My Belated Holiday Post (Huzzah!)
Wow.
I have had a crazy, wonderful holiday.
I also can’t do that cool hyperlink thing that you do, Margaret, so I’ll just type like a maniac and have a super-long entry!
So. Where was I? Oh, yeah. My holiday.
Well, we started by spending the night in this Bed and Breakfast. The night was actually Mum’s birthday gift to Dad- Dad’s really interested in astronomy, and this place is run by an amateur astronomer and his wife.
Well. I say ‘amateur’. He’s discovered 17 or so supernovas, he takes absolutely gorgeous pictures of the night sky which have been featured in National Geographic, Time magazine, and the NASA website… and he runs a B&B with his wife, where he takes the guests up to an observatory and shows them the night sky through an insanely large telescope.
It’s fantastic!
He looks like a mad scientist, too; tall and skinny, with huge eyebrows and glasses and the whole bit.
I loved him.
So, then we drove down the Oregon Coast, camping in these amazing campsites which were right in the forest and it felt like you were completely alone. We camp properly- in TENTS- and it’s so weird because almost everyone else was in RVs. It was really bizarre.
So, we finally got to the most amazing place in the universe. The Ashland Shakespeare Festival. It is a Shakespeare festival in Oregon, close to the Californian border. I know what you’re thinking- ‘The Americans cannot do Shakespeare. It just does not compute.’
This festival was truly fabulous. They did Shakespeare like nobody’s business- and other plays, too! The first play we saw was a 2,000 year old Indian play called ‘The Clay Cart’, and the main woman was truly incredible. The lead male will be my future husband- not only was he educated at the Peking Opera House, is a wonderful actor, and rather gorgeous to boot, he’s been in India helping out the Sisters of Charity!
I’m not usually boy-crazy, but he is the one exception. Yes.
So, that night we saw a play which was based on the Comedy of Errors, but set in the Wild West. And it was hysterical! They completely made fun of every single Western cliché- they even had a stampede!
The next day we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was set in the seventies. It was so funny- all the fairies were guys, and every single one of them wore netting shirts, platform boots, brightly coloured tutus and make-up! It was great. And the Mechanicals (who are putting on ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in the play) were all aged hippies and one of them kept blowing me kisses- we were in the front row.
That night we saw Othello, which was absolutely chilling. There’s not much I can say about it, not because it was bad (It was fantastic), but because it was so quietly, bone-chillingly perfect.
The next day we went on a back-stage tour and then, in the evening, went to ‘Our Town’ by Thorneton Wilder. It was awesome, too; Mum was in tears throughout pretty much all of it. The cast was so multi-cultural- in Our Town one family in the play had a black mum, and white dad, a black son, and an East Indian daughter!
The day after that, we saw ‘Coriolanus’, which is a little-known Shakespearean tragedy. It was insanely amazing- they set it in modern times, and without changing a word of dialogue, it was about America warring with Iraq. I might talk more about this play in another post, because there’s just so much to say about it.
So, then we went back to Canada to visit with my grandparents, and I discovered that maple and Skor ice cream is a beautiful thing indeed. And we went out to this wonderful tiny island where we always go for a few days, and helped our friends forage for stuff on the beach because they’d been shipwrecked on that beach a couple of days before! Very cool… But the best part about the house where we stayed was that there was this amazing little roll-top desk in the loft where I sleep. So I just sat there and… wrote. It was wonderfully magical.
And then we went home, and helped out in VBS, and- now I’m here. In Canada. Typing out this entry and being depressed about School. Which really shouldn’t start.
Well, um, that’s about all I can think of for now, so farewell for now!
I have had a crazy, wonderful holiday.
I also can’t do that cool hyperlink thing that you do, Margaret, so I’ll just type like a maniac and have a super-long entry!
So. Where was I? Oh, yeah. My holiday.
Well, we started by spending the night in this Bed and Breakfast. The night was actually Mum’s birthday gift to Dad- Dad’s really interested in astronomy, and this place is run by an amateur astronomer and his wife.
Well. I say ‘amateur’. He’s discovered 17 or so supernovas, he takes absolutely gorgeous pictures of the night sky which have been featured in National Geographic, Time magazine, and the NASA website… and he runs a B&B with his wife, where he takes the guests up to an observatory and shows them the night sky through an insanely large telescope.
It’s fantastic!
He looks like a mad scientist, too; tall and skinny, with huge eyebrows and glasses and the whole bit.
I loved him.
So, then we drove down the Oregon Coast, camping in these amazing campsites which were right in the forest and it felt like you were completely alone. We camp properly- in TENTS- and it’s so weird because almost everyone else was in RVs. It was really bizarre.
So, we finally got to the most amazing place in the universe. The Ashland Shakespeare Festival. It is a Shakespeare festival in Oregon, close to the Californian border. I know what you’re thinking- ‘The Americans cannot do Shakespeare. It just does not compute.’
This festival was truly fabulous. They did Shakespeare like nobody’s business- and other plays, too! The first play we saw was a 2,000 year old Indian play called ‘The Clay Cart’, and the main woman was truly incredible. The lead male will be my future husband- not only was he educated at the Peking Opera House, is a wonderful actor, and rather gorgeous to boot, he’s been in India helping out the Sisters of Charity!
I’m not usually boy-crazy, but he is the one exception. Yes.
So, that night we saw a play which was based on the Comedy of Errors, but set in the Wild West. And it was hysterical! They completely made fun of every single Western cliché- they even had a stampede!
The next day we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was set in the seventies. It was so funny- all the fairies were guys, and every single one of them wore netting shirts, platform boots, brightly coloured tutus and make-up! It was great. And the Mechanicals (who are putting on ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in the play) were all aged hippies and one of them kept blowing me kisses- we were in the front row.
That night we saw Othello, which was absolutely chilling. There’s not much I can say about it, not because it was bad (It was fantastic), but because it was so quietly, bone-chillingly perfect.
The next day we went on a back-stage tour and then, in the evening, went to ‘Our Town’ by Thorneton Wilder. It was awesome, too; Mum was in tears throughout pretty much all of it. The cast was so multi-cultural- in Our Town one family in the play had a black mum, and white dad, a black son, and an East Indian daughter!
The day after that, we saw ‘Coriolanus’, which is a little-known Shakespearean tragedy. It was insanely amazing- they set it in modern times, and without changing a word of dialogue, it was about America warring with Iraq. I might talk more about this play in another post, because there’s just so much to say about it.
So, then we went back to Canada to visit with my grandparents, and I discovered that maple and Skor ice cream is a beautiful thing indeed. And we went out to this wonderful tiny island where we always go for a few days, and helped our friends forage for stuff on the beach because they’d been shipwrecked on that beach a couple of days before! Very cool… But the best part about the house where we stayed was that there was this amazing little roll-top desk in the loft where I sleep. So I just sat there and… wrote. It was wonderfully magical.
And then we went home, and helped out in VBS, and- now I’m here. In Canada. Typing out this entry and being depressed about School. Which really shouldn’t start.
Well, um, that’s about all I can think of for now, so farewell for now!