Song of the Little Road

I don't know how y'all feel about Indian cinema, but I, being a sucker for the films of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, had to check out one of their favorite films when I heard it was on DVD. Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali is the story of a Brahmin family living in Bengal. It was released in India in 1955. The photography (by Subrata Mitra, who later worked on all of Merchant-Ivory's Indian films) is incredible, the story is beautiful and haunting, the delicate score is by Ravi Shankar, and the direction is immaculate. It's unbelievable that this was anyone's first film. If you are into Indian cinema, check this one out.

Theologians Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout My Soul

Hi.
I'm feeling a little frustrated. My horoscope predicted this.
Rehearsal was okay, but mostly annoying because I had a sick (i.e. no-show) actor. Today was supposed to be my first day with the entire cast and now my first day with the entire cast will not be until next Sunday because I gave another actor the night off tomorrow. (I committed to the latter weeks ago, and can't take it back now.) I hate sick actors. I know you can't really be mad, because, after all, they're puking their guts out or can't get rid of the voices talking in their heads or whatever, but damn it, it gets in my way. I'm trying to work and you're sick and so I can't really do my work. I shouldn't be so bitter. I should be understanding and generous, but I don't want to be because I'm in a frustrated mood.

Frustration number two is that we probably can't have a show on Saturday, September 10th. Initially, we were supposed to perform the 8th, 9th and 10th and then the 15th, 16th and 17th with a matinee on Sunday the 18th. Linda nixed the show on the 18th because the next show needs the space for technical rehearsals, but I found out today that it is going to be nearly impossible for us to have a show on the 10th, too. And why? Because Linda (the producer) didn't reserve the space with the facilities manager and so the space has been rented to someone else on that day. WHAT?! And it's dumb for me to get frustrated about this, because it isn't really my problem, but I do get frustrated, because I hate to just have a show on a Thursday and Friday and not have a Saturday show: that's dumb. And I hate taking performance dates away from actors. You tell them you're having a show: you shouldn't just pull out on some dates because it isn't convenient... but there's nothing I can even do about this, because I'm not the producer and this isn't my fault. I just want to have a good show, and do the best work I can. I shouldn't have to be bothering myself with things like "did we reserve the space we need?" Because if I were the producer, you can damn well bet I would've reserved the dates I needed six weeks ago when I made the schedule! I just want to scream.
Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Okay. That's a little better. I was going to go the cinema, but Howl's Moving Castle is only playing at the One Colorado and I don't feel like going that far (it's really only about ten blocks) or paying that much. I could go see Elevator to the Gallows, but... I don't know. I think I'll see that on a weekday when I need something slower. Hmmm. Maybe I'll go get Thai food, finish reading The Libertine and watch Pather Panchali.

I think my car is leaking coolant from the compressor. It's a completely uneducated opinion, but it's all I've got.

Oh yeah, and I started compiling a giant list of schools to look at for graduate work. It's about 22 or 23 strong right now. To do this all again seems so daunting and makes my spirit sink a little, but I think it will be okay this time: a) I will apply to more schools this time, and b) I will write something nice and long and analytical about Hard Times so that they know I can compose a sentence.

As Luck Would Have It

I had resigned myself to not seeing Wicked while it was in Los Angeles. I hadn't jumped on getting tickets early enough and time had gotten away from me.

But yesterday at 4:00p, I got a call from asking me if I wanted to go and would I meet him and his boyfriend at 6:00p.

Miranda July

I just came home from Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I recommend to everyone. Seriously. It's wonderful: full of realistic magical moments, pitch-perfect performances, and a view of the world that makes me think about all of the stuff I miss out on. It's a fabulous film. Go.

That Cement Is Just There for the Weight, Dear

I really want to see Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, which is screening at the cinema down the street, but how can I justify seeing a film from almost fifty years ago when there are so many movies from 2005 calling my name? I think I will see Me and You and Everyone We Know instead.

PLUS I still have Pather Panchali, Last Tango in Paris, and The Razor's Edge sitting at home just waiting to be sent back to the nearest Netflix hub.

