing. I (again, uncultured) assumed that this was the intro and that any moment the curtain would rise. This was not the case. The music went on and on. The curtain remained stubbornly down. Audrey was already bored.
Finally the curtain went up. There was a nice lady pretending to churn butter in the middle of the stage. Up and down, up and down. Things did not improve from there.
None of us actually knew anything about the play. Aunt Chris and Mom knew a few of the songs. But we really had no idea about the plot. So when, midway through the first act, the cowboy started trying to convince the guy in the smokehouse to hang himself, we were a bit taken aback. Audrey was blissfully unaware of this, having draped herself across my lap to proclaim that she was hungry! And thirsty! And really hungry!
Since I was mostly trying to keep Audrey from complaining too loudly, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to Mom and Chris. Until Mom's phone started ringing. She just got a new number last month, and apparently Steve or Jerry who had the number previously, didn't inform his friends of the change. So Steve/Jerry's friend had something important to say on a Sunday afternoon, and Mom had forgotten to silence the phone. It took 4 rings to silence it, and by then the (mostly very old) people around us were starting to look unhappy.
Aunt Chris leaned across and whispered, "There's only two more songs until intermission." Sadly, she had miscounted. Two songs later began the 15-minute-long drug-induced dream sequence ballet portion of the play. I will hand it to the folks at the Er!e Playhouse. They were true to the movie, at least. At this point, I noticed that Aunt Chris was fanning herself with her playbook. It WAS a bit stuffy in the theater. A few minutes later, still in the midst of the awful dream sequence, Aunt Chris began fanning harder. I looked over and noticed that tears were streaming down her face.
Turns out that when the overly skinny dancing cowboys had come onstage, THEY HAD NOT BEEN DANCING IN UNISON. This set Mom off. She had a prodigious laughing fit and could not contain herself. Aunt Chris was trying to hit her while also not looking at her because SHE couldn't contain herself. Mom began trying to do some Lamaze breathing techniques.
Luckily, FINALLY, one hour and 49 minutes in, intermission came. We marched out into the lobby and Aunt Chris announced that there was no chance we were going to stay for the second act, and we walked out.
