A surprise night out - Moonlight and Magnolias at Nottingham Playhouse

I had an unexpected night out last week. I knew Moonlight and Magnolias would be on at Nottingham Playhouse but I hadn't bought tickets because the end of February/beginning of March was a busy time with trips to Manchester and Norfolk. When I saw Notts TV running a competition for tickets I still entered though because, after all who ever wins competition?

Well, this time I did. Checking my email on Monday evening after my long weekend in Norfolk I was delighted to find I'd won two tickets -  and then a bit worried as I'd ignored my inbox since Friday. All was well though, so off we went to Nottingham last Thursday evening, and had a thoroughly enjoyable time.


Moonlight and Magnolias by Ron Hutchinson (directed here by Kirsty Patrick Ward) is set in 1939, in the fraught days as the filming of Gone With The Wind gets underway, then halts as producer David O Selznick fires screen writer and director, and coerces Ben Hecht and Victor Fleming into taking their places. The plan is they'll spend five days shut in Selznik's office, and come up with a new workable script ... or else!

With Selznick (Joe Alessi) mincing about the stage as Scarlett O'Hara, and new director Fleming (Oscar Pearce) giving his best as Melanie in the agonies of childbirth, while Hecht tries to turn their dramatics into a screenplay, and harassed assistant Miss Poppenghul (Hayley Doherty) keeps them supplied with peanuts and bananas, it's hilarious!
There's a serious side too. The pressure is on because no one other than Selznick actually believes Gone With The Wind will be a box-office success, but Selznick has a multitude of screenplays that haven't captured his idea of the book. Hecht believes Selznick should pay more attention to the world outside his movie studios; that Selznik doesn't acknowledge that Jews, even those as rich as movie producers, are still treated as second-class citizens in the US, and doesn't take the plight of European Jews seriously. 

You'll notice I didn't mention the actor playing Ben Hecht; for this special praise has to go to Felix Dunning. Normally he's deputy stage manager, but last Thursday he was asked to take over the role from Dan Fredenburgh who was ill. Thrown in at the deep end with no time to learn lines, he was brilliant. The script had to be hidden in a ring binder which looked like an appropriate prop for a screen writer, but otherwise, apart from a very few moments, Felix completely looked and acted the part; amazing after one day's rehearsal.

A "Half-full" Week - despite parents' health problems

Since the beginning of the year we seem to have been in a loop of disruptions, and just when I thought things were settling down, after earlier-than-expected grandson, colds, my daughter's move, and then the snow, something else came along to throw everything pear-shaped. This time it was health problems for my parents. Something comparatively minor really - apart from the fact that if you're in your late 90s NOTHING is ever minor, so when a younger person would be nipping to see a GP, older folk end up in hospital, and when one goes in hospital, the other goes into respite care. So we've had a week or more spending all day out, dashing, or sitting stuck in traffic queues, between hospital and care home, getting home with barely enough time to walk the poor dog (who's definitely feeling neglected), grab a takeaway/frozen dinner, and collapse on the sofa, numbly watching old Star Trek Enterprise and Big Bang Theory, before falling asleep.
Nothing prepares you for having to turn into carer for your parents, and it's been a week that's left me physically and emotionally drained. Sadly, such weeks are bound to become more frequent.
It's too easy, though, to fall into the glass-half-empty mindset, so instead I've decided to list all the good things that also happened this week.


Firstly, a competition prize arrived. A Taste of Arran gift box won through CalMac ferries in the run up to Christmas. It's taken a while to arrive as e-mails got mixed up, but it's here! And filled with cheese, chutney, oatcakes, and (my Scottish favourites) haggis, and tablet (sort of like fudge but better).

Making time on Mother's Day to take Dylan the dog out for a special walk at Shipley Country Park, with new places for him to sniff, oh and daffodils and snowdrops for me to admire.

Later that day, tea with our eldest daughter to celebrate her first Mother's Day, and look, a wonderful 'first' for me too, a card from my baby grandson.




Retail therapy and discovering a fab new (to me) clothing brand, Lily and Me. FB has been showing me their adverts for a while, and this week I thought, Why not? Let's try them - and these first two tops are great.





Food - yes, we've eaten a LOT of frozen dinners and takeaways, but one day we treated ourselves to lunch at IKEA - hardly gourmet dining but it was different (Moroccan chicken), self-service so quickly picked up, and, most importantly, on the route from care home to hospital.


Our new armchair, on order for six or seven weeks, arrived.








More food! Lemon muffins from Morrisons. I don't often shop there but we were restocking my parents' food cupboards with cake, amongst other things, and I thought it best to test these myself.




The garden daffodils have survived the beating they took from the snow, and are now in flower.









And don't forget social media. I know lots of people knock it, but at times like these it reminds me that there IS more to life than sitting in traffic queues and hospital wards

Prizes!!

Since I embraced Twitter a few years ago, I've become addicted to competitions. It's so easy to enter on Twitter - click the retweet button and follow! No filling in forms, finding a stamp, walking to the postbox - one click and you're done. I also seem to have found a winning streak. In the last year or so I've won books, bath stuff, theatre tickets, tickets to Chipping Norton Literary Festival  and numerous other things but a small recent win was one of the most delightful.

In celebration of the Queen's Jubilee Taylors of Harrogate were giving away a sample of  coffee and 'royal' edible goodies from Bettys - the famous tea-rooms and bakery. To be honest I'd expected rather vague dog-shaped biscuits and a chocolate bear with a bit of icing decoration - but they were wonderful!

The dogs definitely looked like corgis and the Guardsman Bear was stunning.









 His jacket and hat are made of marzipan with piped icing for braid, buttons and belt. The detail is amazing.













For a long while, I thought he was too good to eat......

.....but sadly even the cutest chocolate bear doesn't live forever.