*
I turned on my personal radio at work today. I never know if I will get KPFK, KCRW or KUSC, such is the temperamental nature of my radio, but I lucked out. The voice coming out at me from the ether was unmistakably Bette Davis's, clearly in her sixties doing an interview where the public was asking her the coolest questions! After it was over, the announcer told me that I was listening to one of the Pacifica Radio Archives' newest finds: an audio recording from 1969 of a Q&A Davis did at the San Francisco Film Festival where she was being fêted for her body of work.
Davis picked out her favorite films, discussed modern filmmaking as opposed to the old studio system, talked about actors she would have loved to work with, discussed Mike Nichols (with love) and said that she begged to be allowed to play Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (this, she says, was before Nichols was attached to the project.) One of my favorite things she said was that the only distinction her film Beyond the Forest will ever have is that "Mr. Albee wrote 'What a dump!' Nothing else good ever came from that terrible film."

Good times.

Puzzles

Is anyone else playing the Sudoku puzzle in the times? I am all about it. It's a kind of logic puzzle with numbers. It's relatively easy (about 20 minutes) and lots of fun.

The spelling words on the Mirriam Webster site today were:
palazzo
quiescence
adroit
lieutenant
siesta
zealotry
recourse
machismo (such a turn-off)
and facsimile.

Does anyone else still pronounce "lieutenant" as "leff-tenant" or am I just being pretentious?

Terrorism

Monday on All Things Considered they had some guy who was the first Muslim ever elected to British Parliament or something. He was on there talking about the difference between the use of terrorism in Iraq and the use of terrorism in the middle of London. Robert Seigel kept trying to get him to define his position... how can terrorism be okay in Iraq (and Israel) but not okay in London? The Muslim Parliament guy kept saying that if civilians died, the people setting off the bombs were terrorists. I am blown away by this.

Can we still be this confused on our definition of "terrorism?" I don't think it's that difficult a concept to grasp. Terrorism is a tactic used by political bodies to enact political change. Terrorist organizations are political groups who have political goals but use military means as their way of achieving them. A terrorist act is a usually violent, almost always spectacular military attack, but for the military action to qualify as "terrorism," the goal of this attack must be "to create terror." Terrorists hope to achieve their goals through fear. Their enemies (usually occupying factions) will ideally become frightened and give in to the terrorists' demands. The IRA used terrorism in Ireland and I always considered it totally justified. They were an occupied nation fighting for their own freedom. I saw Michael Collins. Another great film about (completely justified) terrorism is Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.

I am not sure what the point of this post is, completely, but listening to this British legislator made me frustrated all over again with the misuse of this word "terror." I don't think terrorism is always bad: when used to fight occupation, it is, often, the only tactic that will get the downtrodden any traction. I had been thinking about this a couple of days and then this morning I read that the U.S. administration is now using different terminology to describe the war in Iraq. It's no longer a global war on terror; it will now be called the struggle against violent extremism. I think the new phrase is infinitely more accurate.

Fuck Getting Up

The thing about directing in the evenings is that when I get up to go to work the next morning it feels as though it has been forever since I went to work. Maybe because, in my head, theatre is my real job and working at the airport is just a gig. No matter what, though, getting up to put on a shirt and tie and haul my ass out to Burbank is something I definitely do not feel like doing right now. Working this many hours a week is highly overrated.

Two Gentlemen is going excellently. I think the show needs to open with a live band (or at least a musician or two)... I came to this realization yesterday. Anyone have any suggestions???

A Thought on Big-studio Comic Book Movies and a Review of Last Days

I'm not sure if I dig the idea of our good American directors making big-studio comic book movies, though: it makes the comic book movies smarter and cooler, that is undeniable, but are we not also missing out on stories of actual merit these directors could be telling? Batman Begins and for that matter The X-Men movies are certainly good, but wouldn't Christopher Nolan and Bryan Singer's talents be better used elsewhere? And did I just read that David O. Russell will now be hired to do a comic book movie? Really? I don't blame these guys for selling their considerable talents to the big studio machines, I just regret the studios use of these talents.

