Life outside these cemetery walls…

Your beloved Twisted Libra decided to venture away from the cemetery yesterday. Where to, you ask? Well, as a late birthday gift to myself, I took in a performance of Dracula by the Carolina Ballet. I won’t go on and on about it (because I most certainly could), but let’s just say it was a truly phenomenal experience!

But Libra, if you’re not going to review the ballet, why mention it? (That is what I hear you all saying in my mind right now.) Well, aside from it being yet another extension of my love for all things Dracula, this was also my first performing arts experience since the dreaded Covid came to be. As I was walking into the theater, I realized I had not seen live performance art in more than two years! At one point, I thought I would never again sit in a theater and enjoy the talents of actors and dancers beguiling me with fantastic escapes into wondrous stories. (Yes, this living dead girl frequented the theater pre-pandemic.) This trip was a huge deal for me. It was a return to one of the things I enjoy most in this strange world.

Life has seemingly been full-throttle crazy since around March 2020. I know we have all felt the strain. Our lives collectively changed and we were forced to adapt to a new normal. So, the chance to take back something I loved and reintroduce it to my life was exhilarating, to say the least. For two hours yesterday, I lost myself in the land of Dracula and it was fantastic. How fitting that my return to performance arts featured my beloved Count?

As for the adaptation itself, it was quite well done. It did stray somewhat from the source material, as adaptations are wont to do, but it included the main points (particularly my favorite part with Lucy and Dracula in the cemetery) and was overall a terrific telling of this classic tale. I give it two delightfully wicked thumbs up.

I suppose there should be a point to all this, right? Otherwise, why write about it at all? I guess maybe my point is that, while life did halt on pretty much every front for some time, it has begun to amble along once more. We are slowly returning to a more tolerable pace, and it is time to remind ourselves of some of the things we thought were lost forever. True, in my cemetery there is always life after death, but don’t forget to indulge yourself while you’re still living. Embrace the little things that make your dark heart flutter with…

Be you. Be unashamedly, unabashedly you. Embrace what you love. Express yourself. Set your dark heart free and let the moonlight shine again in your soul. You can’t have living dead without the living part. So, get out there and live. And read Dracula if you haven’t already. You’ll thank me.

Until next time…