Ghouls And Drama.

Last Saturday, me and a buddy Lou(anna) attended a play which a mutual pal, Jo, worked on at LaSalle-SIA college of the arts. It was called Let The Balloons Go...I think and it was quite well done. The future in theatre looks good. Quite intense and the actors were pretty talented. Note that the folks acting and producing are the students with some guidance from their lecturers of course. Anyway, the production ended at 9pm thereabouts and after chatting with Jo for a bit, we left the school at about close to 10. While I was hanging out with Lou and Jo outside the theatre, everything was peachy keen and I was having a good time. Then as Lou and I were leaving, we walked into a relatively quiet alley flanked by two long cabins of empty classrooms and there was a big tree right smack in the middle of the path. It was strange and I couldn't explain why but I hated walking through that alley. Maybe it was indeed too quiet for my liking but it's uber weird how I felt fine one minute and the next when I walked into it without consciously noting that things were a little more silent, I felt awful...like I needed to get out of there fast. The "flight" mechanism started kicking in. I'm not sure if Lou felt it too. I didn't dare ask her there and then and I didn't get to later either. I just chatted as per normal and walked with her like as if nothing's bothering me but I so needed to get out there fast. So I shrugged that twilight-zonesque moment aside until I met up with Jo just this past Tuesday evening and she mentioned that LaSalle is badly haunted. Eeks, u guys can imagine how the lil' hairs on the back of my neck just stood on ends. And she told me how that very path I walked through is one of the "infested" zones. The big tree which I found really creepy and in the middle of the path is said to be inhabited by a...I don't even dare say it...well, it starts with the letter "p". Double eeks! Yeah, I'm aware that some of you will be incredulous when it comes to these things. There're many folks who don't believe that ghosts, ghouls, demons and the like exist. And that's really fair enough. But for Jo and I, we keep an open mind to begin with when it comes to matters that lie beyond human comprehension. And moreover, we both have had close brushes with the supernatural before so for us, there are several possibilities. She then proceeded to tell me what goes on, ghoulish wise, in the school. Man oh man...creepy stuff I tell ya.

Speaking about creepy, last week I completed a novel by Sandman writer, Neil Gaiman called Coraline. It is basically literature for youngsters but that doesn't stop adults from enjoying Gaiman's masterful storytelling. Coraline is about an adventurous little girl who moved with her parents to a huge house which doubled as flats and has 21 windows and 14 doors. 13 of the doors open and close but the last one is locked and leads only to a brick wall...until one day when she opened it herself and found a passageway to the other side. What lies beyond is another flat kind of resembling her own but it's actually different. Things seem amazing and way more interesting than her normal, mundane life at first...like with toys that move for instance. But soon the truth of the other place reveals itself as its denizens want to change and keep her forever. Coraline must thus use her inherent courage and wits to save herself from this alternative life. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel despite its simplistic language(targeted toward the young ones). Like J.K Rowling, Neil Gaiman has a talent for storytelling and that always scores an ace with me. Coraline has that conventionally well developed plot working for it, y'know..the beginning, the protagonist, the antogonist, the middle, the crisis, the climax and the resolution. And that usually gets the nods from most peeps. But I guess it's the world Gaiman has woven and the delectably twisted imagery and concepts that snared my interests from the moment I picked it up. A pretty good read about that latent adventurer in all of us and in a world where we seem to get everything we could possibly want, we can't appreciate the good things without experiencing the bad. And how after every adventure, we will always return home, the one true constant of our lives.

Speaking about adventure, this is a very nifty trailer of Guy Ritchie's newest flick, Swept Away which is a remake of an older Italian film. Looks pretty interesting and I enjoyed Snatch tremendously...vere is the diamond...muahahaha. *ahem* Get swept away, here.