As for Last Days which I saw last night, it has a lot in common with Gus Van Sant's most recent two movies: Elephant and Gerry, both of which are superb films. Last Days has a lot of really similar elements: a love of silence, a roving eye, several points of view, and a slow, meditative pace. This film, like the other two, also goes back in time over ground we have crossed already to see things in a different light or from someone else's point of view. I think this style is very effective and interesting.
Last Days is difficult, though, because it has a main character, Blake, to which it is very tough to relate, at least from my point of view. He is a sort of doddering, mumbling crazy-man who rarely does anything we expect him to do. He is obviously a talented musician, but he doesn't seem to have much else going for him (certainly, his choice of friends is misguided), and I found this frustrating. I wanted to like the Cobain-esque Blake, but everything he did seemed drug-induced and I found it difficult to empathize. Van Sant uses sound in a lot of cool new ways in this film, though, and it might be worth seeing just for that. One of the oddest sequences of the movie is when Boyz II Men's "Down on Bended Knee" music video is played almost in its entirety. It is hilarious. Most of the audience at my screening got the joke, but I know some people were just baffled. The theatre was full at the 10:00p screening I attended, but at least 10 people left during the movie, maybe more. I guess they came for Kurt Cobain and didn't know about Gus Van Sant, but hadn't they seen the trailer?
I don't really recommend Last Days. I liked it more than I disliked it, but it isn't for the easily bored and if you haven't seen Gerry or Elephant, rent those first.

The Fairy Queen is Meeeee!

I wish I could say that in my absence from LiveJournal I had been journaling at home in my big red book that I used to use for The Artist's Way. I haven't been. I have been, instead, doing a lot of thinking and a lot of spending time with people I love.

I spent Thursday night in Valencia with my friend Madison. Her husband was away on business, so I went up to Valencia after work to stay with her. Boo to Burbank-to-Valencia rush-hour traffic on I-5. That shit is unbelievable. When I arrived, though, Madison answered the door and handed me a beer: lovely. We had a nice quiet supper at their house, which is so nice and makes me want to get a house really badly. She has tomato plants as tall as me and basil as high as my chest.

Then, after work on Friday I met Romeo and Juliet for dinner at Clancy's Crab Broiler in Glendale. None of us had never been there, but always up for trying new things, we headed there and had a very nice time. The atmosphere is a little weird: a kind of North Wood's Inn for seafood, but the food is great.
After the Crab Broiler, the three of us drove over to Brand Park to see our friend Michael Steger in a production of Charley's Aunt performed outside and (for some very odd reason) in it's entirety. The show wasn't very good at all, but Mike was quite good, as he always seems to be when I see him these days. His dialect was near-perfect and his performance was real and engaging... and compared to the rest of the cast, our friend was a fucking genius. The guy who played Charley's Aunt was a late-thirties musical theatre performer who was obviously, flamboyantly, distractingly gay. He stretched the limits of believability set on the play to places I thought they never could go. The funniest thing in this performance was his song, late in Act III, which is performed in drag (of course) as the old woman and which features, quite prominently, the lyric "There are fairies at the bottom of our garden." The song was so hilarious under the circumstances that I could barely contain myself.
After the show, we all went to the Elephant Bar in Burbank. Mike seemed ambivalent about the show, which is understandable, but the three of us all re-assured him that his performance was quite good even if the show lacked.

Oh, and I ran into two very old colleagues of mine at the show. Totally randomly, Amy Hiett and Kenny something-or-other, who were both involved with The Bakkhai all those years ago, showed up at Charley's Aunt. Weird. We talked for a little while, but they wouldn't say why they were there and didn't seem predisposed to chat with me. It was such a trip!

Ah well. I am off to see Gus Van Sant's new movie. I know I should catch up on some old films that have been in the theatre a while, but Last Days demands my attention. I will try to see The Beautiful Country, Howl's Moving Castle and Me and You and Everyone We Know sometime during the week. The movies just keep piling up. And I haven't even seen War of the Worlds! Geez.

J.K. and I are in SUCH A HUGE FIGHT

I really hate J.K. Rowling.
I mean, I love her for what she has given me, and I love her for her how well she understands me, but I resent that she likes to push my buttons. I think, after all, she is a sadist at heart.
This evening she has kept me up until midnight and, truth be told, I wish I had saved the last hundred pages for a couple more days. I was loving the book at page 550, and I might have continued to love the book if I hadn't finished it. And now... well I wish it hadn't ended. I wish I knew what will happen next. I wish all of what I just read made more fucking sense then it does right now.

P.S. How did the president find time to nominate a Supreme Court Justice that satisfies his conservative base?
Hmm. He must've finished HP6 over the weekend.

