O stay and hear! Your true-love's coming that can sing both high and low

Today is Shakespeare's four hundredth yahrzeit. According to the flyers all around Highland Avenue, if you walk into the 7 Ate 9 Bakery and accurately recite a Shakespearean sonnet from memory, they'll give you a free miniature cheesecake. I don't know if I can match that offer, but I did write about Shakespeare in "Anonymity." I hope the Globe Theatre's Complete Walk is someday available to be viewed more widely than this weekend on the banks of the Thames. The pictures are great.

Last night we had fifteen and a half people for our seder. That's not more people than have ever come for Halloween or Hanukkah, but it's more than we've ever had to seat around a table in my lifetime. We used two tables, relocated to the living room and placed end to end. Charlotte is still just too young to be taught the Four Questions (and was not present at the time anyway, arriving later with her mother), so Audrey and Peter split the Hebrew and the English between them. We made even more chicken soup than we thought was necessary—and that only for the people who eat chicken rather than the people who eat vegetarian soup with matzah balls—and we still have barely any kneydlakh left. There were lots of macaroons. My brother did a very good voice for Pharaoh. I think it was a success, but man, the dishes.

I don't know why I dreamed of nearly being carjacked with rushthatspeaks while trying to see a nonexistent movie and then walking home through what was either a major transit breakdown or rumored terrorist activity on the Red Line between Harvard and Inman Squares in a Boston that looked absolutely nothing like itself, names and street signs notwithstanding. There was a subway station in Inman and a view of the sea. There were many more independent movie theaters than exist nowadays. That part I wouldn't have minded being true.

Was it a ghost? Was it fun?

I just got back from seeing Vertigo (1958) in 70 mm at the Somerville. I hadn't seen it since high school despite reading the source novel between then and now. My mother feels this movie would be infinitely improved if James Stewart fell from a great height at the end.

I am rapidly coming to the disgruntled conclusion that it may be impossible for me to see Psycho (1960) in a theater anywhere in this town and not have the audience laugh inappropriately, because there were people tonight who snickered their way through Vertigo just as loudly and mystifyingly as they did through The Birds (1963). Judy's painful, resigned "If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?" isn't a comic beat—it's the nightmare of every relationship, that no one loves you for yourself, that you are desirable only if you're a pin-up, a fantasy, a stand-in for the real thing, made in Judy's case even crueller by the fact that the "real thing" was a fiction in the first place. But people laughed. And I screamed a little into derspatchel's shoulder. He thinks it's the melodrama of the story that people cannot respond to seriously, but I don't understand it. It's like going to the opera and laughing because people are singing. I'm well aware of the values of camp and irony as modes of reinterpretation, but they're not the only filter in the world. I don't find Vertigo a pleasant story, but that doesn't mean I can't take it on its own terms. Too much of Scottie is believable for it to play as comedy.

I think my mother is probably right, though.