A Whole Lot of ABBA

I thought you might all appreciate a photo of the mysterious Ikea shopping cart. It was still there when I went to work yesterday morning, but I didn't check last night. I suspect it will linger on our street for days if not indefinitely.

So, I learned something interesting yesterday. Remember how I mused recently about the word pupil vs. the word student? Well, some commenters made me think about the origins of the word and how it may relate to the pupil of the eye, or the pupal stage of an insect. Were all these words related? If so, why?

Well, I looked it up, and it turns out they all stem from the Latin words pupa, or its forms pupulus or pupilla, which mean child, little boy and little girl. Pupil in the educational sense is obvious, as is the pupal (young or developmental) stage of an insect; the pupil of the eye is so named because of the tiny reflection of we see when looking into someone's eye. Other words with the same root include puppet.

Pretty interesting, right?!

But to be honest, that's not really what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about...

...ABBA!

Last night, after work, I went with my friend Colin to see the ABBA Voyage show at the ABBA arena (yes, they have their own dedicated theatre) in East London. This is the show where digitized versions of ABBA as they appeared in their heyday perform on stage. I was a big ABBA fan as a young person (weren't we all?), I owned several of their albums (didn't we all?) and they're still on my iTunes as we speak. So I was very curious about how this was going to work, and what it would look like.

Well, I'm happy to report that the show was totally worth my £80 ticket price. The "performers" appear on stage looking like actual humans, with large images projected onto screens so you can see their digital faces in detail. They look pretty natural -- kind of like a good CGI character in a movie. There are tiny flaws in the movement of small facial muscles, and other giveaways that make you realize you're watching a digital image, but they are very subtle and overall the singers look realistic enough that you ultimately buy the illusion. I developed a crush on Benny all over again.

(Of course recordings and photos were prohibited, but there are clips of the show at the link above so you can see what I'm talking about.)

There are also actual humans on stage -- a live band with backup singers, though I'm pretty sure the music we heard was almost all pre-recorded. They even got to do a number, a gender-swapped version of "Does Your Mother Know?" I assume this is largely to give the audience the sense that they're applauding for some actual people and not just digital images.

I cannot explain how the digital singers were projected onto the stage. There was no obvious scrim or surface upon which to project them, and they certainly appeared three dimensional. They looked opaque against the lighting effects behind them. But they would occasionally vanish in an instant, as if with the flip of a switch, and at least once they strolled off into the darker recesses of the stage. I don't get it!

The lighting effects, including a couple of animated story sequences, were spectacular. And the digital renderings of the costumes looked VERY real. I couldn't get over how the fabric draped and the sequins sparkled.

As for the audience, the evening was quite a scene. People were there in fancy dress, wearing Anni-Frid and Agnetha wigs or colorful bell-bottoms, like these women I snapped in the tube station on the way home. Again, lots of sequins. And the place was packed! On a Monday night! ABBA is a money machine.

We heard all the hits, including some lesser-known ones like "Summer Night City," and a couple of newer songs that I didn't know. You haven't lived until you've seen a bunch of middle-aged, heavyset British guys there with their wives, waving their hands in the air and singing "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight..."

Of course the finale was "Dancing Queen," and there was even an encore!

Dave, meanwhile, was home with Olga and having adventures of his own. Here's the text he sent me, which I didn't get until after the show:

Ultimately, we don't have much more information than that. Dave never saw the suspicious package or learned why it was deemed suspicious and not just someone's Amazon delivery. But apparently the police and the bomb squad were swarming around in the street for a couple of hours. It was all over by the time I got home to happily find him and Olga unharmed!