Well, it is March 1st and the finishing line of our London adventure is now clearly in sight. Frankly, I’m not really looking forward to this last month or so, since it will involve lots of logistics and packing and flying and figuring out details, some of which I will almost certainly miss and have to scramble to fix. I hope I will be able to ignore the stress and annoying details of the next month and enjoy our last weeks here. Helping me do that will be the visit of Paul Weeks, my long-time friend (suite-mate at Bowdoin and married to Judie’s college roommate Gigi). I am looking forward to that.

Miami Beach: Judie had been encouraged to take some vacation time and travel outside of the UK in connection with the visa issue we had. So about two weeks ago, we decided to go to Florida. Judie wanted to visit the K&L Gates office there and we needed to get something notarized to open trust accounts in connection with bequests to our kids and their cousins under the will of Judie’ Aunt Neanie (too long a story). (One of the things we discovered here is that, consistent with the British desire to make simple administrative acts as difficult as possible, it is very difficult to get things notarized. While in the US, everyone can be a notary, in the UK there are very few. And it was not clear that a British notarization would work for the US bank, which meant making an appointment at the US Embassy and paying $50 per signature.) So going to Miami to get something notarized is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. We contacted Chris and Nancy, who often spend time in Miami Beach at this time of year and, although they hadn’t really planned to go, they decided it would be fun to meet us there. So we made our airline and hotel reservations and spent 23-27 February at the Setai Hotel, a place that they had been to many times.

The Setai is a ridiculously fancy and expensive hotel. We managed to get a deal that brought the price down to simply expensive from the normal stratospheric, although they got us back on the drinks and lunches, etc. ($28 hamburgers, $15 and up and up for a glass of wine, etc.) But it was great fun lounging by the pool in sunny low 80s weather each day, taking walks to see the art deco buildings, going out to increasingly great dinners and just generally relaxing. There was some sort of food and wine festival going on up and down the Beach, but the tickets were pricy and that wasn’t why we were there, so we skipped it. After living in London, Miami Beach seemed particularly exotic. All of the semi-clothed, tanned people walking, biking, jogging and skate boarding around the place in their brightly colored clothes was quite the contrast to the poor Londoners marching through one gray day after another, all fashionably dressed in black. It felt incredibly self-indulgent just walking down the street in shorts, sandals and a Hawaiian shirt.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”: Since 1 March is also the first Wednesday of the month, it was time for Judie’s Women’s Group to take the flat for the evening, which means that I was off for a solo theatre experience. So I went to see “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End. I’d seen the Burton and Taylor movie any number of times. The most memorable viewing was when I saw it at Smith College and left the Hall where it was shown and came out to the house and swing where it was filmed. Very eerie. About ten years ago, we saw a wonderful version on Broadway with Bill Irwin (amazing–won the Tony) and Kathleen Turner. In this production, Martha was played by Imelda Staunton, who was the big draw as she is a multiple Olivier Award winner, albeit mostly for performances in musicals. I thought she was extremely good. Her Martha was earthy, smart, bitter, angry, frustrated, funny and sad. Each time you see the play, you should see a different Martha and that was the case here. It is really such a wonderful part and such a great play that I think you inevitably have a good to great production if you have actors willing to give their all to the characters. I do think that the greater role in the play is George as he goes from utter degradation in the first act (“Humiliate the Host”) and cuckolding in the second act (“Hump the Hostess”) to taking control and getting in his own punches, leading to the shattering conclusion (“Get the Guests” and “Bringing Up Baby”). Conleth Hill (probably best known for his role in “Game of Thrones”) was funny, weak, exhausted, furious, impotent and powerful in a fascinating performance. The visitors, Nick (Luke Treadway, winner of awards for his role in “Curious Incident”) and Honey (Imogene Poots) were both very effective in creating fully-realized characters in a play that is dominated in so many ways by their hosts. I particularly like Poots’ Honey, who was not simply a mousy, drunken, vomiting cipher, but had some real personality buried down there. The part of Nick is the hardest to play since you are not supposed to like him, but I thought Treadway’s Nick managed to combine attractiveness with repulsiveness effectively. The direction allowed George and Martha to start lightly, making anyone who didn’t know what was coming to feel like it was a comedy (although if you did know what was coming, it was hard to laugh too hard). Then, of course it builds and builds to a series of flagellations. The set was wonderful. It captured a lovely living room that had been lived in for a long time, was crowded with stuff and not very neat and had seen better days–a visual parable for George and Martha themselves. “Virginia Woolf” is not exactly a comfortable play to sit through, but it is one of the great works of American Theatre and is something that you have to see once in a while to remind yourself just how powerful the theatre can be. I’m glad I got to see this again.

Punishment for our Self-Indulgence: I suppose it was the fates’ retribution for having too much fun in Miami. Our trip back was the worst flight ever. It began innocently enough when American Airlines could not find our reservations and told us we had to check  in at British Air, even though it was a joint flight. We walked a quarter mile to BA and found a long check in line with two agents and at least a 45 minute wait. (At least when we made it to the front, we were helped. Some people waited in line for as long as an hour only to be sent over to American.) Of course, by the time we reached an agent, we could not sit together and there were only middle seats. Bad news for a nine hour flight in economy. But worse was to come. I found myself seated next to a woman with a 20 month old on her lap. To make matters worse, the child had not yet learned to talk at all and could only communicate with grunts and screams. She had one of those bulkhead crib things for him, but seemingly every time she got him into it and asleep, the seatbelt light would come on and the flight attendants would come and insist that he be removed, thereby waking him up and causing him to cry/shriek. So between the tiny seats and my little neighbor doing an audition for “The Miracle Worker”, I didn’t get much sleep and ended up feeling like I’d been in an accident. Then, after staggering off the plane, we got to sit around trapped for ten minutes in a golf cart thing that we had gotten to ease Judie’s walk with her bad knee. And finally, after fighting our way through customs and laboriously explaining our visa situation to a skeptical border agent, we went to the baggage claim for Miami to find no bag for us. After another ten minutes, we were told that there were separate baggage claims for American and British Air, even though all the bags came off the same plane and our bag was there. We slept well when we finally got back to the flat.