Skip to main content

Quarantine Entertainment

We watched an improv comedy performed by a local club last weekend, The event was on Zoom and our first time trying entertainment in these covid times. There were six comedians and the show lasted a little over an hour. A lot of dark humor about the pandemic and race relationships from all of them. Everyone stayed away from election year politics. Sex, relationships and dating only made brief appearances. If I had watched any such show in the early days of the pandemic, I might have had a reference point for how the mood has shifted over time. Generally, people expected to stay in limbo for an undetermined period of time and make the most of it. Audience members who volunteered to show up on video were relaxed in their living rooms on a Friday evening. 

The cost of admission to the event was way lower than it would be if it were live. The comedians showed up with various degrees of preparedness. One was seated inside her car and joining by phone. The audio and video quality suffered a great deal because of that. There was one that had a full studio set up in his home and delivered a near perfect performance. I have been meaning to try an Airbnb experience for a while but was not sure if it would be enjoyable. After this show, I feel more ready to give that a go. The idea that live and somewhat curated entertainment could come home to you feels like rather novel. There is no end to how much that could scale because people are so diverse in their idea of what comprises entertainment. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...