Free Will (Dry Run)

We tried to go to Romeo & Juliet Tuesday night. Thanks to Rachel for reminding me of it, by the way. I'd seen the banners but forgot to pay attention to when this year's Shakespeare in the Park was happening. It's one of those things (like the Highland Games) I mean to catch, then find out I just missed them again.

I love Shakespeare, but only when I can see a performance. I don't, for the most part, enjoy reading him. A good Folger edition, I can get into it for a class, but it's not something I'll read on my own. I've tried the audiobook format, too, and even Frank Muller wasn't able to turn the trick (and he's tied with Richard Poe for best narrator of all time).



But on stage, the Bard is the bomb. Occasionally to the Stendhal Syndrome point, or near enough.

But we got there late, owing to my insistence on grilling dinner first. This wouldn't have been a problem except when it rained for forty days and forty nights last week (meaning my garage was in perma-deluge), the charcoal got soggy. I'd bought the off brand version of Match Light, and it usually takes off without making excuses.



This time, I went through two books of matches before I started trying creative accelerants. I didn't have lighter fluid, but I did have vegetable oil. Given the way such fats normally burst into flames on a grill, I thought drizzling a bit of it over the charcoal might help it light. This does not work, trust me if the same notion ever strikes you.

Crumpled paper would burn, but the charcoal didn't seem to want to catch.



I tried sticking a book of matches down under a coal and touching it off with a lit match, so the intense flame up of the whole book would light the briquet.

This also does not work.

I finally crammed the kettle full of crumpled paper and that did the trick. I think the heat of the burning paper helped dry out the charcoal and we finally had combustion about the time we should have left for the play.



Em was dead set against going, the way she tends to be dead set against anything that isn't going down the street to her 'friendship circle.'

I asked Mo, 'Do you want to go to a park and maybe see a play?'

'Yessss!' This from the kid who says 'no' to everything, so I overruled Em's tweenage wet blanketness and we set forth. We were able to park a mere four blocks from the target, which I thought was pretty good. Em thought it was a death march, but Mo didn't seem to mind.

Being late, having brought no chairs, we didn't last a long time at the fringes of the audience.

We did play in the park some before we went home. Well, Mo did. Em expressed her disgust with her sister, then with the way others stared at her sister (seemingly unaware of the contradiction in wishing her sister out of existence and wanting to protect her). It didn't help that she'd just learned that redistricting has put her sister back in the same building with her next school year, ruining her pretense of being an only child.

When she complained that she couldn't catch fireflies, I tried to catch one for her. At which point Em declared that she hated fireflies.

I told her to get the pickle out of her butt, and that she'd better find her happy head for Friday night when we're coming back more punctually. But she had an out: she'll be in Chicago on the all-time-ultimate Cuz-binder at the American Girl Museum.

So my plans to ruin her entire life were foiled, for the moment...