Favorites of 2011

Fourth day of the new year and I already have a 4 day string of exercising and decluttering one drawer/closet per day. Yes, the threatened black garbage bag is really out! New Year's resolutions-a piece of cake. You'll notice I didn't go for the tough ones, like writing a novel, getting more money for stage 4 cancer treatments or bringing peace to the Middle East (finally!)

Looking forward to a great year and of course looking back over 2011, I have to offer up some of my favorite things. First, the easy ones:

BEST BOOKS

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (fiction) A sprawling novel set between Ethiopia and America of twin boys with a special bond, tested by life events. Hard to put this one down.

The Emperor of all Maladies by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee (non-fiction). A history or, as he describes it, a "biography" of cancer. He talks about all cancers, not just breast cancer and relates some pretty amazing stories. I particularly liked the description of  how difficult throughout history it's been to gain acceptance of new procedures and ideas.

Life by Keith Richards (biography) 20+ disks, but well worth the listen. (You know I love Keef!)

BEST TRIP

Do you have to even ask? Alaska, hands down. As my Park Service son would say my "place attachment" remains strong. Wonderful family travel, beautiful scenery and things I thought I'd never do--kayak to a glacier, hike in close proximity to the bears, and fly in a Cessna 210 around Denali.

BEST ALBUM

Bright Morning Stars by the Wailin' Jennys- discovered this group at Bergen Community College performance and practically wore out the CD, playing it in the car. Also loved their earlier album, Forty Days and especially the single Arlington, which starts with a lovely Irish drum and has beautiful poetic lyrics.  (click on link to listen)
        

BEST PLAY

I have to restrict this category to Shakespeare, since I saw 14 plays by the bard this year, ranging from Bergen Community College production of As You Like It to King Lear with famous British actor Derek Jacobi at Brooklyn Academy of Music and also with Sam Waterston at the Public Theatre. (You know you're in trouble when you start seeing the same play and comparing different versions of it) Gary saw an additional 2 plays, but I drew the line at military history plays--Richard II and Henry V.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - a fun, easy to like Shakespeare play by the NJ Shakespeare Festival in a perfect setting: the outdoor stone amphitheatre at St Elizabeth's College.

Now the harder categories in which to pick a favorite:

BLOG: "Gee, I love them all," she said modestly.  

My pick for 2011 would be:  I still buy green bananas. Yes, Tim, I still chuckle every time I sit in the family room with my feet up in couch potato luxury.

MOVIE: Lots of good ones, none really great.

I liked The Descendants, War Horse, Midnight in Paris, The Help, The Artist.  Off beat: The Guard and Win-win. But as for best picture, I'll leave that to the Academy.

This post is starting to look like a Pinterest page, so I'd better stop. No, I can't get involved in yet another website!! (although it's fun to browse.)

Shakespeare 101

We never do anything casually--seems like it's whole hog or nothing at all. No in-between options in this house. So, when we saw and loved The Merchant of Venice on Broadway with Al Pacino and Lily Rabe (a nice birthday gift from my brother and sister-in-law), I had a feeling that it heralded the beginning of Shakespeare 101 for the spring semester.

You can't just go to a Shakespeare play with no knowledge or background. You have to do your homework to really appreciate a play--there's just so much involved--the language, the plot, historical context. Gary and I have different approaches. I opt for Spark Notes, a great website that summarizes each scene, as well as giving a comprehensive overview.  Gary is the purist and, while he may do cliff notes, he also tries to read the play and get a feel for the language. (also allows him to make pointed comments during intermission like: "Did you notice they dropped scene 4 and combined scenes 1 and 2?"  Sheesh!)

Our second play was Timon (rhymes with Simon) of Athens, staged at the Public Theatre, a small venue with Richard Thomas (John-Boy of the Waltons) as Timon.  I'm sure most people have never heard of this historical play that is rarely performed and may not have even been properly finished by Shakespeare. Some things just don't add up, so scholars speculate that it was still in draft status. Why even perform it, then, you may well be asking, as I did?
  

The hook is that it is eerily relevant to the recent financial chaos we've had and examines what happens when the bottom drops out of an extravagant, licentious lifestyle.  When bankruptcy looms, where do your friends go? I loved the first act, although normally I'm not a fan of Shakespeare in suits, set in the 1920's. How do you reconcile Elizabethan language with the flapper era?--bit of a disconnect, but falls under the theatrical category of suspending disbelief. We accept certain conventions in theatre, if it's done well, because it's an artificial world we're willingly entering
.

The second half dragged a bit--numerous long soliloquies (this is Shakespeare, after all).  But, how can you fault a play that stages the decadence and depravity of the city by updating the traditional veiled dancing girls with a brief view of a 1920's porn movie? 

Our third play was Macbeth--a great gory play, fast moving, witches, ghosts, sword fights, people going crazy, riddles, ambition, guilt, deception.  Something for everyone! The Duke Theatre at 42nd street was the perfect setting--small stage, surrounded by the audience on three sides, with entrances and exits from all over the place. You really felt like you were in the play, especially from the 2nd row! 

This weekend we saw a surprisingly good student production of As You Like It at Bergen Community College. I loved the classic Elizabethan costumes, moveable scenery of three anthropomorphosized trees and an enthusiastic cast with a few very talented actors. 


Still to come: King Lear at Brooklyn Academy of Music in May and Romeo & Juliet this summer at a re-created Globe Theatre inside the Park Ave Armory.

One of the best things about Shakespeare is the language. I never realized how many popular phrases originated with the bard.  An interesting benefit from this Shakespeare-mania is we are now ready for the most challenging intellectual cocktail party, ready to drop a few verses, just to show how "learned" we are. Feel free to borrow any of these quotes below. I've also suggested some appropriate places and times to say them.

