Is there anything else to say but how freaking fun it is to say this line? It’s just, like, dessert for the actor. Rolling your tongue over all these words, one right after the other, in such a natural build. It’s like getting on a kick-ass roller coaster. You don’t have to do anything once you’re in – just ride the words all the way to the top. And you ride them all the way to the top of the speech too.

What comes next MIGHT continue the ascent but it’s more likely the plateau, maybe that last little inch, followed by a moment of suspension at the top of the hill – right before that car takes a long fast drop down.

You know, it’s funny about Claudius. He’s clearly a villain. He knows he’s a villain. We see his villainy in action later in the play. But while he is villainous, he’s rather bloodless. His fratricide is with poison and through the ear, no less. It’s an exceptionally un-intimate way to kill someone and not at all bloody.

When he sets Hamlet up to be killed, he does it with paper. When he tries to kill Hamlet a second time, he does it with a poison pearl. When he’s wounded, he seemingly doesn’t attempt to draw his own sword, he asks for the defense of his friends.

And while we could see the act of leaping into his brother’s bed with his sister-in-law as bawdy, there’s just something about Claudius that seems more politic than sexy.

Which may be part of the reason he’s so hard to work up the energy to kill. He doesn’t act like a bloody, bawdy villain. He acts like a white-collar criminal, like a political scammer. He makes you want to confront him with paperwork, not run a sword through him.

Oh yeah. Getting juicy and fierce with the language now, Hamlet! Gotta love a good violent fantasy and it’s particularly awesome because he’s skipped the violent part and gone right to the intense leaving the bad guy’s guts around for carnivorous birds.
I mean we go from one bird – the pigeon (equivalent of being a Renaissance chicken?) to the guts of another – the vulture, if I’m not mistaken. And in between, the implication of some sort of violence that left the villain disemboweled.

It’s remarkable how satisfying this sort of thinking can be – imagining the grisly remains of someone you hate really can give you a charge. And if you imagine it as a benefit to other creatures (even if they are carnivorous birds) somehow you can eliminate the moral challenge of actually killing a person. It’s kind of pleasurably disgusting.

She was bigger than me. Taller. Rounder.
She was mean, too.
While we waited for the bus, her favorite past-time seemed to be taunt me. I did not enjoy the same activities as she did. We weren’t very compatible.
At a certain point, words were no longer enough. She began to threaten to hit me. I was very scared of this possibility but I was VERY self-righteous and proselytized for pacifism. I spent a lot of time at the Peace Center, where my Dad was the treasurer.

I thought believing in non-violence would save me from violence. It didn’t. She hit me anyway. And I just stood there and took it. Partly because I felt it was the right thing to do and partly because I didn’t know what else to do.

I was confused, later, when my mother offered another way to respond to this bullying, that I could, if I wanted to, hit a person a back. It hadn’t even occurred to me to do that. This is a solution I’d be much more likely to enjoy today. But then, I don’t remember that girl ever hitting me again so maybe being a self-righteous peacenik worked somehow.

I have a long list of people who’ve done me wrong – small slights or large ones . Depending on the era, I could fill in all sort of people for the villain’s role.

But I’m writing this on New Year’s Day and there’s something about the freshness of the date that makes it easier to let all that go.

And it’s also true how much time heals things, or if not heals things, then at least takes the sting out a bit.

Who does me those wrongs? I don’t feel like giving them the extra weight of my attention or light of my thought.

Is this a comic imagined fight? This language sounds reminiscent of Sir Toby Belch or Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Or Sir John Falstaff. We never hear serious characters speak this way.

It’s like, in this flight of Hamlet’s imagination, he suddenly places himself in a different play, a world of cartoon vehicle, where the answers to challenges are scripted and clear.

A three stooges move from before there were Three Stooges.
Nose tweaking seemingly is always a comedy bit of violence.
Has there ever been a serious nose tweak?
It’s just funny.

It would be VERY hard to just pluck off someone’s beard – unless, of course, it were a false one. Many Santa Clauses’ beards are pluck off-able. Many a comedy old man or vaudeville wise man, these could all be easily plucked. One quick tug or lifting the wires that curve round the ears and beard can be yours.

But an actual beard that grows on a man’s face, from a man’s face? It would either take tremendous force or great patience, one hair at a time. And even then, the beard would seem to be plucked OUT, not off.

It might be shaved off but the strength of hair follicles are such that removing it with one pluck, isn’t physically possible.
Given the theatrical tradition of false beards (see also, Bottom’s excitement about choosing his beard for Pyramus and Thisbe) perhaps it’s a theatrical move, this plucking off of beards and blowing it in one’s face.

Gratefully, I’ve never had my pate broken. Across or lengthwise. I have an unbroken pate for which I am grateful.

I just finished a book, though, in which the protagonist fell down a flight of stairs, (in heels, during the performance of a number from A Chorus Line) and split open her pate. She ends up with a bunch of stitches and eventually a scar.
It’s a testament to the writing of this passage that I feel as though it happened to me, that when searching my memory for possible melon splitting, I thought of this passage.

I stumbled on this book while at the library in search of a book I could read on the subway. I’d never heard of the author or the story but it sounded interesting and fit my criteria of being both a paperback and not terribly heavy to carry around. Sometimes this strategy can yield some real clunkers but this time I stumbled upon a real jewel. The narrator of the story is the daughter to an heiress (chocolate – of the money in the title.) It is dark and shocking and full of pathos. Told in the first person, there are dozens of things that, if observed from the outside, would have been inexplicable but there’s a way that this first person perspective illuminates a mysterious corner of human behavior.

And it’s somehow funny too. It’s like horrifyingly funny or funnily horrifying. The character’s childhood is painful to observe and her teen years almost more so but the author frames it all with such skill that the pain is part of the pleasure of the book. Which is, by the way, one of the themes that emerges.

If you ever had a friend who self harmed or ended up in bizarrely unhealthy relationships, this book might help you understand the link in the chain to this sort of behavior.

I felt like I was looking through a window at something very real but I really shouldn’t be seeing but somehow couldn’t look away from.

Despite a lifetime of effort, years of trying to be nice to everyone, there are still those who might, in fact, call me villain. I first realized that “nice” wouldn’t save me in 1997. We were on tour, all bundled up together, across the country. I liked this boy. And also hated him. He was surly and aggressive. And the nicer I was to him, the less he liked me, the more aggressive he became. I tried all my old tricks on him but none of them worked. He liked me best when I didn’t take his shit but dealt it right back. And I was baffled.

It wasn’t until later in my life, when I quit trying so hard to be innocuous and began to focus on being true that I really began to make enemies. I’ve left lots of broken relationships in my wake – people who would not friend me on Facebook or say hello, if they ran into me on a train. I don’t know if they’d call me a villain. In fact, I wonder which of these would.