Anticipation

Kim's year-long Blog Improvement Project at Sophisticated Dorkiness encouraged us to "look for blogging inspiration somewhere new.

There’s no real way to do this. If you’ve got a laptop, take it out of the house and write up a post somewhere different. If you don’t have a laptop, grab a pen and paper and do some brainstorming outside the house.

Go to the park, a local coffee shop, the library, a friend’s house, your backyard, wherever you feel like it. Just get away from where you usually blog to see what inspiration you might get from a change of scene."

I did this in a movie theatre while I was waiting for Gamer to start.

It wasn't hard to see that I was immediately drawing on sense memory for this exercise.


Many of you already know that one of my favorite places in the world - and favorite moment in life - is taking my place in a theatre seat, waiting for the show to begin.

It can be any kind of theatre, any kind of performance.

It can be a spot snagged among an outdoor crowd for the Busker Festival.

It can be a hardy sports stadium seat built to withstand drunken disappointment in a game, but serving me as a seat at the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo.

The hockey arena can be tucked out of sight so I can sit in surging anticipation for Lenny Kravitz and an amazing night of music.

It can be a no-frills wooden chair on homemade risers, awaiting a Fringe Festival performance.

It can be a seen-better-days upholstered seat scavenged from a renovated theatre as I sit just feet away from Michael Mahonen (Road to Avonlea's Gus) as he shows his acting chops in Salt Water Moon, a play by Newfoundland-born David French.

But there are two types of theatre seats that thrill me more than any other.

The basic cinema seat - where I have willingly whiled away countless sunny days in a darkened theatre. No matter how far technology takes us, no matter that I can watch films in an increasingly sophisticated home setting, I will always cherish viewing films as they are meant to be screened - in a theatre surrounded by other film lovers.



And the other one?

Why, a seat at the ballet, of course.

Where the orchestra tunes up as the lights go down to a quarter...