Single & Alone, with Dan Gordon in a Dress

Last night did something I don’t normally do.  I went to the Theatre alone.  You’d think that in this day and age all the old taboos would be broken and eating in a restaurant, going to the movies, seeing a play as a SINGLE WOMAN ALONE wouldn’t be a particularly big issue.  I must be more conditioned than I thought, because the closer I got to the Theatre door the more the word ALONE loomed in my mind.

I was seeing a political farce, with an audience full of men, which was interesting, because research and experience shows that most theatre bookings are made by women on the behalf of couples or groups.  We’re not afraid of booking theatre tickets, we just prefer to turn up with at least one other person to protect us from the stigma of ALONE-ness.  These men were in groups, and they gave the impression of not being regular theatre goers, but they certainly seemed comfortable, and there they were, out with one, two or three of their buddies (they don’t like being SINGLE AND ALONE any more than we do, obviously) to see Dan Gordon die expertly 4 different times, including once in a little black dress.

As an aside, Dan Gordon in drag giving it the full man-on-man-4-stars-in-the-Guardian snog with another actor nearly brought the house down, but that’s another story…

So how was it in the end?  Pretty good.  Aside from the slightly increased stress of impressively holding in my stomach for the entire interval (when you’re with your partner, stomachs can relax into companionable plumpness), there were a lot of ups.  I had detailed conversations with the three men on my right and the two on my left, something that would never have happened otherwise, and the illicit pleasure of a little measure of baileys at half time, and quietly poking a finger into the glass to get the last bit stuck in the ice cubes while pretending to admire the photographs on the Lyric walls of the adolescent Liam Neison.  

But I noticed there wasn’t another single woman in the house.  What do widows and divorcees do?  Books as couples or groups, I guess.