Happiness Is What My Life's About

Rehearsals--much to my surprise--have been going very well. Last night I finished everything I wanted to do in two hours of my scheduled three-hour rehearsal. This play is so short! I hope I can figure out how to make it funny as well as everything else. The play has it's own problems (I don't know who here has read The Two Gentlemen) but a man attempts to rape his best friend's fiancée, is caught, forgiven and restored to friendship all in about 5 minutes and the girl doesn't say anything. Definitely problematic. It will work out, though.

Things have been great lately... except for the whole overheating car thing. I feel productive, and I feel lately that I am really working toward a future--owning property does that for you, I guess. I always talk about my big plans for the future on this blog, and I assume that everyone is sick of hearing them, especially after I didn't go off to school this summer, but, honestly I think about it all the time. It weighs upon my mind and demands to be acknowledged. And it's not just me comparing myself to my successful friends (read: Allan and James), it's that I want to begin moving toward a place where money isn't a problem and I no longer have to work at a job which holds no interest for me.

By the way: happy birthday, Allan. I know I'm a day late. It seems to be a trend, lately.

Crazy Dream That I Actually Remember

After the barbecue at my parents' house for my sister's birthday I came home about 5:30p and decided to fucking sleep.

(My HP6 came in the mail, by the way... no Tuesday bullshit for the Pasadena Post Office.)

I had a dream that I decided it would be easier for someone to pick me up at the airport (KLAX) than for me to finish driving all the way home. Perhaps it was fears about my car, but I don't think so. I think that I had reasoned in my head that it would be out of my way to continue on whatever road I was already on and it would just make so much more sense if a cab picked me up at Los Angeles International. So I parked the car on the side of the freeway. It didn't look like I-405, in fact it didn't look like a California freeway at all. It looked more like one of those Eastern two-tier jobs. Anyway, I ditch the car, lock it and get into the airport the back way (?... I guess that means across the tarmac.) So I'm in the airport and I realize that I've left my wallet in the car (something I do all the time) and I have no way to pay for the cab ride home. I have my new cell phone, so I'm okay for contact, but not so okay for money. So I call my friend Jaime and I am telling her this story as I walk through LAX, which looks a lot like the casino floor of the Imperial Palace, Las Vegas, having no identification (a scary thing at an airport) and no money... and I can't find the way out of this place!

Then I woke up.

So Productive!

There had been random speculation this week that, were Chief Justice Rehnquist to be forced into retirement by his health, Justice O'Connor could be persuaded back to the High Court in order to be the new Chief. Such speculation was started by a Democratic senator, naturally, but the Conservatives might have gone for it after all. At any rate, this evening, the Chief issued a statement saying that he is hale and hearty and has no intention whatsoever of retiring despite his recent bout with thyroid cancer. Ah well. I like the Chief a lot and I would be sorry to see him go in any case, but the person I really wish would stay on the court is J. O'Connor. Every time I think about her not being on the Court next year, I just get depressed. I will miss her.
Why couldn't Justice Thomas retire? Now there's an idea I could get behind.

In other news, Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince is being released on Saturday. Ok, I will shut up about that. If you care, you know and are excited, and if you don't give a shit about Harry, I'm sure you're damn sick of hearing about his scrawny little sixteen year-old ass.

I can't watch DVD's anymore when I get home from work. I always try but it never works out. This afternoon I came home and popped in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali and sure enough, ten or fifteen minutes into the film I start falling asleep. Pather Panchali is thought by many (Akira Kurosawa, for one) to be one of the greatest films ever made, so I thought I might want to be awake when I watched it. It's not that the film was boring, it's just that I am so tired when I get home from work these days. I don't know what it is that tuckers me out so badly.
Anyway, I ended up baking tonight. I made popovers (which turned out only so-so) and then I made a cheesecake for work tomorrow. We need a little morale boost at work, lately. Yesterday, our boss was screaming at the top of her lungs at two of the girls in the office and for no good reason at all. We all find it frustrating and one of the girls is very seriously thinking about giving her notice. I am not quitting (no one would yell at me like that anyway) but I feel like I should cheer them up a little--or at least try to.

Oh yeah, and I got a new phone: it's really cute and the battery lasts longer than five minutes.

And So It Begins..

The first Two Gentlemen rehearsal went fairly well for a first rehearsal. They always let me down, really, but that's me and not anyone else. I never am able to communicate my own excitement about doing theatre to actors. They never seem as excited as I, for some reason. This one also had the manager of the theatre carping at me. Getting lectured by the theatre's manager is not the best way to start a show. But the cast will work together well, I think, and I will be able to whip this show into tip-top shape in the time allotted.

