notes & things | 9/17/2026
Another week is quickly vanishing down the rabbit hole and we find ourselves mid-September, though the humidity the past couple of days may belie that. This past weekend brought another trip to the drive-in, a musical adaptation of Tweflth Night out at Chicago Shakespeare, and sneaking off to see the new Practical Magic, which had all the right witchy vibes as the original, despite my relatively low expectations given Hollywood antics. The original came out when I was in grad school, and I remember watching it while visiting my parents and then promptly and immediately buying the soundtrack. I watch it every fall, usually more in October, but I bumped up my viewing to last week to get ready for the new one. It's a nice segue into the fall season from summer and before I move onto more horror-ish favorites.
This week, I have been puttering away on the play about e-mails from the dead, which is turning out to be both ghosty and mystery-toned, so it's lining up nicely. I'll be releasing this month's play over on Patreon and the New Play Exhcange in the next week or so. Indiana is for Lovers is the motel zombie play, which I have been working on--much during the actual hotel mini-retreats the summer has allowed. There are also two others on the verge of polishing up, the orchid play and the train station / time travel project, which will round out the year of mostly focusing on plays. I have a couple more ideas for scripts that I want to see if they pan out, but will probably be getting back to the Calypso manuscript after that. I also want to make a little more headway on the thrifting memoir to get it into some sort of final shape to revise in 2027 (I may even have a title!)
The night comes on faster now than it even did a few weeks ago. Mid-September is when I notice that dwindling daylight after the longer summer days. The light even after 5pm is on the decline, when it lasted until well after 7pm in August. This week, J has a musical festival he'll be at. I refrained from going since crowds, outside humidity, and all-day sunlight are not my favorite things. I'm also not a concert person, my preferred way of experiencing music being at home while I am doing other things. Musical festivals are mostly just nightmare fuel.
Earlier this week, we also saw Dirty Dancing at the Niederlander, which was a mess of half-assed adapting, bad acting, and mediocrity I was literally offended at having paid so much to see (at that theater, we like to get one of the little front-of-loge boxes, but tickets are usually over a $100 each. I am as suspicious of nostalgia-bait (see my fears with Practical Magic above) as anyone, but this show's failures seemed especially grievous considering the potential. Yet the audiences cheered at every familiar line and scene, and then gushed how great it was as they left the theater, which put me in a funk and kind of pissed at the wasted opportunity. I'm willing to accept that not every musical is a work of genius on the level of a Hamilton or Hadestown, and we've seen some fun, but not well-constructed as musicals based on films the past few years (Legally Blonde, Back to the Future, Death Becomes Her) but those were at least a good night of entertainment. This was decidedly not.
What we did thankfully get to see that was totally worth it last week was a play called Sisters at The Writers Theatre up in Glencoe, which is a newer play about the consciousness of AI and what it means to be a human (and this subject to emotions, resentments, desires, and all the messier things of it) told through the story of one girl/woman and her father's invention, an AI sibling trapped in a box (who spends the play as a disembodied voice off stage.)
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