Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to catch up with posting some crafty stories that have been going on in my home. I have been somewhat distracted by our extensions. We renovated our house by increasing the size of our kitchen and making a rather small study nook for the children. We started in earnest with builders and diggers and all that in February and then by mid-July the worst of it was over. We are now in a process of finishing off bits and pieces and re-establishing other parts of our life. For months, it seemed like all we did was manage the renovation but actually we did some other fun things as well - like our visit to Sydney to see Mary Poppins. And after I catch up with the backlog of paperwork created by the renovation, I have knitting, tapestry, and embroidery projects that all need some internet viewing time - demanding things that they are.
Mary Poppins, the musical, was in Melbourne last year and some of Tess's friends from school went down to see the show. Let's just say there was a LOT of talk about Mary Poppins at school last year. The girls even started writing and practicing their own stage version at lunch times. We borrowed the DVD from the library so that Tess could participate in these playwriting and schoolyard acting sessions. We didn't hear about the Melbourne show until quite late in its run, so there were no tickets available during the time that the children were down visiting grandparents. In about May 2011, it moved to Sydney and I promised Tess we'd go and see it there.
She let me have quite a bit of fluff time, you know that time where you look at it online and tickets seem expensive and no particular time seems to make sense to take off from home, and you aren't quite sure what level of ticketing you need, and where to stay in Sydney and blah blah. Eventually, she decided I wasn't being decisive enough and so I was prompted regularly to get on with it. And I am so glad she did, I did, we did. She prompted, I got on with it, and we went. It was fantastic. The whole weekend was step-in-time, skip skipity fun.
I enjoyed getting away from home, hanging out with Tess, the production and exicitement of the stage show, the day off school, exploring Sydney. We had wonderful weather, good meals, exciting shopping trips. It was wonderful. We had so much fun at the show we both wanted to go back and see it again. Since returning home, the CD has had a lot of rotations and Tess can now sing most of the songs. She laughs at me when I muddle up all the 'lets go fly a kite' lyrics. She has a fantastic memory for the lyrics, I'm better with a tune and just make up the lyrics as I go along - there are a lot of things that rhyme with kite! And see that parrot umbrella....well we needed one of those...
I decided that what seemed easiest was to go to a Sunday evening performance and have Tess miss one day of school. Lots of the child-friendly performance times were all booked up and so it was going to either be a mid-week performance or a Sunday night. We decided to stay in a hotel right next door to the Capitol Theatre. It was very convenient and took lots of pressure off us. I grew up in Sydney but after years and years in Canberra, I do find the big city takes a bit of getting used to regarding traffic, parking, buses, people, all that.
In early August, the show won a whole lot of Helpmann awards just after we saw it. There have been plenty of reviews and, like many of the professional reviewers, we loved it as well. The set was most inventive with the house opening and closing and changing shape. The music was the lyrical, toe tapping, sing-a-long type stuff. There were spectacular bits where Mary flew through the air, where Bert tap danced upside down on the ceiling, where kites flew up in the atmosphere. It was all stylistically choreographed. The costumes were loads of fun and I'm certain that the ladies sitting in the seat next to me were actually dancing along. The wooden sprung floor of the old theatre seemed to be bobbing up and down in the audience.
In the end, I did decide to splurge and buy really good seats. I suspected that it would be a good show from everything I'd heard. I also remember from my own childhood the excitement of going to a live show and I wanted Tess to have those memories as well. Afterwards, when I was chatting with my Tapestry ladies at our monthly class, I found out a few of them regularly go up to Sydney to see live shows and one, who has a teenage daughter, goes up once a year with her daughter for the latest show. I think maybe that would be a nice life.
The day after our Mary Poppins was a Monday and we both felt deliciously naughty as we got the school text message saying Tess was absent from school. Sydney was turning on the most beautifully warm mid-winter day. It was sunny and blue sky bright. We had a list of places we had to visit - Haigh's Strand arcade shop, the Nut shop, then buying bathing suits in Myer, and onto Morris & Sons. After which we took a bus to Circular Quay for lunch, before a final fabric stop on the way home.
Tess chose the lunch spot at Circular Quay. She had been up to Sydney during the July school holidays with her grandparents and they had lunch here on the Concorse near the Opera House. It was all surprisingly easy - skipping out on the boring, dirty, renovations, missing a day of school, sitting in the warm winter sun eating pasta on the promenade of Australia's most beautiful harbour, buying wool for future weaving projects, bathing suits for summer holidays, fabric for more pyjama sewing and generally sharing life. Small moments of escape that soak up joy seem to be the best moments of life.
This final photo is from australiaphotos.co.uk. and shows you where we were sitting > under the white umbrellas to the right.