Graduation and Shakespeare

Friday was a big day. My housemate Jen works at SOME’s Center for Employment Training and Friday was their graduation. People enter and end the program on their own schedule and they have twice yearly graduation, and Jen invited all of us to come be a part of it.

On Friday morning I went to work like normal. It was a reasonably busy Friday. Even with the lead case worker, the associate caseworker and I there, we still all saw a lot of participants. I went on a little bus adventure. Really it wasn’t an adventure, just an hour long bus ride. It was actually pretty neat. The bus from my office took me right downtown DC, even past the White House. Then I switched buses and went over the river into south east, which is really not as ominous as it sounds.

The best part of this is when I was on the second bus, my housemate Noah got on the bus with me. I hadn’t even known that Noah was coming to the graduation. So we found Jen’s building easily and Jen was saving us seats right in the second row, like celebrities. My coworkers from our SE office were also there. One of our front office coordinators was graduating from CET. They were there to support her and I got to support Jen.

And coincidently, my fellow intern and I, Jalaine, were going to a play together later that night so it worked out really well.
The graduation was just that, a graduation. However, it was a fun graduation, with a real sense of ceremony. The graduates wore gowns. There was even a key note speaker who is a talk radio personality. She was very interactive and focused on the graduates. I was glad to be a part of it.

After the ceremony, a crowd of us went out for drinks. We went to Lucky Bar in Dupont, which I loved. Jalaine and I ate dinner and headed out to Arlington Virginia for our play, “All’s Well that End’s Well.” We went early to avoid ending up late and ended up in the middle of nowhere Virginia 50 minutes early for our play. And in the middle of nowhere Virginia there is nowhere to get a cup of coffee or a beer. There were only closed government buildings and friendly police officers (who may have been surrounding a deserted building…?) who helped us find the playhouse.

The theatre was Washington Shakespeare company. Once we found it and went on a time killing walk and got settled in out seats, I was pretty happy. The theatre was a black box and they had built a series of platforms and there were no fewer than four black and white beds as a part of the set. Which I thought was great. Not in a dirty way. But in a “if you show a gun in the first act, it better go off by the third act.” I think it’s the same with beds. If you have four beds on stage you better use them. And they did. There were a couple of seduction scenes that, ahem, utilized the beds.

So I found the play enjoyable. But I think there is a reason that “All’s Well That End’s Well” is not preformed more. It has kind of an odd romantic plot where I could not understand why the heroine would ever be interested in the man and a subplot involving humiliating an old soldier or possibly someone only pretending to be a war hero. While I thought they did a great job of making the verse understandable, I found this sub plot totally incomprehensible. And I think I understand Shakespeare pretty well generally. So having made the decision not to read this play before seeing it, I'm not sure if I have a problem with the play, or the production.

So for my first play in DC, it was pretty good. I think next I need to go to something actually in Metro DC. But altogether it was a great Friday.