"Cut the crap, Hamlet; my biological clock is ticking, and I want a baby now"; or, Twelfth Night
I have decided that my holiday tradition, the one that everyone will associate with me, is going to be Twelfth Night.
Thanks to Absent-minded Secretary, I learned about this little holiday. (We were trying to figure out when we would be able to get together to exchange gifts, which we did on Monday anyway, but that's beside the point.) Apparently it's a festive day of gift exchanging and misrule and wassail.
So last night, I had a Twelfth Night party with just a few friends (I live in a small place). We drank wassail and ate chips with spinach artichoke dip and chips with cheese dip and watched a movie.
I highly highly recommend the movie. It was a recording of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). Rioutous. They give you a brief introduction to Shakespeare and his work then launch into Romeo and Juliet. Because nothing is so amusing in Shakespeare as his dramas and histories, they condense the comedies into a single play. This is, of course, completely acceptable, considering that Shakespeare was a master boiler-plate author who took the four great comedy ideas of the time and drew them out into sixteen plays. The second act of the play is Hamlet. Initially, you're thinking that you have to sit through forty minutes of Hamlet? Oy. However, the fifteen minutes dedicated to a Freudian analysis with Jungian undertones of Ophelia make the entire thing completely worth it. Color me rolling on the floor in fits of laughter.
Anyway, I will now be known as He Who Throws a Raucous Twelfth Night Party. And next year, I will expand it. All must share in the joy and glory and amusement.
8 comments:
Wahoo! for Twelfth Night! Tee Hee! for Hamlet backwards in 10 seconds! :)
Though I've long heard good things about Complete Works, I've never seen it. A problem that I will fix ASAP, as I have just checked the DVD out to myself. I'm not sure how I feel about this, by the way. It's one thing for you to make me want to read books by talking about them, but this here blog is not called Movies are King.
We had a Dia de los Reyes party last night, which I'm pretty sure is the Spanish version of Twelfth Night, but we will surely cancel our party when you invite us to yours next year. Even though we'll probably be in Washington or Hawaii. We'll cancel our party so that we can sit at home and think about yours.
Oh, and I loved that sly employment clue. I totally wouldn't have gotten it if I didn't know. Poor, poor Th.
Absent: I expect you back next year.
Master: But it's a movie based on a literary work, which we traditionally interpret as a "book," so it's okay to be enticed to view it.
And, if you aren't within reasonable distance for the party next year, I don't think you should cancel yours. We can pretend we're like the CES and hold simultaneous parties, as in Twelfth Night--Utah and Twelfth Night--Washington/Hawaii. And yours can have the latino flavor to it. Ooh, and you can be all bitter because you've lost your personal identity when you were swallowed up into the larger, more popular school, er, I mean party. ;)
Sounds like a BYU-Idaho orgy!
I wouldn't miss it... if I am on my death bed, with a cold, and without a cell phone to communicate, I will crawl by my fingernails up your stairs to attend. But how are we going to top a movie based on 37 pieces of literature for next year?
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Yeah. I can't find it.
My favorite part is when they do everything backwards.
And there's no such thing as BYU-Idaho orgies. I should know. I started that rumor.
Ah, yes. Frank Sinatra is God.
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