The show must go on...

A couple of the juniors from the Jewish side came up for the weekend because their Bubby was in a play.

At 87 years of age Bubby retains her love for the stage. She’s lived and breathed live theatre all her life. It’s something she was born into. Her family was deep into live theatre in the old country, which happened to be Poland. Various relations landed in the bigs; Broadway, film, and TV.

She never made the bigs. Instead, it fell to her to start up a theatre company in a small town a couple of hours north of Toronto, and that company is going strong to this day.

Ironically, her family hails from the same small town in Poland as my mother’s folks. What are the odds? Here I am with the Farm Manager living the good life at Falling Downs. Eighty years ago our respective forbears, her’s Jewish, mine nominally German, were co-habiting the same shithole shtettl in Poland.

But back to the play. The theatre company she co-founded over fifty years ago was putting on a stage adaptation of “Gas-Head Willy,” a novel by a local author. What we didn’t know was that the theatre had an air conditioning failure last Thursday.

You’d like to think that would have been fixed by Friday at the latest, but such was not the case. I overheard some admin types talking amongst themselves and it seems they can’t get a contractor on site till Monday or Tuesday.

What the hell? You’ve got a veritable emergency and you can’t get a HVAC contractor in under four days?

Go into the trades, dear young people…  It’s gonna be at least another hundred years before a robot comes out to fix your air conditioner.

Meanwhile, we’ve been having a heat-wave in these parts. Yup, we’ve been setting record high temperatures most of September.

Heat wave.

Record high temperatures.

No air in the theatre…

But the show must go on!

And it did. Not that I particularly noticed or cared. I was fading in and out of consciousness for most of the evening. Luckily, I was alert for Bubby’s lines, so I didn’t completely disgrace myself.

I’ve had the privilege of having the Bubbinator in my life for ten or fifteen years now. Every time we go to see her in a show, we figure it could be the last time.

And we’ll keep going as long as she keeps going!

Air conditioning or not, the show must go on!