I guess a lot of ladies go crazy for a guy’s physique. I had a friend in middle school who was obsessed with boy’s backs. “Look at his back!” she’d swoon, as some high school boy got out of the pool. I did not understand sexuality hardly at all. I guessed, since she swooned over backs, that backs were what was meant to be attractive in boys.

At the time, I thought boys were cute if they had nice faces. But I understood that that was not something meant to make me swoon.

There were girls who went crazy for butts, for chests. There was a sort of part-for-part objectification competition.

Me? It was always hands that would make me go swoony when I thought about them. But not until I’d seen those hands in action and I could swoon at the thought of your hands on my skin, or moving across strings or over keys, circled around sticks, trailing along my arm, wrapped around a paintbrush. For me, it was always what you did with them.

I used to write songs about that. 

This seems to be an official, ceremonial, Princely welcome to the castle for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He is, after all, welcoming these guys to a place they’ve already been welcomed by the King and Queen. He’s giving them the run of his palazzo, which they already have been given access to.

What he’s not doing is welcoming them to his chambers, or his private smoking room, or the corner of the castle that’s like his pub, you know where he can kick back and have a few drinks with buddies. He’s not welcomed them to play pool or go shooting or ride his horses. It’s like the welcome he’d give a visiting ambassador, not the welcome he gives his friend, like Horatio, for example.

Hast any philosophy in thee?

Philosophy used to be the place you’d go for answers, it seems. Psychology and anthropology and sociology hadn’t really kicked in yet, so philosophy was what you had to explain the oddities of the world.

I never studied philosophy. The one class I was interested in met at 8:00 in the morning and I found I wasn’t QUITE interested enough to think through the early morning fog that clouds my brain at that hour. I’m not sure I even fully understand what philosophy means in this day and age or even, in previous ages. It seems to me to be a methodology for thinking about the world. If I had any philosophy in me, it is a fluid one that shifted from seeing the world as a stage to seeing the world as a game to a Feldenkrais lesson to a Rasaboxes exercise to a viewpoints exploration to a Choose Your Own Adventure and so on.

I am curious about the economics of king’s portraits. Clearly, they can be expensive. And are likely not mass produced. It seems unlikely that etchings would be the prime portraiture so these are likely paintings, painted by painters.

Do they churn out multiple copies of the same painting? Or paint one and have their apprentices copy them? Or just paint portrait after portrait in various styles? And in miniatures?!

And why would you shell out a hundred ducats for a painting of a guy you used to make mows at? Is it expected? Is it so that if someone comes over and they see it, they can report back to the king that “Lord SO and SO has a lovely portrait of you in his dining room? You really must go and see it!”?

I understand that politics and economics had a great deal to do with currying favor. It’s just hard to see how getting a painting of a king would do that.

It’s amazing how much more I get done when I don’t have to go to work. Unemployment does wonders for my productivity. In the past week, I made a website, business cards, posted several blogs entries, finished a sewing project, made great progress on my novel and more or less started a business. It’s strange what a little bit of free time can do.

It seems like they do. Almost every time. I was a feminist from an early age. I wouldn’t fight about much; I was more inclined to defer than to debate but one thing would make me shout “Nuh-uh!” or “That’s not true!” and that was when some boy in my class would claim that boys were better than girls at something. I knew the culture had his back if he claimed a woman couldn’t be president or be an astronaut or play baseball or whatever it was but I was ferocious in defending the possibility. Sally Ride meant the world to me.

Now I can recognized that little boys said the things they said mostly to get a rise out of girls like me. I can see that they enjoyed making me angry and might not have really believed what they were saying. But what they didn’t realize, as they teased us about their gender’s superiority was that they were reinforcing centuries old beliefs and even as we fought fiercely for our right to be just as good as boys, we also couldn’t help internalizing the structure. We might have firmly believed a woman COULD be president but the fight for that belief was such that very few of us could actually imagine it as a reality. I mean, here it is 2013 and no woman has even come close. Our numbers in congress are better than they’ve ever been and are still appalling. This radio interview with Geena Davis on NPR mentioned a statistic where when a group has 17% women in it it is seen as a 50/50 gender split.

Until perceptions like that change, until real equality exists, the boys will continue to carry it away.

To re-capture magic
To succeed where all else have failed
To slip free from poverty’s claws
To love the work one does for money
To go out all night and be ready to tackle a day in the morning
To have it all
To understand what it all is
To change the dominant paradigm
To realize the artistic revolution you imagined as a student
To shake loose the outdated, unhelpful ideas of self that send you down the same roads again and again
To proceed as you’ve never been hurt, never failed, never lost.

If only our field thought this far ahead. Theatre folk tend to be so intensely present oriented, they almost never think of the broader picture, of the future for anyone but themselves.

I loved Michael Chekhov’s essay about The Theatre of the Future, for this unusual big picture thinking – for its attention on what we make and its impact on what comes next.

The way I’ve seen most theatre folks operate, these children in this story would not say their writers did them wrong, they would more likely rail against the next crop of children and never think through how the system set them up to drop them down again. We theatre folk tend to think all our bad luck is personal, that each failure is ours alone – and almost never look at the systems in place that ensure that personal failure.

There’s a frankness to this line. One which indicates that the life of an actor was not at all glamorous – just a choice for someone whose means are not better. It’s not too glamorous now either. The actual day to day of the theatrical person is relentlessly mundane but it has a shine on it when you start and it clings to you a bit when communicating with the outside world.

The man playing Orsino had a deep rich baritone. It was lucky he was into Shakespeare because he had a Shakespearean voice – one that could boom out and bounce around even outdoors. One night, next to a fire in the grill on our company porch, he told me he had, as a child, been a part of a choir. He sang – this babyfaced, sweet-voiced kid – and was much lauded for his singing. When his voice changed, so did everything. A life ordered around a sweet voiced boy got turned upside down by the fluctuations of man-making hormones.

He quit singing. He couldn’t anymore, couldn’t depend on his voice and somehow or other, he found his way to theatre, where his voice became important once again, but in a new way.

And then we asked him to sing.

Is escoting the same as escorting? How is anyone escoted? The words must be related – they must share some sense of accompaniment mustn’t they, coming as it does, after “Who maintains ‘em?” Is the sense, perhaps, how do they get where they’re going? Perhaps a combination of escorted and transported.

But – once we look at the definition and the sense is Support. Hmmm. How are they supported? Pretty close to the previous question.