You probably recognize these two quotes:
"If you want to make God laugh, just tell Him your plans."
Or more poetically, c/o Robert Burns:
"The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley...."
No prizes for guessing the common thread that links them, as that's pretty obvious. It's particularly appropriate, today, with respect to
this organization, because today, a double bill of their productions of
Henry IV (or "The Complete
Henry IV of William Shakespeare [Abridged]") and
Henry V is scheduled. Except that, of course, there's an uncontrollable wild card in all this, namely.....
.....the weather, of course (well, duh). That's the risk one takes when planning an outdoor event, equally of course. At the time of this writing, Saturday afternoon, the odds were not good, picking a zip code on weather.com near the plays' location:
3 PM: Cloudy, precip = 0%
4 PM: Cloudy, precip = 0%
5 PM: T-Storms, precip = 70%
6 PM: T-Storms, precip = 90%
7 PM: T-Storms, precip = 80%
8 PM: T-Storms, precip = 50%
9 PM: T-Storms, precip = 50%
10 PM: T-Storms, precip = 40%
11 PM: T-Storms, precip = 40%
Since
Henry IV is supposed to start at 4:30 PM, and
Henry V at 8:30 PM, not a good sign.
Henry IV might start, but not finish. They might acknowledge, if a recent post on
their Twitter feed is anything to go by:
"Rain rain please stay away"
While weather forecasts have a general reputation for inaccuracy, a 70% prediction of rain is a pretty sure bet that it will come. Even if it were to hit an hour later than planned, that's still rain. It would almost be preferable for a storm to hit before the show, have done with it, then sweep the stage and maybe start the show a bit late if needed. In fact, we got a burst of rain at noon-ish.
Being his standard loser self, 3CM was actually thinking of stopping by the double bill today. He's seen Henry V in the park so far, but not Henry IV. So this is the deal for tonight:
(a) If there's an autobot tip jar when this diary goes up, the plays are on.
But:
(b) If there's a real time tip jar, then the shows got rained out.
At the moment of writing this, while 3CM is anything but a betting man, his bet is on (b). This is a shame for the Shakespeare folks, since this is the first year that they've ever done two plays in one summer in Forest Park, and thus the first year that a double-bill was on the agenda.
Just to compound 3CM's loser quotient, as a heads-up, no SNLC next Saturday night. I'm completely booked next Saturday night (work, not fun, not that 3CM knows how to have or to be fun, but he digresses, as usual) and will have no time to reply to any comments next week, let alone write even an auto-bot SNLC to post. So you get a break next week, such as it is.
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week, which may or may not involve rain.....
-----
Late afternoon update: Henry IV got cancelled. Henry V is still set to go at this moment. The % values at weather.com say that it might be clear sailing for tonight. We shall see.