'Mamma Mia' and some memories

Today evening was fun. Guha and I went for the Mamma Mia musical. We'd both been pulling long faces about this earlier. Both of us had started watching the movie in December, and I had gagged before the movie got to the middle and then fallen asleep....so when we heard that the musical was coming to Purdue - we pooh-poohed it.

For some reason though last week when I saw the posters, all the all-too familiar ABBA songs and some vague memories of memories came back to me, and I told Guha on a whimsy that we should go for the show. That musicals are always better watched as musicals than as movies and in any case it would be fun hearing all those ABBA songs after so many years.

And so Guha got the tickets today. And so we went. And so it was. Great fun.

They were all accomplished singers and performers but the young woman who played the role of Donna was the one who had an astounding voice.

As I heard the songs there were some memories that came floating by:

1. How as a 6 year old I'd heard the song Super-trouper and I was quite convinced that the lyrics started off with "super-duper" right until I was 12 or so....

2. How when I was in class VII, I was given some of my pocket-money to buy my first cassette and an ABBA cassette it was indeed. They sang almost all my favourites from that cassette today....and I can't remember ever hearing all of the ABBA songs in one go apart from the time I was in school. And today's performance didn't disappoint me. There was my secret favourite and quite frankly risqué : Does your mother know. Voulez-Vous, which was definitely a dance number as well... Gimme, gimme, gimme! and Take a Chance on Me followed. 'Course I've never minded dancing on my own by myself, and today I was grinning in my seat and doing my "thumbs-twirl dance", which embarrassed Guha to no end - even though nobody was watching. He did join me though a little later for some very short minutes on some air drums...The performance was absolutely delightful. I'm talking about the performance-on-stage, that is.

3. There were the other quiet favourites: Chiquitita, The Name of the Game and The winner takes it all, Thank you for the Music (rather ironic that last one) and I remember listening to these as a school-going kid when I wasn't particularly cheery but was feeling not too terribly miserable either. The ABBA songs (and these in particular along with Fernando came to haunt me when I was in classes XI and XII. After I was a year into my undergrad in Calcutta I don't remember listening to ABBA much.

4. And then they performed the song I have a dream today that sent my memory bells pealing quite noisily. When we were in Class X, Sumki and I took it upon ourselves to direct the Class V play for Teachers' Day. We decided on Cinderella - which was fine. Sumki wrote the whole play on her own, which was better than fine. I was supposed to write one Act but never got around to doing that (and in any case she was the better writer). But the story doesn't end there.

We took it upon ourselves to make the play into a musical.

Why two mortally tone deaf people who couldn't sing for nuts would do that is beyond my powers of understanding. But we did. I don't exactly remember how we managed to teach the songs to the kids. Who was teaching them? Surely we couldn't have tried teaching them on our own by ourselves. The kids were exceptionally gifted. The girl who played the part of Cinderella (Moutushi) could sing like an angel, and the girl who played the part of the Prince (Debiparna) - even though she didn't have the intimations of musical greatness, she did have oodles of charisma and a brilliant clipped accent, and I think she pulled off the couple of songs that she had to sing (one being The Carpenters - I'm on Top of the World) pretty well. It was Cinderella/Moutushi however who had to sing I have a dream, and she was perfect....I couldn't help but be amazed today - and after all these years, as to how Sumki and I with such utter gall went on to direct a musical of all things!

5. The other memory comes from not a pleasant patch of a year - but the memory by itself is - oh well. Here goes.

It was my second year here. During the end of the Fall semester we had a stack of end-of-term papers to write up. Beth and I would meet up in the department on some late evenings to work, and sometimes there was more of snickering and exchanging of notes on random topics than paper writing. And on some evenings there was too much to type and there were too many papers (with some methodology and theory bits) that were thrown at my head (by Beth) so that I could fit them into my inching-along paper for any horsing around to happen.

One evening, Lorrell and Alyson - two other batch-mates/friends joined us in the department. We met relatively early on in the evening. The computer lab was otherwise deserted, and after 17 minutes or so of focused work, Lorrell started entertaining us with some songs from ABBA.

