Murderous British Nannies and A Strange Happenstance

10/26/2015 11:00:00 AM Lexie Dunne 0 Comments

So my sister and I have noticed the most random occurrence when we get together. I’m going to call her Chelsea because I always do online, but my villain is also named Chelsea so you know that’s not her real name.

Anyway, I have two sisters. Grace is my roommate because I don’t want to walk Nikki at 5 a.m. and I try to get together every few weekends with Chelsea and hang out. Both of them came with me to NYCC, where the occurrence happened the first time:

People give us tickets.

I was the only one with a four-day pass at NYCC, but I had Chelsea with me when I met Sally Janin over at the Qwillery (you can see my post there!). Upon finding out Chelsea only had a one-day pass, Qwill offered her an extra four-day pass she had, which meant that Chelsea got to stand in line with me and meet Kelly Sue and now she adores Bitch Planet. It was a cool moment and I’m forever grateful to Qwill for our awesome sisterly day together.

Fast forward to this summer, to our outdoor theater in Forest Park, The Muny. It’s a great place because there are free seats if you don’t mind sitting a quarter mile from the stage (binoculars!), but Chelsea and I decided we should actually get slightly better seats for Beauty and the Beast. And as we’re standing in line, a gentleman approached us and gave over two tickets (he’d bought better ones for himself and his granddaughter and the Muny doesn’t give up your old seats, apparently). We thanked him and got even better seats than the ones we would have paid for. It was a great coincidence and we had a blast.

Muny selfie!

I’m starting to think it’s not a coincidence because on Saturday at the Nanowrimo event, one of the women asked if anybody wanted tickets to go see Mary Poppins. Chelsea an I were just like, “…Sure?” since nobody else was taking them. Which is how we ended up seeing Mary Poppins at the Touhill while wearing jeans and in my case, Chucks and a hoodie.

Everybody was super-jealous of my kicks.

The show was put on by Variety, which is a charity that works with special needs kids, and they wrote in a children’s ensemble so that kids of all abilities could be in the play. The main cast looked like professional dancers and actors, and they brought out the interns that were part of the program and introduced them to the crowd beforehand, so it had a community theater feel with professional production values.

Pre-show Ramen with Jen and Mike (and Chelsea). Yummmmmmmm.

I had a good time watching the play because the singing was fantastic and the dance numbers—particularly the chimney sweep scene—were phenomenal. I’m a little sad that the suffragette storyline didn’t show up in the play, as I love it when the suffragettes are randomly dancing with the chimney sweeps, and Mrs. Banks’ storyline felt reductive in that loss.

Also: Mary Poppins straight up murders the evil nanny on stage. She mind-controls her into drinking poison WHILE SMILING WIDELY. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely want Mary Poppins’ self-confidence, but she smiled through some pretty horrific stuff (the childrens’ toys coming to life and tormenting them, the children being shoved to the ground, the parents arguing) and that was…unsettling. The entire sequence for Playing the Game (aforementioned said toys coming to life) was in essence nightmare fuel for me, but I’m told it replaces another, even more psychologically terrible song called Temper, Temper. Maybe that was a bullet dodged.

But yeah: Mary Poppins, smiling serial killer! Who knew?