April Showers

Life is regaining a sense of normalcy and so here we are again, with a bulleted summary of my recent activities and well-intentioned (though potentially ultimately hollow) promise to update once more in a semi-regular fashion. Let's get to it.

• About a month ago a dear friend from home paid a visit to Ye Olde Strats and we had a brilliant weekend. Work got in the way a bit, but she got in on Saturday and after my shift we went out for drinks with some friends* and then came back and crashed. Sunday we went for breakfast at the Caffe and then she split off to do touristy things while I served the good people of Strats Italian food. After work we met up with the friends from the night before and went out for an incredibly lovely dinner at a real restaurant, with candles and courses and bottle of wine and EVERYTHING. It was wonderful. The food was delicious, the company unparalleled and the Persecco quite effective. I had to say goodbye to her the next morning, after another great breakfast at our local independent coffee shop, and that was a little heartbreaking. Still, though brief, that weekend was one of the best since getting to England and I've spent a good deal of time since trying to get her to come back (:

Ashley, myself and Lily at dinner

• King John happened! My gosh, I'm behind. I was the Citizen of Angers and got to say lines such as "if not complete of, say he is not she/and she again wants nothing, to name want,/if want it not be that she is not he" and stand on a ladder looking scared. It was an experience. The first night I was pretty much petrified, but it was only the last night that I messed up any of my lines. It was a lot of fun to hang out with people and work on a show, but I'm not sure I'm in a great hurry to act again. MASS.B is directing the summer show, and I think I'm doing some kind of version of AD-ing for him, which is way more my speed. 

Pictorial representation of King John's dramatis personae

• Had a paper due in March 31, and it almost killed me. I hadn't put it off or anything like that, I just had terrible writer's block and wrote the first draft something like eight times, finally re-writing the entire thing at 10pm the night before it was due and pulling an all nighter that was interrupted only by 20min of sleep at about 4am and a minor meltdown at 6am. The experience was vaguely traumatic and has led to a queasy sense of academic inadequacy ever since. I know I'm smart, but am I this kind of smart? A question yet to be satisfactorily answered.
• Last week Chi, MASS.B and I went to London because Chi had an appointment to try on wedding dresses at Harrod's. We had a large lunch at Chipotle (don't judge, we like and miss our Mexican food) and then killed time by the river, enjoying the sunshine. The actual appointment was far less intimidating than we thought and we weren't even compelled to draw on our pre-concocted Chi-as-millionaire-jam-heiress story. The woman was really helpful and there were two dresses that Chi looked stunning in. I wish I had pictures, but they were all on MASS.B's phone, my camera having not recuperated since King John.

Those are, I think, the big points. We are on term break now and it's been mostly working on the next paper and thinking about next steps. I was supposed to go to a conference in Prague in July, but I'm second guessing the cost/effort required as being less important than concentrating on stuff here, for now. I'm starting to get the hang of the whole waitressing thing, but I'm never going to win any server awards and I don't find it particularly thrilling (though the people are by and large lovely and the money much appreciated). Despite the post title, rain has been pretty scarce and instead we've had a lot of sunshine and temperate days. I bought my first cookbook, but still primarily enjoy eating parma ham tortellini with too much butter.

And things are good! Nay, great, even. Today I slept in, showered, put on fresh pajamas and then spent the day reading Early Modern plays in bed. Now I'm going to watch Tangled and type up quotes, and this what I'm supposed to be doing, today. I love grad school. Regardless of the aforementioned academic insecurities, I'm incredibly happy in my choice of life path and I only hope I get to continue on it!

Love to you.

*these are friends who have not been nicknamed yet, and yet should be, because I hang out with them a lot. However, I'm kind of over the whole nicknaming thing. Not sure how to proceed from here.

Creepy, Kooky, Mysterious, Spooky

Late Thursday night a dear friend and sister got into town from Scotland, where she's studying Art History. We did that sleepover thing, where you talk about how tired you are until the lights are shut off and then suddenly there is SO MUCH TO SAY! And there was a heckuva lot to catch up on.

Wound up sleeping in more than was intended, but that was okay because this was a vacation/holiday weekend without any real plans. I'm still learning how to entertain people in Strats (it will be easier when the Company re-opens), and Tau and are both easy going, so after a few rounds of "well...what do you want to do?" we decided to just go play in town for awhile, which included a trip to the Creaky Cauldron. I had mentioned this store in a previous post as a "store for people who actually think they are witches," but, while that's what it looks like, turns out I was wrong! It is, in fact, a delightful Harry Potter-styled shop that sells wands (carved on the premises), home fragrances and sweets disguised as spells, ministry of magic proclamations and other things of that nature, in a kind of waiting-for-a-ride-at-Disney* atmosphere. You can even send post by owl! And there's a tea shop at the back that claims to sell butter beer.

All of this was delightful, but there's more! The shop also holds a small kind of haunted house museum you can walk through (for a small fee, of course), lighting your way with a small electric candle. There was a Harry Potter room, a room of potions with a riddle, an incredibly creeped out nursery (children are terrifying), LOTS of dark mirrored hallways. I was very fond of it as it was only tableaux. No one jumped out at you, nothing suddenly moved. However scary it was, it was because your own brain made it that way...and, might I say, I have never pulled back curtains with more apprehension than during that little exploration.

Explored a few more shops and then got some tea before heading over to the Birthplace, where they were doing a special candlelit 'Shakespeare's Villains' event. The entry to the performance was separate from the main Birthplace entry, and you bought your tickets from the two actors trying to drum up business on the street and the guy was kind of in my grill more than I would have liked, but Tau gave as good as we got. Tau and I didn't feel like giving our real names, so we became "Pembrooke" and "Lady Rothschild" respectively for the rest of the evening, which didn't do much to further endear us to him.

Freelancer joined us for the tour, which was actually really, really cool and not a tour at all. Instead of being shown around by someone telling you about Shakespeare's life, our little group of six was led room to room by actors doing creepy scenes from Shakespeare. The porter led us to the witches, who conjured up some evil doings before bringing us before the Macbeths and then pointing the way upstairs, where Richard III was engaged in some nefarious plotting before we were then let out of the house by Hamlet, thinking about what happens after death. The performances were surprisingly strong for something like this, and because each room had it's own separate scene, you had time to really absorb the atmosphere. I especially loved that the discussion of murdering the princes was done in the nursery. Great touch.

Ended at the pub, as all the best days do.

*I mean that as a good thing. Think of the line for the Hollywood Tower of Terror—the attention to detail in the set decoration is insane. It was like that, only for a shop looking like it came from Diagon alley.