Good evening, Kibitzers!
Early this year, I got word that the local theater I’ve been going to for years, the NJ Shakespeare Theater, would be open, after two years of staying dark. Did I want to buy season tickets, my friend wanted to know? It was maybe February or March, and I figured, surely it’ll be safe to go by fall. (Because I apparently have not learned anything from this plague.)
I skipped the August show entirely; my friends went and at my request gave my ticket to someone else. The next show is up now, and our tickets were for next Friday, October 7. So today, I get an email from my friend: she got a notice from the theater that the Friday performance is “mask optional” and she just wanted to make sure that was okay with everyone.
Since I normally just don’t go anywhere, that prevents me from encountering situations where everyone thinks I’m weird because I’m not willing to act like there is no Covid. So this made me kind of sad because I could HEAR my friends shaking their heads over my reply, and probably making that little finger-circles-next-to-head gesture. But they heaved a deep sigh and we’re going on Tuesday instead, which is a “mask required” performance. You know, like they all should be.
All of which is to say that annieli is very kindly filling in for me next Tuesday. I hope I’m not grievously miscalculating in doing this at all, but of course, if I end up with Covid, I’ll never know for sure where I got it.
Meanwhile, today’s diary is filled with videos I enjoy looking at but have no background on — people making rangoli. Rangoli may sound like an Italian entree, but they are a South Asian art form in which patterns are created with granular materials like colored powders, sand, grains, flower petals, and the like. (If any reader knows more, please feel free to share in the comments.) Where I’m coming from is, YouTube is full of videos of people making amazing designs with brightly-colored sand, and I find these both fun and soothing to watch. I experience them as sort of a cross between coloring and playing in a sandbox. I hope any you look at make you smile!
If you’d rather just look at finished designs than watch people making them, I refer you to this Indian wedding-ideas site, which has dozens of them, done in sand, flowers, and even lights. If you’d like to try videos, here’s a selection.
This one is 59 seconds long, so it serves as kind of a sampler to see if you want to watch any more.
Other than a huge supply of rainbow-colored sand, this art form doesn’t seem to require a lot of specialized equipment. People use anything circular to form their outlines, and here they’re using a comb to texture the sand. [7:10]
Another interesting use of the comb. Like several of these videos, there are a few different designs covered. [10:37]
This person has a different style, using a matrix of dots to lay out the design, and the results are mostly white, a bit like lace. [9:28]
This complex design doesn’t start out as a circle. [7:42]
A couple of pretty fancy rainbow-colored designs in this one. [11:46]
These designs demonstrate how to do shading. [8:58]
Although I know almost none of the iconography in these designs, I do recognize Ganesh, elephant-headed god of wisdom and remover of obstacles. This intricate design was made for Ganesha Chaturthi, the festival marking his birth, which was celebrated this year on August 31. [10:05]
Today’s musical selection: Patsy Cline’s Love Letters in the Sand. [2:23]