I'm a sucker for good choreography, so that aspect simply blew me away. Then there was the Angel of Death, the aerodynamics of John, and the assortment of young men with flowing skirts and painted faces.

It was a terribly artsy sort of performance and I couldn't do it justice through any description I might put forth.

I have to hand it to people who wax unabashedly artsy at the most trivial things and still manage to take themselves seriously. I could never do that. If I started yapping about, say, how ballpoint pens resemble sartorially aligned spires of ivory, I'd either start laughing or break off in utter disgust. They're just pens, for heaven's sake.

But someone who can say such tihngs with a straight face, now that can work. It's quite pathetic in some cases, when the artistic tangents are just plain awful (think middle school poetry), absolutely begging to be mocked. Except they aren't, because their utterer takes himself and his poetics so seriously (think enthusiastic English majors) no one else can bear to laugh at them.

And then, somethimes artsy ramblings really and truly do work. There are very few people who can make me sit up and listen and nod along to such things. These are the levels of aesthetics that strike me dumb. She pulls it off damnably well, for one.

I could never get away with that, even if I wanted to. Too grounded, maybe. This is why I could never make it in the coffeehouse scene. Aside from the fact that I despise coffee, I mean.

But I'll take a stab at summarizing the more profound points anyway, not that it'll make sense to anyone but me.

Good and evil in separate paradigms, your typical screwy dichotomy, cracking like the mirrors she preened into. It opened in this way, with that slip of dragonfly-green iniquity admiring herself through the mask that concealed her infamous gilded lids. Duly so, tossing a cascade of red-brown leiotrichy hither and yon, dying like a Russian on the ice (sorry, Talula).

Flitting about for the prophet-on-strings (up and down, slowly, with the angel that wasn't quite there--angels exist) as the devil-goat Assyrian fed ulna to belly with an unnoticed yodel and his pink-swathed counterpart sat by with the queen's feathered fan and a mournful expression.

La petite princesse once again, petty and sulky with the jewels in the corner, swirling in a conniving cloud of yellow chiffon, thrusting delicate sandals in Herod's prettily painted face.

He pulled off the look astonishingly well, considering the costume (cross between an Elizabethan prostitute and a geisha, with a bit of Vegas callgirl thrown in for good measure--tassels and ruffles and sparkles, oh my). The plastic flower-crown and the Amadeus-like giggle really added to the effect.

You have the look of a dreamer, the demon-queen said after the king slipped and quivered in comical anger until the guards stepped apart to let the Syrian's corpse fall over him. The Jews were a single man with a fan, black and white with eyeholes, and a versatile voice.

Costume changes and more lovely dancing, then graceful arms, appropriately anemic, twitching through their multilayered shroud. Up and about, then, dancing with the wing-beating, unsmiling angel of death in her black mask and belted dress, spinning. One with a face fanned out in a smile and hair flying out in a fan; the other remaining a rigid line; the ensemble spread round them, midly lugubrious. She came for her wages as the king curled up in a ball of skirts, bravado broken, and Herodias with her demon-queen ensemble laughed like a harpy. Chaos came deiberately and the two women turned in unison to the king and danced with the crystal balls, cackling silently. And death danced alone in the midst of it, skirt spinning in a big black wheel before swirling once around her thin knees and dropping to the ground, stoic as a stone.

Salome dancing a lurching ballet with the head in her teeth. Kill that woman. Herod was rather mad by then, laughing quietly and clasping Herodias, who cried out in slow motion as her daughter died. Herodias, I am beginning to be afraid. Giggle, grin, fade to black.

Curtain call, and then Herod patted his geisha-face and Jokanaan came out sans wig and with a hooded sweatshirt over his leather...thing...and the chattering began.

It seemed there was a troop of English students (from MWC, ironically; I recognized a few faces--one of them belonged to the girl behind me who jabbed my shoulders with her feet and talked loudly beforehand about how cool it sounded that Salome wanted to have sex with John the Baptist). So there was jabber, and the English brats analyzed the performance to bits, asking for explanations of symbolism and imagery that made the actors blink and laugh.

I'm more certain than ever that Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet with all that garden nonsense in mind. Authors rarely live up to what interpreters make of them, neh?