🎶 Traditioooon! 🎶

To you, the day Christmas came was the most important day of the year. But for me,

Thank you for being here with me for that joke.

On Monday, as is Christmas tradition, I went down to Chinatown for Chinese food. meowtima invited me, along with a bunch of other people who don't celebrate Christmas, so it was five Jews, one Chinese person, one Malaysian person, and one Kazakh person. We ate an enormous amount of food, I got compliments on my aesthetic, we had a big discussion over halakha--this is almost inevitable if you get a bunch of Jews all together in one place--and when I requested that we make sure to order a variety of dishes so there would be plenty for me to eat that wasn't treif, someone said:

At least one of the five of us keeps our ancient traditions.

It was definitely worth the almost-an-hour that we waited before we were seated, and I'm glad that we deputized meowtima and his Malaysian friend to do the ordering. I got home at almost midnight, extremely full, and then went to bed.

Oh, and meowtima got me a present! He said it was stupid, but when I opened it and found a plague doctor mask I didn’t think so. It makes me want to plan a Darkest Dungeon cosplay—I’ve already got a lot of what I need in my ordinary wardrobe. I mean, as I write this I’m wearing a black sweater with glove sleeves, a black woolen poncho/cloak, and a black hooded infinity scarf.

Tuesday, it was Tuesday. I did nothing.

Wednesday I took advantage of all of my time off and bought tickets to go see Fiddler on the Roof, which has a three-week run in Chicago! I've never seen a stage production of it before, and I got seats right at the front of the balcony. To cut straight to the point, it was fantastic and I'm incredibly glad I went. Tevye's quotes from the Bible, the increasingly unorthodox () marriages of his daughters, the jokes, it was all great. I especially liked his performance of "If I Were a Rich Man," which made it seem like he really got into the fantasy of not having to work, swaying as he sang to himself (a bit like davening, now that I think about it). It was much more free-spirited than the movie version.

The reviews had some complaints about the performances of Golde and Yente, but the only other version of Fiddler I've seen is the movie and I barely remember it, so I don't have anything to compare it to. I felt that Tevye's performance, which really played up a man trying to make the best of poverty by means of his faith and the wisdom of the Good Book:

"Tevye: As Abraham said, I am a stranger in a strange land...
Mendel: Moses said that.
Tevye: Ah. Well, as King David said, I am slow of speech, and slow of tongue.
Mendel: That was also Moses.
Tevye: For a man who was slow of tongue, he talked a lot."

was enough to carry the whole production for me. Which is good, because it's really centered around him. No one else gets much character development--his daughters are developed only through their marriages (except for the two youngest), and his wife doesn't change at all. Neither really does anyone else. It's Tevye's story, and it shows. But I loved it for that, and the man playing Tevye was great.

"Perchik: Wealth is a curse!
Tevye: Then may G-d smite me with it and may I never recover!"

There were two people behind me who had never seen the show before, who spent the whole intermission talking about how funny the show was and how much they liked it.

I went to bed very late, which wasn't great because on Thursday I got up very early to go meet aaron.hosek for our yearly brunch at Svea. Every December they have a Christmas plate that's delicious, so this is our fifth annual trip there. I only go there once a year, in December, and I always look forward to it. We sat at the counter this year, ate our food, and talked about things other than video games! Hopefully we can do it again next year.

I hope everyone's having a good December and you're looking forward to the New Year!