I hadn't eaten much all day, I just finished rehearsal, it's almost midnight and I'm really, really hungry. Do I come home and make myself a turkey sandwich or perhaps a salad?

No. I gorge on chocolate chip ice cream (the Private Selection brand, no less), tell you all about it and then go to bed, my belly filled with carbohydrate calories. How. Healthy.

Mountain Wedding

This weekend was my friend Jill's wedding. Jill lives and teaches in Ohio nowadays, but she spent a lot of her recent years up in Lake Arrowhead at a kids' camp there. So the wedding was, rather fittingly, I suppose, up in Lake Arrowhead.

Having been informed ahead of time that there would be an open bar and that folks from my high school days would also be in attendance, I went ahead and booked a room at the resort where they held the reception. That was probably the best decision I made all weekend.

The wedding was very nice. There is always way to much talk about god in these things for my taste, but this minister seemed to be particularly obsessed. He was going on about Christ's first miracle (turning water into wine--in case you are a heathen and don't know), and then they did a bogus thing with the candles: normally there are two candles and then the bride and groom light the center candle with their two smaller candles. Right? These Lutherans lit a center candle first and then the bride and groom "drew their light from Christ" and lit their candles. Weird. I had a lot of fun at the reception, though. Some very fun people from high school who I never see were there. And I got hit on all night by a married man (what can you do when you look this good?) The food was surprisingly good; Jill looked beautiful; and I started drinking at about 5:00p and didn't stop until 2:00.

I Am My Own Credit Card

Last night, after working 9 1/2 hours, I trekked down to the west side to the Wadsworth Theatre. This is the last weekend for I Am My Own Wife and the options for me seeing it have been very limited what with Jill's wedding and starting rehearsals for a new show. I was supposed to go see an old friend in The Merchant of Venice this weekend, but I opted to see Tony-winner Jefferson Mays instead.

I always feel like a child when I do things like this by myself. I know I ought to feel more adult, but instead the opposite is true. Traveling to Virginia alone, renting a car, buying tickets over the internet, making hotel reservations. I always feel out of place, as though I were an impostor and at any moment someone could take away my right to do these things. Perhaps a sense that I really don't belong is a part of me as a person, something that I carry--something I ought to get rid of. Because, in fact, what allows me to belong is my American Express card. It's rather awful to say that, but it's true, no matter what Chuck Palahniuk says. I belong because I can pay for things. I wonder if that should scare me at all. It probably should, but if anything, it makes me feel safer.

I Am My Own Wife was absolutely sensational and I am very grateful I did not miss it. Jefferson Mays was incredibly versatile and the set design and lighting were surprisingly beautiful and subtle. I love Moisés Kaufman, but I think the direction is occasionally campy where it ought not to be. Perhaps it is an affliction particular to one-person shows: for a character to morph into another character in front of us is, perhaps inherently, to induce us to laugh. Almost every time it happened the audience would laugh. Especially because for it to work, the characters must be very different from one another, that is, slight caricatures.
It's a fabulous show with a lot of fascinating things to say, and the actor is wonderful, but I am wondering if the material would be better-served enacted by a company of actors instead of just the single powerhouse of Jefferson Mays.

Hump

I am still so fucking sore.

But, if you're keeping score, I finished cutting The Two Gentlemen and I sent it off to my cast.

Our first rehearsal is Monday.

Oh.

And I met a boy.

P.S. TEN FUCKING DAYS UNTIL HARRY POTTER COMES OUT.
I'm ok. I just had to get that out of my system. I am so excited!

Bump. Set. Spike.

The thing about big holidays--you know, holidays like Independence Day and Thanksgiving as opposed to minor ones that you have off work like Labor Day and Memorial Day--is that it is impossible to relax. I mean, you don't really have a free day to catch up on things or sleep for an extended period of time or repair the plumbing in the house. Because you're out doing things with family or friends.

In my case it was both friends and family and (a first!) both were enjoyable. Who knew it was possible? The family got together around 1:00p or so. I arrived with a cheesecake and a lemon curd to go with it (a lovely combo, I must say), and then I made deviled eggs when I arrived. We played Taboo and then talked about politics for at least an hour and it was a good discussion--mostly with my dad: my sister says horrifying things like, "We should invade a few more countries" and "women have too many rights in this country,” but my brother actually had some interesting things to add this time, as well.