1. If you get along well with your oncology nurse, you might joke as she draws blood:  "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" When she hooks up the IV infusion, try: "If you poison us, do we not die?"   (Merchant of Venice)
2. After you get a bad sunburn at the beach:  “Mislike me not for my complexion, The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun.” (Merchant of Venice)
3. At the next baseball game:  "Fair is foul and foul is fair." (Macbeth)
4. When rain is pouring down and temps are in the raw 50's:  "Fair is foul and foul is fair."(Macbeth)
5. To your boss, when you've missed a deadline:  "To-morrow, and to-morrow and to-morrow"  (Macbeth)
6. After a boring day at work, to a co-worker:  "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; (Macbeth)
7. When blowing out your birthday candles: “Out, out, brief candle!” (Macbeth)
8. As your boss or a politician explains austerity measures: “It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” (Macbeth)
9. Save this full version for when you've lost your job, your home and your love all in one day (in other words you're really depressed): “Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” (Macbeth)
10. Cooking dinner:  "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." (Macbeth)
11. Getting stubborn stains out of the rug: “Out, damned spot! out, I say!"  (Macbeth)
12. As you pull the overcooked turkey out of the oven on Thanksgiving: “what's done is done.” (Macbeth) 
13. After a bad day on the stock market: “What's done is done.”  or “We have seen better days.” (Timon of Athens)
14. After any bad day: “We have seen better days.” or “True is it that we have seen better days.” (As You Like It)
15. As you finish off your Easter candy in one sitting: “Can one desire too much of a good thing?” (As You Like It)
16. In response to the crazy religious right: “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” (King Lear)
17. When you want to pass the buck: “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.” (King Lear)
18. Words to live by: “Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest". (King Lear)
19. When looking at a bad report card or a start up’s business plan: “Nothing will come of nothing." (King Lear) 
20. When a deal is too good to be true: "All that glisters is not gold." (The Merchant of Venice)  Note: the "glisters", not glitters-this will set you apart as the Shakespearean aficionado.
21. When an expectant couple shares the names they've picked for the new baby and you don't like any of them: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." (Romeo & Juliet)
22. On reading someone's blog: “he hath strange places crammed
    With observation, the which he vents In mangled forms.”  (As You Like It)
23. When bloggers get carried away with themselves : "All the world's a stage"  (As You Like it)

A long post, I know. I guess Gary is not the only one in our house who's gone “all out” for the bard, who, by the way, died almost 400 years ago on April 23, 1616. 


And, yes, folks, we are coming to the end of poetry month!

Love, Loss and What I Wore

I saw this play last week, when my original plan to see Laura Linney in Time Stands Still was scuttled by her absence. The TKTS booth offered Love, Loss and What I Wore, a Nora Ephron anthology that promised a light afternoon of laughter.  The theatre was dominated by women and I swear I had seen Vagina Monologues years before in the same venue.  Five actresses take the stage, sitting on chairs, reading the script and assuming different roles. It delivered the laughs, as promised, but got me to thinking about the theme.

It's such a great idea--why didn't i think of it? You do remember what you wore with the happy or sad times, the favorite childhood clothes, the adolescent angst with your mother, the times you felt so cool in your boots or your hippie vest or so hot in that little black dress!

Judging by my husband, who adored his purple stretch bellbottoms with the buttons on the fly and his American flag pants, I would venture to say this association to clothing applies to men, too, although most wouldn't admit it. (and fewer still can actually say they still own those clothes, tucked away in a box in the basement)

What was your favorite childhood outfit?  When I was 10, I got red leather gloves for Christmas to wear to church with my "good" coat. But, I discovered when wearing them outside to play that a snow ball would turn reddish from the leather dye and a whole new adventure began.  We had snowmen with red eyes, snow cars with red backup lights and snow forts with red doorknobs. (yes, lots of snow in Schenectady). The gloves were ruined and my mother was not pleased.

Neither was she pleased when she caved to my pleas, supported by my Aunt Marcella, to buy denim shorts a few summers later. I was thrilled. They were light blue (because Mom absolutely refused to go for the dark denim--"so mannish"), very tight, knee length. I wore them with a button down, yellow oxford shirt with a light blue stripe. 

My other aunt, who also had only sons, had her own idea of how to dress me and every Christmas I got an expensive shirtwaist dress from Klopman's--even into the sixties, when I just died having to wear it. The last one I remember had a white background with red flowers and a red accent belt. Even my mother agreed it was time to tell Aunt Be that the reign of the shirtwaist dress was over.

From college I remember my first pair of jeans in freshman year, when my roommate took me to downtown Ithaca's Army Navy Store to buy boys jeans because they didn't make them for girls. Later, a group of us were sitting in someone's dorm room, sprawled across the bed or hunched together on the floor, discussing the great issues of the day, when someone commented. "Look we're all wearing blue jeans!"  I also had a favorite red and white flowered peasant blouse and a yellow Indian print dress with huge sleeves.

Years later,(no connection to the story above!) when I was pregnant and finally had a Dolly Parton chest, I sported a navy sundress with cleavage, an unheard of experience for me. (now if only I hadn't had that big belly!)

Happy times--the clothes I bought for a Bermuda getaway (without kids)-- and sad times--the black pinstriped pants suit (very IBM) that I bought for my father's funeral, but never wore again.

So, think back to your favorite (and unfavorite) clothes and I'll think you'll find a story connected to them.  Indulge yourself and share with us, if you dare!