Women as Metal. Well. 
Well.

We can be hard. We can be strong. 
We hold up a great deal of things. 
We are shaped by the forces around us.

There is so much iron in our blood and every month we watch it leave us only to return again.

We can bend in the wind, the way tall buildings and bridges are built to.

Solid. 
Shiny.

Tough. 

Here is “good” again. First, it was the good king and queen and now it is good mother.Doth Hamlet protest too much with this “good” stuff?

The readiness is all. Not to be all circular with my Hamlet quotes – but really. . .the readiness is the most significant factor with players. Especially players who are about to do something live. Live-ness depends on readiness in a way that nothing else does. It requires being ready for the thing you’re doing but also for eventualities around that thing.
What happens if someone forgets to set that prop? Only readiness gives you the skills you need to deal with that.
I’ve been developing my company’s first improvised show and there is nothing to be done for the shows but to get everyone as ready as possible. What do we do if someone gives us this? How do we adapt if we get nothing from them? What if it starts to rain?
And we just have to hope that everyone’s ready.

Rimshot! Punny punny rimshot!
We got the Brutus.
We got the double meaning of capital.

But what I’m curious about is the calling of Polonius/Caesar a calf.
Are we meant to see Caesar’s death as a sacrificial slaughter? An offering for the gods in some way?
And if we’re meant to see Caesar’s death that way, are we meant to see Polonius’ death that way, too?
If we see Caesar’s death as regrettable, then yes, it bears some similarity as Polonius’. But Caesar’s is very purposeful – Polonius’ death accidental.
I do wonder, though, if there is some way that we’re primed to see Polonius’ eventual death as noble, as sacrificial, as necessary in the long run somehow.

Does Hamlet already know that Polonius played Caesar?
Is he just winding him up to watch him go?
Or perhaps giving him a great set up, playing the straight man, as it were, giving Polonius the opportunity to talk about his glory days as Julius Caesar once again.
Maybe winding him up for an audience. For the King . . .maybe it gives him particular pleasure to have Polonius evoke the name of a ruler who ended up assassinated by his friends? Maybe it’s a little pre-show show – a little preview of the more pointed drama.

POSTER:
Copenhagen University presents the Poli Sci Players’ production of Julius Caesar
(image: a 19 year old Polonius in a bedsheet clasped together with string.)
Saturday and Sunday in the College Cafeteria –
See Caesar meet his end where we meet our friends!

*
There’s something remarkable about the fact that kids have been doing plays in college from before Shakespeare started writing. There’s a long tradition of academic playacting, it would seem. Now, many of those people will do Shakespeare’s plays so it’s remarkable to think about that lineage going so far back and circling.
Before fraternity brothers put on Hamlet, they put on Julius Caesar – but not Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – some earlier writer’s. Perhaps someone closer to the actual period of Caesar.

I meet a lot of people who did theatre in college. A lot of the people that I knew when I was IN college did theatre. It’s one of those things, like experimenting with your sexuality, that people do and think back on fondly before moving on to more lucrative things.

That is the thing. When you send words out into the world, they leave you, you lose them. You give them away with speech, with writing, with publishing. The sharing of words is the loss of ownership, I suppose. There’s a way that writing with no audience is a kind of hoarding. I write and write and write – many many things that no one will ever read. Those words are still mine.

But as soon as others take them in, I share them. I retain some ownership but the eyes that read them or the ears that hear them own them a bit as well.

Once I’ve heard a story on the radio, for example, the story becomes a little bit mine. When I share it with someone else, either through playing it or explaining it, it becomes a little bit mine and a little bit theirs.

And so it goes on and on – the portion of ownership growing and shrinking as the words travel on.

I always picture the capons like foie gras geese when I hear these lines. I see the little chicken birds, their beaks propped open and aimed at the sky. Two fingers take a promise and cram it down the poor little birds’ throats. But it’s all a cute animation version in my mind, so it’s not so horrific. The promise looks like a sparkly star and every time the fingers pour another promise down the bird’s throat, you can see the sparkle travel down the bird’s gullet and finish off by sparkling in the stomach. Its cartoon eyes bulge out and sometimes its pupils roll around.

But of course, you cannot feed capons so. Capons don’t eat promises.

It has been some time since I felt a sense of promise. I hadn’t noticed how used to its absence I’d become. It was like the keys I put in my bra this morning because I didn’t have pockets – at first they were sharp and uncomfortable. The keys poked and prodded at me. But very quickly, I became used to the heavy spiky mass of keys between my breasts and several times looked around frantically for my keys, wondering where I’d left them.

I think the loss of promise was like that – painful at first but I got used to it, like I can get used to most things. But the air today shifted, not promise-crammed so much as air with a pinch of promise on top. The relief was palpable. A bit like removing a bunch of sharp pointed keys from my bra and dumping them out on the table. I eat the air, promise sprinkled.

Chameleons prefer a gold plate under their lunches. They’re fans of nouveau cuisine, especially vegetable foams and emulsions. Chameleons will relish a bit of relish, as well as a delicate crisp of something not usually in crisp form.

Sometimes, if they’re feeling cheeky, they’ll stretch themselves out along the plate, turning gold while they nibble.