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

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[yhlee]

I am glad y'all had a good seder!

Funny story: The dining halls at Cornell would have...ah, I don't remember everything since I never ate from that table but they would have kosher food &c. at a table for people who needed it. Except Joe, being Joe, wandered over and would eat matzah ball soup from it because he developed a taste for it. (A Jewish acquaintance of mine later asked if Joe was Jewish and he says no, not to his knowledge. [1])

[1] German on his father's side; mother's side traces back to a shady individual who apparently ran around with multiple wives in different locations, etc., so who knows.

I had a dream last night that made me think of you (well, you know what I mean). It involved two gay mermen in an a/b/o universe hooking up. It was happy and consensual (or as consensual as a/b/o dreamworlds get, anyway), I swear. :p I'm not really clear on how the anatomy worked because my dream did not provide that level of detail, alas, but hey, I take my happy feels where I can get them.

[phi]

Chag sameach! I'm glad you have a good celebration. This is the first year in many years that Mike and I didn't attend one: combination of being overscheduled and also discovering between last year and this that the person whose seder we usually attend is not actually Jewish in spite of passing herself off as one, and that the haggadah they use was writting by a pair of multi-generational Lutherans, and that, in fact, some years there are no Jews at all in attendance. I feel . . . icky and appropriative about continuing to go to that one.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

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

Yet another of the things I coulda done if it weren't for these meddling kids, I mean continents, getting in the way. Well, one continent.