She was listening to them on her comp but was singing along as well -

Friday night and the lights are low

Looking out for the place to go
Where they play the right music,.......the swing
You come in to look for a king....

And then she really got into the lyrics and with a lot of head-shaking and air-guitar playing, she belted out -

You can dance, you can jive...having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene.....dancing queen...

At which point I had to join in with my voice and my dance.

Beth gave us big stares, which translated meant, "What on earth is that?"

"ABBA, Beth. ABBA. The Swedish band...."

"Muriel's Wedding. Seen Muriel's Wedding?" Piped in Lorrell before going back to her head-shaking and singing.

Beth shook her head and said, "nu-oh."

"Take a chance on me...." Crooned Lorrell some minutes later....by which time I had had to reluctantly return to my paper, which was glaring back at me from the screen. "Get on with the self-esteem bit you iijit. You've written enough about creativity...."

In the middle of the night all of us felt terribly hungry and the cheapest and the closest choice was what else but McDonalds. We all had some nasty burgers (apart from Alyson who had some equally horrific looking chicken nuggets) and washed them down with some Coke, and trudged back to campus to finish our papers. Beth kept wanting to break an arm or a leg so that she wouldn't have to turn in her paper. I kept reasoning with her that that wouldn't get her out of handing in her paper. She'd have to do it at some point so she might as well finish it that night. So much of brilliant sense coming from myself startles me at times.

So there we were. I don't remember how much of my paper I had done but all of a sudden I heard the noise of squeaky wheels over the whatever-song I was listening to on the net while working. I looked around at Beth who was looking back at me with her eyebrows lost in her hairline somewhere. Through the corner of my eye I saw a chair (with someone on it) swinging and making its way out of the computer lab. I took off my headphones and heard Lorrell telling herself, "Coke. There has to be some coke in the fridge....coke. Gotta get some coke." I left the computer lab to see that Lorrell was sitting on the chair and rolling along on it all the way down the length of the corridor to the kitchenette, which houses the rather ample-sized fridge.

What happened after that is ridiculously silly. Lorrell came back on her chair and then (the exact details escape me) she and I decided to have a wheel-race on speeding chairs down the corridor. Alyson, quite excited at the prospect of a race came out to be the judge and as soon as she said, "Get, set go!" both Lorrell and I were off whizzing down the corridor like wheely-bullets. We were in splits of course but we took the race very seriously as well. I got ahead of her quite soon and just as I was nearing the end of the corridor - quite the clear and easy winner, Lorrell lunged forward and tried grabbing me. She was trying to cheat! Well I was having none of that. I gave one mighty swing forward while fending her off...and I don't know whether I was partly responsible for what happened next - but she went crashing into a recycling bin (which according to Beth is still the only recycling bin in the department to have a massive dent). There was a mighty ruckus in that building as Lorrell banged into that bin with her chair. We waited and stopped in our tracks to see whether we could hear any sirens but that was that. Lorrell was unhurt, and the recycling bin while it wasn't that lucky, and had suffered some damages still stood straight - sort of squashed up against the wall. Laughing hysterically we rolled back down into the computer lab. Alyson and Beth, if I'm not too badly mistaken were also in fits. As far as I remember I didn't get off the chair but wheeled back down the corridor as speedily as I had come. At some point Lorrell and I noticed a couple of fairly largish cameras (or what looked like cameras) near the ceilings and we hoped that nobody had recorded our antics.

These were only some of the memories that came back on being there at the musical today.

For the encore the cast performed three of the songs Mama mia, Waterloo, and Dancing Queen before the curtains went down for the evening. Oh it was marvelous fun and I'm glad Guha and I managed to kick our lazy habits for the evening.

The show was pretty packed but for the entire evening there were three empty seats on my right, and I kept looking to see whether they were going to be taken all of a sudden.

Now, that would have been something.....

*Note: I've provided the links for all the ABBA songs just in case anyone wants to hear them*