I went to go use my coupon at Scott's store before heading down to Mom. I was stressed out about getting there before he does (in my experience of trying to hang around and wait for him to show up, he takes like 20-40-ish minutes to wander in on Saturday mornings....which is convenient if you wish to avoid him as I do now) because I went out to my car and found it totally covered in nature barf and had to go run off to get it washed (before it rains again!) because Mom would lose her shit if I showed up with a dirty car. But I made it there six minutes after opening. Luckily for me, neither him nor his mother was in there, just lovely Kimberly, who got me in and out of there (buying notions) in another six minutes. I did see his car when I was driving out, so oops, he was in there... but he wasn't out and didn't see me. WHEW.

I made it early to Roger's, we had lunch, Mom gave me some random food items, and then I had to drive her to San Jose. I put on a podcast about Lucille Ball both ways, which helped a lot, but she still was..Mom, with hitting the imaginary brake with her foot, telling me how I should be following behind cars, yelping in fear any time some other car did anything weird, and yelling at me about the GPS. So that was...not awesome. After we got home I asked Roger if she ever bitches about his speed, and he said she just acts that way with me and from what he saw with his mother and sister, this is what mothers and daughters do. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I will note that the Lucille Ball podcast (Even the Rich) was very interesting, I had no idea that Lucy (a) had a kid get shot and paralyzed in her backyard and (b) randomly fell ill, lost feeling in her legs for four months, miraculously got feeling back, and then had to wear a 20 pound weight on one leg for months because it had somehow gotten shorter during the whole thing and it hurt like hell. Daaaaaamn.

It also went into how her movie career was perennially B movies, how she had to have her personality eliminated, get totally made over as a redhead with big eye makeup, and how the studios still said she wasn't memorable and wanted to get rid of her. And how she got thrown out of acting school for not singing and not dancing and not really getting elocution down and she ended up learning from Ginger Rogers's mother (!) instead and that went a lot better. Only the first two episodes out of four or so are up yet so they haven't really gotten to how she got into television, but it sounds like she just snapped and was all "Fuck this, I'm creating my own thing as ME here."

I note I was too tired after all of that, plus really hungry, and they actually let me spend the night there, so I did that. We went to Panera (where I met a stylin' gay guy and we were admiring each other's wardrobes) for dinner and then Roger read and Mom watched "The Company You Keep," which I actually quite liked.

As for the show we saw, it was My Fair Lady. I can't remember when the hell I might have last seen the show--I know I've seen the movie and Pygmalion. I texted Morgan at intermission saying that the elocution lesson reminded me of singing lessons, and she said, "Lol good. I'm always with you."

Now it's been awhile for me, but man, Higgins is JUST AN UNREPENTANT COMPLETE ASSHOLE from start to finish of this. He mellows out maybe like 1% over the course of 2.5 hours. Most fictional properties would have written this as a romance, had him mellow out, get to know and like Eliza, maybe have him act like less of a dick. But no. He is utterly dickish to everyone throughout the show, and brags about this, and everything revolves around him, and the most affection he has for Eliza is to consider her his possession. No interest in marrying her or anyone (he openly hates women), he's just...accustomed to her face, and presumably her grabbing his slippers. Eliza matures so much and becomes so together and figures out what she's going to do with her life (marry Freddy, go to Higgins's linguistic rival), and you just want her to go "FUCK YOU, HIGGINS" and leave SO bad. Even his mother thinks he's an asshole. The audience was literally gasping at things he said, they were so awful.

The last scene is a...contentious one. In the original play, Pygmalion, Eliza is all "I'm leaving and marrying Freddy" and bugs off. In the movie musical they have her come back after she's left and Higgins demands his slippers. I read online at intermission that the 2018 Broadway version had her return, chuck the slippers at him and leave again, which I was rooting for. Instead, she walks in, touches his cheek, he delivers the slippers line but actually sounding sad about it, and then she walks off...but kind of further into the "house" offstage, not back out the front door. I've heard they end the show ambiguously these days and that is as ambiguous as you can possibly get.

Oh, and random fact: I did not know they randomly had drag queens in the poor London bars of 2012, and yet there were four guys in corsets and skirts dancing around during "Get Me To The Church On Time." That was....new.

I did get a random message from (Redhead) Sarah talking about a Winters board game group that Scott and Cameron were in that she thought I was in and wanting to tag me about some board game she's buying. I was all "um, I have not been invited into such a thing," and she said she just made it up. I guess she just wants to have a group. Mmmkay, then? Confused.

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