A “Wicked Good” time

How often can you say the phrase "I spent the weekend in London?" For us Americans, it doesn't seem possible. But if you take the train from Lille, it's only an hour and a half (or so). So as you can tell from the last post, Mark and I spent the weekend in London visiting our friends Niall and Seamus. The food portion of the trip was both good and bad, and the entertainment portion cleverly danced around that idea of good and bad. Let's start with the food.

You know you can't judge a book by its cover. The "National Café" at the National Gallery overlooks Trafalgar Square, Nelson's Column, lots of other columns, sculptures, lots of tourists, and Canada House (hurrah for Niall who, while born in the UK, grew up waving the Maple Leaf flag and making lists of Canadian actors on American television). The service was pleasant but not proficient, shall we say. But for $50 per person, you'd expect the proficient as well. Service errors included reaching across my face to fill up my water and showing me an elbow; grabbing two steaks, not knowing which is medium rare and which is medium, then hoping the customer will sort it out; and carrying that huge oval tray around like a cocktail waitress and exposing diner's foreheads to near collisions with rubber coated plastic. Some of the food was just ok overall, yet other bits were not even digestible. I had a cèpe (mushroom) tartlet for a starter and the chicken for the main course (it's hard to screw up chicken). As a side on my plate was a round heap of "spelt" (yup) with barely any flavor, sitting on top of a slice of grapefruit. Odd combination. Mark and Niall's steaks were not even edible. Mark tried to be a trooper and grind down the gristle, yet Niall gave up all together. You know this is a common occurrence in this restaurant when at the passing request that it would be nice to remove the cost of the steaks from our bill, our waitress acquiesced and the bill showed up steakless… just like Niall's tummy.

Now, change gears completely. This next experience presents itself like an open book. Take a 15 minute taxi to a section of town only known for its empty warehouses. Take that taxi even further down a little alley and, without even a sign on the door, you find the entrance to the Bistrothèque. This was my kind of place. No need for any sort of pretention because it was all real. Interesting cocktails, excellent food, and down to earth yet impeccable service. This is a dining experience from the get-go. The smartest thing the designers did was to make the only passage to the dining room be through the kitchen. You have to carefully make your way around bustling waiters and waitresses while you catch a glimpse of the cooks who seem even more rushed, but happy to be there. The four of us had cocktails, then a starter course that we shared – crab cakes on one plate and a goat cheese salad on another – then our main dishes. I can't quite remember what we all had but I ordered the roasted chicken. I know what you're thinking: "he ordered the chicken again". But this time there was a reason; the place reminded me of Madison's Sardine restaurant where I always order the chicken and it's delicious. I wasn't disappointed. We gave in and ordered dessert as well! Here, the cost was about $85 per person but well worth it, as all memorable experiences are.

Our entertainment agenda for the weekend included two events: Sweeney Todd (the film) and Wicked (the musical). Both deal with the convergence of good and evil on one human being and how someone who is inherently good, innately good, can become evil. Let's do a quick résumé of both stories (and if you know this already, you can skip a few paragraphs).

Sweeney Todd was a barber, a husband, and a father. His only mistake up to this point in his life was being naïve and having a wife too pretty for words. A judge, wanting this wife as his own, had Sweeney Todd arrested on false premises and sent him to jail for 15 years, just enough time to woo his wife. But the wife, apparently too frail and too weak-minded to handle the stress, poisons herself. Fifteen years later, long story short, Sweeney Todd takes up barbering again but uses his chair and his blade to eventually get to the judge. Man after man who unexpectedly came up for a shave ended up with a slit throat and a two story drop into the basement, landing square on his head, where he was cut up and used for meat in pies. The barber gets his man (the judge) but in the excitement of it all, kills the neighborhood crazy old lady who , it turns out, is not just any old crazy old lady. She is Sweeney Todd's wife. You see, the key line is that she poisoned herself, she didn't kill herself. So in this bloodbath of a film, evil conquers good. That is, until you take into account that the cute little adorable singing shop boy, someone who grew up surrounded by evil, remained good through and through and eventually takes a swipe at Sweeney Todd himself. So yes, good conquers evil.

Wicked plays around with ideas of good and evil, but not to show that one conquers the other, but rather to explain that they exist together in us all. G(a)linda, the "Good" Witch, is also self serving, opportunistic, and not too smart. Nessa Rose (whom most of us know as the Witch of the East, the one with red and white striped stockings who gets a house dropped on her) uses her disability as a way to get attention and hold onto her adorable Munchkin husband, Bock. Elfalba, the supposed Wicked Witch of the West, is the one with the purest heart of them all. She dedicates her life to helping those who cannot help themselves, defying the Wizard, denouncing his fallacies, and she eventually accepts her fate of being banished forever. In the novel, where the author, Gregory McGuire, did not have to worry about offending the pleasant expectations of theater goers, good and evil are reversed even more. In fact, good becomes evil, and vice versa. Careful! Spoiler ahead! In the novel, Dorothy is depicted (only for a few short paragraphs) as a bitchy teenager, Elfalba's mother is a real whore, her love interest (Fiero) is beaten to death, and Elfalba herself really does die. In the sequel, if you dare, "Son of a Witch," there's a rape and a gay sex scene. Imagine that in OZ!

Wicked wasn't just good, it was great. I've been wanting to see that musical for a few years now, knowing all too well that it would be white washed of its grit, but still happy to see something like this on the stage, something that puts into question our ideas of good and evil, something that takes the victimizer and makes her the victim. Ever since I began reading books about Buddhism and compassion, I have been learning how to try, at least try, to sympathize with the evil one, to understand what would drive him or her to commit such evil acts, and to ask myself what I have contributed to allowing such evil to make its way through my society. It's not an easy question, and one that is certainly worth more than an Internet blog. But it's still a good question to ponder. Did I help get that judge elected? Did I 'ding dong the witch is dead' with the rest of them? How about you?