A Midsummer Cat's Dream.

Emily has been using her catlike brain to participate in this week's packing. She has an uncanny ability to know which object, surface or container will be next and indicates which it is by placing herself on it. This precognition must be tiring because she usually goes to sleep.

I went to see Queensland Ballet perform A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was excellent. Unfortunately I only decided to go yesterday and I failed to recruit anyone to share it with at such short notice. Also, I saw nobody I knew at the theatre so there was not much conversation for me. However I did a bit of people watching, and aren't we a peculiar lot.

After not being able to spot the gaps in the first act (because there weren't any) the audience was so desperate to applaud that the slightest opportunity was seized. Each scene in act two got applauded (and each applause was abruptly truncated when the next scene commenced). By the end of the third act it was like the third season of an American television sitcom where every character gets a clap when they enter or leave. At the end of act four the whole cast was on stage for the triple wedding and when the ceremony finished there was continuous applause as each dancer made their exit, which would have been appropriate except there was still another scene to go. Was this behaviour because: (a) the audience wanted it to be over already; (b) the audience could no longer withhold their acclamation; or (c) the audience were a mob of plebs who wouldn't know a curtain call if it fell on them?

Meanwhile, on stage, Tama Barry had obviously put the costume designer, Richard Jeziorny, offside because Lysander's tunic was the equivalent of two gold embroidered arrows pointing at his crotch. "Look at the large bulge my genitals make," he seemed to say instead of the more traditional "let us elope to the forest, Hermia". And in the forest Michael Braun's role as Puck was not harmed by his resemblance to a classically trained clone of Wil Anderson.  ¶ 12:28