Educating Rita

Today David & I saw Educating Rita at the Lyric, rewritten to take place in Belfast in the 1980s. Rita’s accent, so thick it could slice cheese, was terrific. Irish idiom is very rich and the script was rotten with Belfast bon mots.

After that matinee, I went to 10X9, when nine people each have 10 minutes to tell a story about their lives. The theme was science, but that hardly limited the range of topics. One of the funniest was about a doctor who had testicular cancer and, before undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, went to a sperm bank to have his semen frozen. His treatment would make him infertile and he wanted to preserve his options.

The audience giggled as he told us about the red folder labeled “Adult” (I didn’t giggle because I didn’t know what a red folder labeled adult would contain). It contained pornography. And not just any pornography, but all photos of female nurses in various X-rated poses. Nurses! A nurse had seen him into the room and another would escort him from the room. Why on earth were the photos of nurses? But the truly bizarre part of the story is that the doctor was gay, so women busting out of nursing uniforms wasn’t really doing it for him. I can’t do justice to his telling of the story, only that he had a wonderful sense of humour about an absurd situation.
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