Visitors from afar

One drawback to life in the Northwest Corner -- I suppose that some of you might instead consider it an advantage -- is that we do in fact live in a corner, and thus off the mainstream routes of American intercity travel.  No one drops by for a visit, as he passes through Seattle on his way to somewhere else.

Visiting Seattle or Portland requires an element of real determination, in some folks' mind -- like travel to Africa.  Or, at least, England.

For Californians, coming north across the Siskiyous into Oregon and beyond represents travel into a great, unknown, empty, green and moldy wetness.  For Easterners, even those who no longer fear sudden Indian raids, it's a heck of a long trip across the prairies.  Even flying over the prairies.

So, I was happy to have three members of my family up for Thanksgiving.  My sister, like me, was born and raised in the Northwest, and so lacks some of the fear and trembling that apparently seizes non-natives.  Clinton and their adult son are Californians through and through but, over the years, have grown accustomed to brief forays into our local fishing villages and lumbering towns, our potlatches and bar brawls.

So the three drove up, and arrived on Tuesday.  We celebrated mother and son birthdays that night at a downtown steak house (now-Californian Kathy has retained certain atavistic cravings from her less sophisticated childhood).  We did some in-town hiking under gray and threatening skies at Seward Park -- a large and still forested Seattle city park.  My guests cheerfully (fully aware of my inept cooking abilities) took on the responsibility of preparing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, large enough to feed most the city's homeless, for the four of us.

And, on Friday, we had a light dinner downtown, and then took the monorail out to McCaw Hall in the Seattle Center where we watched Pacific Northwest Ballet's first 2014 performance of the Nutcracker. 

In 1983, PNB commissioned Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) to design new sets for a complete re-working of the familiar Christmas ballet, and has presented that production annually ever since.  It was Sendak's and the PNB's artistic director's decision to return to the ballet's roots in the original story by E. T. A. Hoffman.  Sendak felt that the oft-repeated ballet had become boring and predictable, and he hoped to re-emphasize the more unsettling aspects of the story.  He has written that, as usually performed, the ballet

is smoothed out, bland, and utterly devoid not only of difficulties but of the weird, dark qualities that make it something of a masterpiece. 

Unfortunately, this year will be the last in which the Sendak sets and the associated choreography will be presented.  Next year, PNB will perform the more traditional 1954 Balanchine production.

We had seen PNB's Nutcracker exactly ten years ago, and loved it then.  I liked it even more Friday night, maybe because I knew I'd never see it performed this way again.  The sets were, of course, dramatic.  The battles between toy soldiers and sword-bearing mice were exciting enough to keep the kids -- of whom there were many in the audience -- wide awake.  Drosselmeyer -- the young heroine's god father and a local magician -- was one-eyed, strange in appearance and behavior, and interested insistently enough in all the small children on-stage to create a feeling of unease in the adult members of the audience. 

Overall, the production was often funny, always beautiful, and well-danced by both adult and child members of the cast -- all without losing that sense of the weird, the dark, and the eerie that Sendak and PNB's art direction had hoped to achieve.

The ballet was a highly successful conclusion to a very welcome visit by my relatives.  I was sorry to see them leave town and return to the lotus-eating pleasures of their California lifestyle.