Everything I've Ever Wanted Snack

Can you die of happiness?

guy: whoa! she died! what of?

other guy: ...joy?

Update Snack

Call me corny or call me sentimental. (You can. Seriously. Both of these things may be true.) But Twelfth Night has been my favorite Shakespeare show since very early memory. It was the first Shakespeare I ever saw, actually; in Telluride, after fishing or playing soccer or something else with my family when I was young, we stumbled upon an evening production in one of their giant parks. It was the scene where Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek and that other guy are hiding in the bushes while Malvolio reads the faulty letter. And my brother literally could not stop laughing. He was laughing so hard through the next few scenes that the usher had to come over him and tell us to calm him down or we would have to leave. I think we ended up leaving. I hadn't scene a production since then, but I did Viola's monologues in high school. And there was the time in Actors and Directors in college, where someone did a scene from it and Mary Robinson laughed so hard that she fell off her chair. The class stopped in horror and a fit of giggles, and from behind the risers in the corner we saw her hand frantically waving us on: "I'M FINE! KEEP GOING."

And the production I saw tonight lived up to all of my expectations and childhood memories. Anne Hathaway was mesmerizing, Audra MacDonald was radiant, Hamish Linklater was da best. I laughed hard (though not as hard as my brother...?), I cried a little (for happy rather than sad), and I felt a distinct surge of joy throughout, and rightness. I had better seats than Angela Lansbury. Opa was probably jealous of me, or he was there, smiling, wondering if she'll ever do a follow-up to Murder, She Wrote.

And tonight was a Full Moon.

W[h]ine Snack

Ugh! I had to wake up at FIVE THIRTY this morning because I HAD to go to wait in line for tickets in Central Park for Twelfth Night. And I spent SIX HOURS reading a novel and the Sunday Times and eating a BaconEggAndCheese under a gigantic TREE. Ugh, and then I got some of the LAST tickets! Ugh, and then I had to WALK home through Central Park and all I saw were hilarious DUCKS and some young gentlemen STICKFIGHTING and and old man teaching his granddaughters how to FISH. And THEN I went home and made pasta and watched 30 ROCK and read more of this TOME that I started in the morning. And NOW I have to get READY for the SHOW, during which the imbibing of ALCOHOL from SELF-PREPARED PLASTIC BOTTLES is READILY AND HEARTILY CONDONED. UGH.

Woe is me and my awesome day.

PS:

"Elsewhere in the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn--and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.

"So, let us drink a cup of tea."

-Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Snacklog

A reminder to all of those Presidential hopefuls in the wake of debate-time. Big ups to Willy Shakes for laying it out loud and clear.

Subject: A Rebirth of Snacks

Originally Sent June 20, 2008

Snacks on Speechmaking:

-Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.

-Do not saw the airtoo much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

-Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

-O, reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

-Go, make you ready.

fotografia courtesy of reuters.