For a big chunk of the month thus far, I was on a silent retreat, meditating, writing, reading, walking, and eating a lot. I was gone when the Mesherle verdict came down, which may be a good thing; although my hometown didn’t burn, it did smolder a little. Dread the sentencing; the guy is maybe going to do two years max.

Am now roughly around the halfway point of the BiPcsP (book in progress currently sans publisher) and just finished another essay on top of it. I seem to have inadvertently become a kind of amateur feminist theologian, a line of inquiry with pretty awesome creative rewards and very minimal financial ones. Then again, indie don’t pay either. I’m broke as hell but banking soul points.

I am shit when it comes to completing memes but this one was right up my intellectual/summer job alley.

30 Days of Shakespeare

1. Your favorite play

This is an awful cliche, but I don’t think I’ve gone more than a day since I first read it (probably about age 12) without hearing some line from Hamlet whiz through my head. Just yesterday, it was “eyes purging thick amber and plum tree gum” when I saw my morning warped visage in the mirror; a few days before I was quoting Claudius: “my words fly up, my thoughts remain below.” In the show Slings and Arrows, Geoffrey tells the nervous cast that he considers Hamlet to be the “greatest work of Western civilization… so at least we’ve got that going for us.” I wouldn’t disagree.

For some reason Hamlet is rarely performed in the Bay Area while we’re gagging on Midsummer (fun fact from my research for Cal Shakes: last year there were 36 productions of Midsummer in the Bay Area alone; we need a moratorium on that play immediately), Twelfth Night (so…over…it…) and R&J (ugh), so I’ve actually only seen it on stage twice in my life. But I must have seen the Laurence Olivier film version a dozen or more times, and I’ll even sit through the Branaugh  though his mustache pains me. The recent BBC version with Doctor Who as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart (so sexy) as Claudius was quite good too. But, hey, Bay Area theatres… let’s have a kick ass Hamlet sometime soon, okay?

Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you’ve never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line

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