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Bear with me: Sun Bear @ParkTheatre

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If The Light House is an uplifting tale of survival, Sarah Richardson’s Sun Bear gives a contrasting take on this. Sarah plays Katy. We’re introduced to Katy as she runs through a list of pet office peeves with her endlessly perky coworkers, particularly about coworkers stealing her pens. It’s a hilarious opening monologue that would have you wishing you had her as a coworker to help relieve you from the boredom of petty office politics.  But something is not quite right in the perfect petty office, where people work together well. And that is her. And despite her protesting that she is fine, the pet peeves and the outbursts are becoming more frequent. As the piece progresses, maybe the problem lies in a past relationship, where Katy had to be home by a particular hour, not stay out late with office colleagues and not be drunk enough not to answer his calls. Perhaps the perky office colleagues are trying to help, and perhaps Katy is trying to reach out for help. It has simple staging
Speaking of rubbish service, A and I go to Balans cafe in Soho regularly. I am not sure why as the food is more likely to be awful, the people often in there are freaks (usually exes of A's who are now hustlers) and the service is mixed. The one thing going for it is the location and it is a great space. I think that's why we keep coming back.

Wednesday evening was a case in point. Early January they gave me a voucher which was a "buy one meal get one free" deal. The deal came with a whole series of catches however. You could only redeem the offer Mon-Wed between 5-11pm and the moon had to be in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars. The fine print was so amusing that I asked the waiter what we could get with this deal. Eventually after much haggling he told us that A's all day breakfast and my burger would cover the deal so we made the order.

A few minutes later the waiter came back to apologise and say that breakfasts were not part of the meal deal and that if we could use the voucher another time that would mean that he wouldn't have to pay for the breakfast. I was amazed that not only were the planets not in our favour for the deal, but the management were so cheap and such slave drivers that they wouldn't cover a £5 breakfast but make their wait staff pay for it. Rather than make the waiter work a full hour to pay for our meal we decided that we would have the common decency to try and use the voucher another time. As for the meal? It was edible this time...

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Play ball: Damn Yankees @LandorTheatre

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