Lovely evening last night with cathijosephine and C. watching Hamlet for free on the Boston Common. It was, um, a somewhat nontraditional production.
POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?But I enjoyed it. I really liked the spare, geometric set. (
HAMLET: Words, words, words.
POLONIUS: What is the matter, my lord?
HAMLET: Between who?
POLONIUS: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
HAMLET [reading]: Warning: Not a lifesaving device. Do not leave children unattended.
Then at cathijosephine’s last night, I had a political dream. It was about the epic struggle of Civilization against the Republicans, but I sort of got cheated out of a real dream. This is a dream; it’s supposed to be grandiose, with interned progressive dissidents breaking out of the Republican gulags, and villagers with torches and pitchforks swarming the National Mall, and tearful televised confessions of treason and deceit by the President and his advisers.
But no, in this dream I was in a rented room somewhere with a bunch of other people, sitting on folding chairs under fluorescent lights, listening to a tall man with thinning hair and a rumpled shirt talk about how important it was to stand up to Republican control of government by donating money to various Democratic and progressive campaigns, and going on about the various candidates we could contribute to and why each race was important and what the chances were, and what would happen if so-and-so won the Republican primary in that district instead of thus-and-such, and how this bill might look when it got out of conference committee, and so on, and so forth. Mind you, in the dream, I was happy to be there, happy to be able to contribute and maybe do some good, but where were the gigantic space battles?