Then I went off to the Evangelista/Barber/Schroeder family barbecue (which I also attended last year) and enjoyed myself there as well. There was a lot of volleyball (a little tiring, but mostly fun), free food, fireworks, and general festivity. A lot of my friends were there, too, so that makes it nice.

Okay, I’m tired now... and sore... and I have to go to work in the morning. Boo to that shit.

Shake-a-speare

I've been working hard (it's relative, I know) on cutting Two Gentlemen. Considering my first rehearsal is in one week to the day, it's about fucking time I finished, but I think I will easily finish tomorrow and then I can send my cuts out to the cast.

I picked up Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human to see what Professor Bloom thought of Two Gentlemen. I always review Bloom's opinion when I start to work on a Shakespeare play. He is the United States' foremost authority on Shakespeare and he has very strong opinions about each of the plays (and a well-documented passion for Falstaff and Hamlet.) Anyway, Bloom hates Two Gentlemen. He says it's his least favorite of all of the plays ranking only The Merry Wives of Windsor lower. Understandably, I do not find Bloom's opinion in this case particularly encouraging, but I do feel as though the gauntlet has been thrown down. This play will be quite the challenge.

I should also mention that I went to see a production of The Merchant of Venice this weekend: not a favorite play of mine, but a friend was in it. My friend, Linda Bisesti, is also on the board of the theatre company. The Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company has been performing Shakespeare in Los Angeles for eleven years. For all of their shows, women perform every part in the play. They do so pretending to be men in a sort of reversal of the way Shakespeare's plays were originally done (that is, performed by all men). The genderbending seems to be more an affirmation of the power of women than anything to do with interpreting the text in new and interesting ways. At any rate... Merchant is the fifth LAWSC production I have seen and I am less and less impressed each time.

In most of their shows, the acting is somewhat hit and miss. This Merchant combines people with a very wide disparity in talent so that a few scenes sparkle and many many more fall flat. The show was directed by Lisa Wolpe, my dislike of whom increases exponentially with each show I see that she directs.

I am trying not to be too mean.

My friend Linda was very good in the show, and so were a couple of other folks (four at most in a cast of nineteen!) Most of my beefs are with the directing specifically and, more generally, with the entire notion of women-playing-men-playing-Shakespeare. Most egregious among the faults of the show is that it doesn't tell the story of the play. I left not knowing at all what happens in the show. The show moves from topic to topic: from anti-Semitic violence to extremely broad comic farce to love-comedy to melodramatic mooning to legal drama to partisan politics without so much as skipping a beat, leaving me (understandably) a little confused.

And of course, this being a Lisa Wolpe show, there is no hint of sex in it at all: god forbid there should be any of that. She's the Puritan lesbian! Never mind sexual freedom, she turns Shakespeare's writing--where virtually every other word is a sexual pun--into the sexual equivalent of a Joseph McCarthy hearing.

The show has lots of other problems, too. Chiefly, that phony pretend-talking we sometimes see in Shakespeare was rampant in this show: this is something that drives me absolutely crazy in any show. Why are you pretending to have a conversation? I know you're not really talking! There is only so much disbelief I can suspend.
This show asked me to believe that real life was happening onstage (a tough thing for any play, even a realistic one), then it asked me to believe that people spoke Shakespeare in 1942 Italy, then it asked me to believe that people I know are women were really men, and then they want me to believe that they're talking when I know they are not! It's just too much work. You're pretending to trick me and I'm pretending to be tricked. It seems so dumb when I think about it.

If this company is ever to have a production that is successful in my estimation, they will need to drop the pretense... as much of it as is possible. It seems to me that speaking Shakespeare in the year 2005 is pretense enough. Anything fake in addition to that makes the whole exercise just seem silly.

If You Haven't Yet Heard...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is shown before administering the oath of office to members of the Texas Supreme Court, Jan. 6, 2003, in Austin, Texas. O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court and a swing vote on abortion as well as other contentious issues, announced her retirement Friday July 1, 2005.

I am so... sad. More than agreeing with her almost completely on everything, I just had so much affection for this woman. I will miss her opinions (all of which I read), her attitude, and just her presence. O'Connor was the most powerful person in the country, and now that power has shifted.