Pride, Opera, and Disney

We took this photo at the London pride parade. The flag on the left with the pointy tip almost poked my eye out on several occasions. The flags are pretty, with their bright colors and the way they are waving in the wind, but you might notice that there’s nobody marching in the parade. This happened a lot, and to be honest, I was a bit disappointed by the parade. There were some fancy drag queens, a few buses, a couple leather bears, and a lot of gaps between them. Sometimes the gaps between the groups were so big that I thought the parade was over. There was also a distinct lack of nudity. Really, you know a pride parade is a bit pathetic when the opera has more nudity in it.

The opera had to be my favorite part of today (although, watching Mulan later was a close second). We saw Salome, and it was wonderful. Our seats were house right at the very top and, while not ideal, gave us a very interesting view. One advantage was that we could actually see into the cistern where Jokanaan was. Of course, we also had to put up with the bad parts of sitting in seats that cost only 5 pounds. This mostly consisted of the jerk in front of me who started texting twice during the show. But not even the rude cell phone man could do too much damage to the production. One thing in particular that I really liked about this production was that instead of having the dance of seven veils simply be a dance, they turned it into a creepy almost rape, which added a lot to how messed up Salome is at the end, which is saying something since she is really messed up. Another thing was that the severed head looked deliciously real, and even had blood dripping from it from the moment it was brought on stage (by the naked executioner) until the very end of the play. It was also wonderfully disturbing when Salome, completely covered in blood, finally kissed it.

We finished the night by getting some Burger King and watching Mulan. It was the perfect way to end the day.