My favorite part of living in New York was the theater. Any extra money I had inevitably went to buying a ticket to a musical or play or the opera. For the price of two cocktails in Manhattan I could buy a ticket at the student rate and enjoy two and a half hours of pure entertainment.

Needless to say, I have been in withdrawl since being home.

Not having any money and no car has put me at a loss for scoping out cool entertainment in Austin which, by the way, has a pretty great theater scene. What I do have though is time, time spent listening to the radio and calling in to hotlines trying to win prizes to help with the boredom. A couple of weeks ago I won tickets to see a play in Austin that my brother had wanted to see, so we went.

Just the idea of soaking up some live acting and singing had me all excited. I picked out a great outfit and even did my make-up. Because of construction on the highway connecting our town to Austin, we took the scenic route into downtown Austin which doubled the actual time it should take to get there. And after driving an hour, plus and extra fifteen minutes looking for a parking spot, we sat through two and a half hours of a really bad production. The sound system was awful and did more squeaking than amplifying of voices, the lighting cues were crap and kept illuminating furniture instead of people and the time in between scene changes seemed like days. The only saving grace was the actors, who powered through the horribly produced show and worked with the less than steller no-real-conclusion material to give pretty good performances of really bad material. Towards the end of the show I found myself looking and my watch in the dark trying to decide if the little hand had literally stopped in time. And then, just like that, it was over. No one in the audience even realized that the abrupt finish to the song was actually the end and we all just sat there waiting until the lights came up and the actors walked on stage to stalled applause.

Now I know how hard it is to put on a musical production. But you can't just stroll in to town advertsing Shaft in a brilliant role ina brilliant show only to give us Shaft in his same old leather bomber jacket spouting off fatherly advice in a few scenes and expect it to make up for a horrible production. It's just not that simple and your audience, well we're just not that dumb.