Patrick Stewart Day

I don't have much time to write today. Shocking, I know. I've already used up most of my computer time looking up train schedules and costs since a group of us would really like to get out of town and do something this weekend. We're already doing a day trip to London on Friday as a class, but a bunch of us would like to maybe go back to London or do another day trip on Saturday or Sunday since Stratford is a little place and we've already seen pretty much all there is to see here. And while one Sunday of just hanging out around town doing not much of anything was fine, I'm not particularly excited about spending both Saturday and Sunday here doing nothing special. So hopefully we can plan something for the weekend.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon's voice class with Charmian, another voice teacher at the RSC, was really good. It was very physical, lots of running around and shouting and stuff. Then last night not much of anything happened. I walked around a bit, grabbed dinner, and then just hung out at the B&B, mainly with Amanda and one of the Alexes.

Today I spent the morning in the Birthplace Trust library working on my paper. I got a whole lot accomplished on it today so I'm feeling pretty good about it (as opposed to how I felt after last week's library session, which was something along the lines of 'Holy hell, this paper will never, EVER get finished, much less be acceptable as a potential conference paper'). I'm writing about Julius Caesar and the way in which directors often set the show within a context of current political events, so I'm looking at three RSC productions, one that sets the show in Mussolini's Italy, one that sets the show in an emerging ex-Soviet democratic nation, and one that sets the show around the Velvet Revolution. It's interesting research so I hope the paper turns into something semi-decent although we have a lot to do next week and not a ton of writing time so who knows what will actually happen.

Anyway, we had a lecture on Antony and Cleopatra today because we're seeing it tonight. I'm so excited about seeing this show. I've never actually seen Antony and Cleopatra performed, not on stage, not in a movie, not at all. It's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, though (possibly my very favorite, actually) so I'm happy to finally get a chance to see it. And this performance is supposed to be really terrific, it has been getting good reviews. And in case you didn't glean this from my oh-so-creative title, Patrick Stewart stars as Antony. So yeah. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow if it ends up being worthwhile, and it better!

I'm off to go look at more train schedules. Talk to you peeps tomorrow, probably.

P.S.-To Mom and Dad: I don't know what time of the month my cell phone bill comes, but be aware that it might be, um, significantly more than usual because of international text message charges. Ha. Just rest assured that I've specifically budgeted some of my spending money to cover the text message fees I'm probably racking up over here and I will pay you back when I get home. Love you!