Gentlemen, do the right thing
Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day. This is an important occasion, and not one to be taken lightly — or, horror of horrors, forgotten — unless you enjoy being a thirty-five-year-old bachelor living in your parents’ basement and spending all your free time playing online Dungeons & Dragons.
Pancho Villa did not waste his time like that. Pancho Villa did not spend his Valentine’s nights alone. Pancho Villa was a man, and he knew how to treat his significant other of the moment.
This may or may not be at the heart of Sabina Berman’s comedy Entre Villa y una Mujer Desnud (Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman), which opened last night at Milagro Theatre. The play’s performed in Spanish, with English subtitles, and although we haven’t seen it yet, as Milagro describes it, it sounds fetching:
Gina wants more out of her casual relationship with Adrian, a liberal intellectual who’s in it only for some good sex. Adrian shies away from any form of commitment — that is, until Gina takes up with a younger, more sensitive lover. That’s when the spirit of Mexico’s most famous revolutionary rides again, appearing as Adrian’s macho conscience ready to do anything to win this battle of the sexes.
This evening Mr. and Mrs. Scatter will hie themselves out to Hillsboro for the opening of Bag & Baggage Theatre’s own contribution to the battle of the sexes: a scrunching-together of Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher’s Jacobean response to it, The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, in which Kate comes out on top. Do tell!
We might have gone to Third Rail Rep’s new revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, which looks like it could be a memorable production, but not this weekend. It’s about three loser guys trying to pull off a scam from a junk shop. What’s the percentage in that? If they couldn’t score a date, they should have just settled in for a round of Dungeons & Dragons.
Don’t let that happen to you, D&D boys. A last-minute tip: Flowers are always good. Chocolates, too. At Chez Scatter, we’re planning oysters and sparkling wine. We might be leaving our bandolier and hat on the hitching post, though.
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PICTURED: Nurys Herrera and Vicente Guzmán-Orozco in “Entre Villa y una Mujer Desnud.” Photo by Russell Young.
February 13th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
FYI, I am 39, happily married, and spent last night playing Dungeons & Dragons with, among others, my wife. In the basement. And yet we are not socially deprived shut-ins, and plan on having a fully romantic Valentine’s Day. And we’re not alone. Please revise your stereotypes.
February 13th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Hello Marc, welcome to the fray. Mr. Scatter is abashed. Perhaps he should have mentioned (he has in the past) that he spends every Thursday afternoon ferrying a passel of 12-year-olds to their weekly D&D sessions. He deposits them at their dungeon master’s home, goes to a coffee shop to read or write, then picks them up and delivers them home, all with the bonus of listening to them chatter cheerfully about killing trolls and such. He sees a romantic future for all of these boys, though not, he hopes, quite yet.
FYI to other Scatterers: Besides being a D&D devotee, Marc is a distinguished writer who writes a mean movie review. That’s “mean” as in “bad,” which means good.
February 14th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Live theatre would have been grand.
Instead we went to the cinema
and spent the afternoon at Rick’s
There’s nothing like Casablanca
Bogart, Bergmann, Henreid,
Claude Rains, the list goes on
Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre
Not only do Ilsa and Rick both tell
Sam to “play it”, play it is heard
again … Henreid in his magnificence
says “Play it (pause) The Marseilles” …
If you can’t go live, go to Rick’s.
February 15th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
I saw that “Casablanca” was playing; thought about going — haven’t seen it in years. We’ve been trying to introduce the Large Smelly Boys to the joys of black & white cinema, with occasional success: the Cary Grant version of “Arsenic and Old Lace” was a big hit, for example. I remember that the cinematography in “Casablanca” is terrific.