we will rock you

saw the Queen musical in london this evening.  i liked it very much, as i'd been assured by a friend and her family that i would.  two things that impressed me in particular:

1.  a lot of the time, a song began with the singer and the band beginning simultaneously.  i've been the band leader watching for the singer to take the breath, so i know the band beginning on the singer's beat is no big deal; but where, i wondered, was the singer getting the pitch?  this happened more than once, and midway through a scene, so it doesn't seem the sort of thing where a person can get a pitch backstage and not lose it before it's time to begin that particular number.  i concluded that, as (this being a big ol' rock musical) everyone was wired with a headset microphone, they were given the pitches in their earpieces.

2.  at the point in the curtain call when the cast indicated the band, the band leader leaned out from his perch to take his bow -- and then reached back and grabbed his score off his stand and held it up, pointing to the music of Queen; it was as if he was saying thanks, dudes, but it totally wasn't us.  now that's class.

... and then she checked her e-mail.

1.  my mother's cousin, a recovering alcoholic, died of kidney and liver failure sunday morning.  a friend of my father's from high school, who had some sort of apparently serious heart trouble and was having an operation last week to deal with (maybe?) some development involving her spine, died on the operating table.  the 25-year-old daughter of some other friends of my parents', who had left her abusive boyfriend and moved back to her parents' home town, died suddenly some time in the past few days.  AND,

1a.  my father's aunt, my grandmother's kid sister, has pancreatic cancer.  she's going, my father says, to discuss with her oncologist the possibility of a treatment involving chemotherapy "that offers some hope for at least some additional time".  those are encouraging words, eh?

fucking FUCK.  this?  is not what i meant when i spoke of all these guys (pope, schiavo, prince rainier, saul bellow, frank perdue, &c.) dying like dying was going out of style.

[does math]  my grandmother was not quite 70 when she died, and that was ten years ago last august, so she'd be 80 now -- so this aunt is like 75 at the most.


2.  my mother asked me what i think about the idea of accompanying my sister-in-law's family to Hong Kong for like a week next christmas.  (the sister-in-law's family has been talking about it for years, but it hasn't happened for one reason or another.  my brother will obviously be a part of that, and my parents had talked about going as well, but this was the first i'd heard talk of my possibly going as well.)  and i started to give my sort-of-startled reactions, about how i'm not opposed in concept, but i'd want to have spent some time in DC before that, and (as she said) also with her family in NY at some point while i was in the US, etc., etc. -- and then i sort of kept talking about my second layer of reactions, because without much warning i was typing an e-mail to my mother and i was in tears (possibly abetted by hormones, and almost certainly by [see above], but also definitely coming out of what follows).

But this is all off the top of my head, because I'd never thought about *me* going to Hong Kong.  I'm not against it, as I said, mainly -- but the more I think about it right now, the more I think I might feel a bit like I don't belong as much as other people might -- I mean, it's a [their]-family thing, right, which includes [brother], and includes you two as well in a by-extension sort of way, and it's not that I ever feel *excluded*, that's not my point at all, but I do sometimes feel sort of included-because-where-else-am-I-going-to-go, and (this is probably just a function of my mood right now; on another day, or at a different point in my hormonal cycle, I wouldn't feel it so strongly, but after all, it's always there in one form or another) that tends to highlight the still-single, Bridget-Jones-like nature of my holiday plans in ways I occasionally get unhappy about.  It's not, like I said, that I ever feel excluded from anything, so don't think that; and it's not that I don't want to spend time with you, or with [brother] and [sister-in-law], or even with the rest of the [her family].  But I so often feel like I'm coming along on other people's trips because I don't have plans of my own.  It's no place to be.  :-(  And I know that if I were seeing someone, you'd have asked me about both of us coming along on this Hong Kong trip; but for some reason in my head that seems totally different than the idea of just me coming along.

Okay.  So I didn't mean to get all thinky and dramatic on you.  Sorry.  But I feel like it is fair for you to know what I'm thinking, right?

as i said to merry in chat a minute later, more articulately than i'd said to my mother, i think:  i feel like i'm not the same sort of part of my sister-in-law's family as my parents are, and that therefore i'm being included mainly (not only, but still) because i'm single, and what else am i going to do.  which i know isn't true -- but it's hard to shake the feeling that i go places as And Their Unmarried Daughter.  which is incredibly anachronistic and FUCKED UP, but on hormone-heavy days it's there in my head (if nowhere else), and makes me sad.