This is one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons of all time where they are given an assignment they know will be cancelled, and of course do not work on this task (whereas Alice finds the task to be completely urgent):
The trick of course is getting a good sense for when a meeting will be cancelled or when priorities shift and some tasks are just left at the bottom of the to-do list forever. This can backfire spectacularly if a manager suddenly remembers and elevates the unnecessary task. I don't often pull this at work, but it has worked out in my favor a few times.
At any rate, in this specific case I am thinking about the Stratford festival. I wasn't that interested in the 2019 season and didn't book any tickets in Dec. or Jan (before the prices went up). When I finally decided I was interested in checking out Henry VIII after all, the prices were frankly ridiculous. (This is often a problem with shows in the Studio Theatre. The Festival Theatre has a much broader range of ticket prices, and it is more typical that they will offer 2-for-1 sales and other discounts.)
I decided I would hang tough and see if they sent me a late-season discount. While it took longer than I expected, I finally got the flyer with the discount code. I was a bit more surprised that the Stratford Bus was still going to be running in October, but that makes it even more satisfying (since renting a car to drive down there would more or less eliminate the ticket savings). So I will be checking out Henry VIII after all. This gets me pretty close to seeing all the history plays, aside from King John (I guess I'll just rent the video from Stratford's 2014 season) and Richard II. Not sure if I have had a chance to see Richard II and passed, though I have seen Marlowe's Edward II (once live and then Derek Jarman's film). While it's not the end of the world, it is just a tiny bit disappointing that the bus will be coming back kind of late on the 20th, so I can't catch Thievery Corporation at the Danforth Music Hall that evening. (Or rather I can't count on being back in time, though I might conceivably be back home by 8 pm. Hmmm.)
At any rate, next season at Stratford looks a lot more interesting to me. There are three plays I am likely to see (The Rez Sisters, Moliere's The Miser and Hamlet) and I may go see Hamlet-911, which is a new play by Ann-Marie MacDonald built on the bones of Hamlet. I may even take my son to see Hamlet,* but I'll have to see how everything works out in terms of timing. I will make much more of an effort to book tickets in the pre-sale period before the prices go up.
Once again, Shaw doesn't interest me that much. There is a small chance I'd check out Trouble in Mind, and I'll think it over for a while. Actually, I might be up for Flush, based on a novella by Virginia Woolf, which is one of the lunchtime one-act plays, but I am almost certain the bus won't get me there in time, so I would either have to rent a car or carpool with someone else who wants to go to that.
* I've definitely been taking him in reverse order -- Lear and then Othello and now probably Hamlet. I still haven't managed to get him to Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, which are the much more typical entries into the tragedies.
No comments:
Post a Comment