Brunette Sierra has officially tested negative! Huzzah! That's the Evita news for today. Still waiting in fucking suspense until Friday, which is why I did something to occupy my time tonight but feel like I can't go do anything distracting Thursday/Friday, JUST IN CASE THERE'S A SURPRISE ZOOM OR SOMETHING.

Work: I don't really have anything to say about work, my brain was not in the mood for such and I kept sneaking off to talk on another chat channel about everyone's trauma.

After work, I went to go see the play "A Great Migration" in Sacramento. I note the theme/logo of the show is a monarch butterfly, and right before I left, I remembered "oh yeah, I bought a shirt at Whole Earth that has monarch butterflies on it, and I have a few monarch butterfly pins I've never been able to do anything with." So I put the shirt on and pinned on the giant butterfly pin and put the other clip in my hair and put on a butterfly mask--and people at this show actually noticed and liked it and one took my picture for social media. I'm so flattered!

They also had monarch butterflies stuck around the theater doors and a light-up butterfly sculpture-y thing, which was great. AND THE STAGE! It's a layered stage with a giant monarch butterfly painted on it, interspersed with a map, and there's stuff all over the place (the usher joked that they hadn't cleaned anything up) like when kids are moving, suitcases, etc. The mom in Vancouver is up on a higher pedestal trying to figure out her projector, and they project some scenes/the talk/some background info behind them. My favorite was the stereotypical Irish potatoes (one wears a hat, one is a redhead) matched up with two dumplings to represent the interracial marriage. So silly, so funny.

The play is about a lepidopterist named Louise who's giving a TEDx talk in Vancouver combining "Migratory Patterns of the North American Monarch Butterfly" with raising three fatherless boys. While she's sweating it out with the evil projector, her three sons, Allan, Leo and Hank, are road tripping from SF to Vancouver to go. That's making it a bit simplistic: Leo gets carsick (but not plane sick, apparently) and booked a flight, but his brothers straight up kidnap him into a road trip. Why?

Because the family's half-Korean (Mom's Irish, Dad's Korean) and Dad ran off decades ago, but he never renounced his South Korean citizenship. Allan got himself a teaching job in South Korea and has found out that if he lands there, he'll be forcibly conscripted into the army there unless his dad renounces his citizenship. Wanting to meet Dad anyway, he voluntarily recruits Hank and well, forces Leo, as Dad is living somewhere in Washington(?) on the way to Vancouver. So, road trip interspersed with butterfly talk and flashbacks to the mom raising three teenage boys and moving every few years.* It's a very funny show and a delight to watch. There's also a snarky commentating narrator that's a delight.

I admit I expected some kind of payoff to this--there's a BRIEF mention of dad being a drinker and gambler and it seems slightly hinted that maybe the mom was moving due to that last one? But it's never spelled out, alas.
The one thing I think is a little weak is the end--the guys finally get to dad's door and basically chicken out and run away (which, let's face it, I kind of expected that to be bailed on since there's no sixth character in the program and the show was about over), and then the last scene is the guys showing up in the audience to watch Mom's talk. That's cute and all, but I don't feel like we got like, any resolution regarding the dad? What the hell is going on there? I don't know. But other than that, I really enjoyed this and had a good time.

I note that there's an understudy listed in the play, but they had ANOTHER guy (not the understudy) in this as Hank. He did an excellent job and all the brothers flowed together well, but these days I was wondering "who's got Covid? Both the original and the understudy?" Sigh.

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