The Lady's Not For Burning, there's a good play. I have to confess, I've never heard of Carly Churchill.

I do miss formal classes. All the night classes around here are for "useful" things taht will make you more "marketable", because as everyone knows, if it can't go on your resume it's worthless.

but I am always drawn to retellings of famous stories from the woman's perspective, even if the perspective is one I don't agree with in all particulars.

I think The Wide Sargasso Sea was one of the earliest examples of this.

What Vortex Said, re Lawrence Fishburne. Cowboy Curtis, dammit!

I get ND's point about the overteaching of Shakespeare, but only if you're looking at Shakespeare as a dramatist. As opposed to Shakespeare as literary and linguistic foundation. There's no other playwright (or writer of any kind, actually) even close to being as influential as Shakespeare in the latter regard.

You can teach a pretty good literary course just hitting the books which stole their titles from Shakespeare: Pale Fire, Sound and the Fury, Remembrance of Things Past (bit of a cheat as megan and amych will tell you...).

Seems like you could use a lot of Slings and Arrows scenes to teach Shakespeare too. Particularly Geoffrey's take on Ophelia and the outtake "Speak the speech" scene for Hamlet.

I was reading one of my other threads, and one of the people was upset because she and her family are going to a fancy resort in Mexico, and the restaurant does not allow sandals or sneakers. She was upset because she had to buy shoes for her sons (the dress code applies to children as well). I wanted to ask - why are the only shoes they own sneakers or sandals? do they never have to dress up? Or am I crazy?

I used a couple of scenes of Slings & Arrows to teach Macbeth. Worked ok, but the freshmen are a little young to appreciate a lot of the humor. I'm looking forward to using season 1 to teach Hamet to my seniors next year.

What Vortex Said, re Lawrence Fishburne. Cowboy Curtis, dammit!

Amusing yes, but that didn't surprise me in the same way. He had to have been hella young when he was in AN.

Is this cute or ugly? [link]

He had to have been hella young when he was in AN.

I think he was 14 or something like that. It came up in [memfault] that documentary about making AN that came out umpty years later - that as ridiculously young as the character was, Fishburne was an absolute baby in this crazy environment.

Oops! More like 17. But, yeah. Baby. And the doc is Hearts of Darkness. Thank you IMDB, my other external brain.

Is this cute or ugly? [link]

I can't decide!! i need to see it on a human. i'm leaning towards cute though.

There's no other playwright (or writer of any kind, actually) even close to being as influential as Shakespeare in the latter regard.

See I'm not so sure of even this statement. When you look at the impact that writers in other languages had in dealing with the constraints of verisimilitude and in shaping the way that subversive text could be fit within a rigic framework there are some amazing things that come to the surface. That also throws to the side the classic Greek and Roman writings that predate Shakespeare. Yes, he is important, but I don't think he's the penultimate example of writing. I don't think that any one writer could ever have that influence.

Ugh. Fuck cancer. Turns out my choir director's wife and fellow alto has a worse diagnosis than expected:

The kidney mass is identified as transitional cell carcinoma of high grade and stage. The one good thing about this diagnosis is that it is now crystal clear that removing the kidney was the right and only thing to do. The bad news is that this cancer has a not inconsiderable likelihood of reoccurring elsewhere in the body. As the doctor explained, there are two things that have to happen for that to occur: first, cancer cells have to have escaped the kidney, which is likely to have happened over the last year as the cancer was growing through areas packed with tiny blood vessels; second, the cancer cells have to find a place to set up camp, which is less likely though not negligible.

ETA in the rest of her post she much more optimistic than I can imagine in her circumstances--not in a faux cheery way, but tough and grounded. Of course, she blogged it two days after the diagnosis, so maybe that's how long it took to get to that point.