Day #494

Friday evening I took two of my grandchildren to the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern to see Romeo and Juliet. More than 400 years since that play was first performed, and it’s still wringing tears from audiences.

Every time I see it, I hear at least two or three lines I could swear I’d never heard before.

I’ve noticed a change over the years, though. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I got caught up in the tragedy of the story.

In my forties and fifties, I studied the emotional makeup of the various characters.

Now that I’m in my sixties, I want to take those two youngsters and shake them. 

     “Tell your father, Juliet. He likes Romeo; he’ll holler a bit, and then he’ll say okay.”

     “Romeo, listen to the Friar, for heaven’s sake. ‘A pack of blessings light upon your head.’ Juliet’s alive, you’re alive, you’ve been banished when you could have been executed. All will be well.”

Or, all would have been well, if Romeo hadn’t gone nuts with useless grief and killed himself.

Of course, if those two teenagers had listened to the voice of reason, we wouldn’t have had a play that lasted 400 years.

I guess it’s just as well. 

BEEattitude for Day #494:

       Blessed are those who write well, for they shall live long through their words.

_______________________________ 

The teeny details:

my books:  http://www.franstewart.com Please buy them from an independent bookstore or directly from my website.

my eBooks for Kindle:  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Fran+Stewart 

Day #489 Theater Week

What an amazing week this is turning out to be.

Yesterday I went with my dear friend Millie Woollen to the Aurora Theater in Lawrenceville to see Body of Water. I hadn’t known anything about the show ahead of time. We both have season tickets, so we just show up regardless of what’s playing.

Body of Water turned out to be a moving, disturbing, challenging, funny, sad, excruciating play about memory loss. I came out of it determined more than ever to appreciate each moment of my life.

Later on this week I’ll be going to the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern to see Romeo and Juliet TWICE. The first time will be with my daughter and two of my grandchildren--the two pre-teens. I love watching their enthusiasm over the way the actors carry them along through the story.

And then, a couple of days after that, I’ll go back to the Tavern to see the show again with Millie. We both are Club Ticket Holders, which means we see every show there, too. And, because I like to take my grandkids, sometimes I see the shows twice.

There’s something about live theater -- good live theater -- that simply cannot be explained to someone who’s never seen it. I have on occasion seen the same Shakespeare play three or four times in the same month, and it has different nuances every single time. The Shakespeare Tavern is an “Original Practice Playhouse,” which means that they perform the plays as Shakespeare’s company did, with the actors acknowledging the presence of the audience. That means that the mood of the audience -- always a variable from night to night -- determines in part how the show “feels” that evening.

If you’re ever in the Atlanta area, do yourself a favor. Take in some live theater! I’ll vouch for these two outfits any day.

BEEattitude for Day #489:

       Blessed are those who work at what they love, for they shall spread joy in their wake.

_______________________________ 

The teeny details:

my books:  http://www.franstewart.com Please buy them from an independent bookstore or directly from my website.

my eBooks for Kindle:  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Fran+Stewart 

Day #146 Thoughts on Immortality

My thoughts have been all over the road map recently. Miss Polly, my 14-year-old cat, woke me as usual the other morning, and I got to thinking about mortality—hers and my own.

People, and cats too, live as individuals. When we see a friend walking down the street, we don’t say, “Oh, there goes another member of my part of the human race.” No, we call that person by name and recognize her individuality. Ditto with cats, friendly dogs, even the possum who cleans up around the bottom of my bird feeder and turns on my motion-sensor light each night.

Honeybees, on the other hand, live their short lives (six weeks for a worker bee) as simply a part of a larger unit, the hive – the way individual cells in our body do their work for a short time and then die off, to be replaced by new ones.

Eventually, our human cells—all of them—run out of gas, and we die. But think about a hive. There could conceivably be a hive somewhere in the world that is still making honey after, say, a thousand years of being in that same place. Or maybe a million or two. As the hive population grows, half the bees take off somewhere else (that’s called “swarming”), but the other half stays behind and builds up their numbers and their honey and pollen stores all over again.

Isn’t this a kind of immortality? I’d like to think it is. You see, when I’m no longer around, my bees will be able to keep going without me. They may move to a new location, but they’ll still be the hive that grew and flourished on my back deck.

Come to think of it, as long as my books last, my first cat is immortalized, because she served as the model for "Marmalade."

BEEattitude for Day # 146:

       Blessed are those who take good care of themselves, for they shall live long and prosper.

One thing Fran is grateful for right now:

       Romeo and Juliet, which I saw last night at the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta with my granddaughter. Four hundred years, and the story is still fresh. Hey! That’s immortality, too, isn’t it?   

p.s. It’s official: this is “National Read an eBook Week.”

You can find my Biscuit McKee Mysteries on Amazon or Smashwords for only $3.99. These links will take you straight to my eBook pages.