Friday

Tonight we went to see a play. The HCMC International Choir, in conjunction with a local dance troupe and the Saigon Players (the volunteer acting company to blame for bringing Monty Python sketches to a local bar on Talk Like a Pirate Day*) are staging Annie Get Your Gun all week. I didn't know what to expect. I was concerned that the Players, some of whom we know, were going to make an odd match with what I assumed was a professional choir and dance company. It all worked out equal, though; and without much funding or production equipment they managed to pull off the first off-off-off-off Broadway performance in Hồ Chí Minh City. But hey, I don't want to talk about the play. I want to talk about the theater, a white concrete horror reminding me, on the outside, of some treatment plant. Inside it was the similar to my high school auditorium, lent a prison je ne sais quoi by gray concrete floors and orange, spray painted seat numbers. We were in row thirteen, right on the aisle. The chairs themselves were red vinyl loafs of batting and wood; mine tipped me forward. But the best thing about the place was the wildlife: early in act one, I happened to notice a rat the size of a cinderblock duck across the aisle three rows ahead of me. Everybody noticed it. Throughout the play that rat scurried back-and-forth between seating sections, ducking around our legs. It was so large I could hear its feet click on the prison floors. I was impressed: nobody sitting around me ran screaming for the door. I put my feet up on the next seat, and waited calmly for the rat's next entrance. But I have no idea how the play ended. [Cavin]