Review of The Which of Shakespeare’s Why by Leigh Light

The Which of Shakespeare’s Why is a comic take on the historic Shakespeare authorship quest. It has a play within a novel, good and bad puns, some overblown characters, and an Artificial Intelligence sub-plot that is torn right out of the interests of today’s tech startups. Right off the bat the author’s name, Leigh Light, would appear to be an androgenous “nom de plume” and the cast of characters includes an abundance of aliases and some cross dressing. All of this suggests that at least part of the spoof is aimed at Shakespeare’s plays regardless of who wrote them.

The main character, Harry Haines, is a frustrated aspiring actor who is cast as Hamlet in the initial production of a new New Jersey repertory company.  Just before rehearsals get under way, the major angel runs off with his mistress and takes his money with him. Faced with financial disaster even before the first production, Lance, the ever-resourceful director, tries to save the day by recruiting the also wealthy jilted wife of the first money machine. This woman will turn the cash faucet back on if there is benefit for her technology company and a part in the first production. Lance offers the role of role of Queen Elizabeth in the play.  

“Wait a minute” you might say.  “Queen Elizabeth the first, or the second for that matter, is not in Hamlet.”  This confusion may be based on the fact that the Queen was seen as attending a play at the Globe in that cuddly romantic fiction movie titled “Shakespeare In Love”. Dame Judi Dench even won an award for it. Whatever!  To accommodate the new money fountain, a re-write of the bard’s script is necessary. Harry, our lead in Hamlet, for some inexplicable reason, is hired to do the job. He is given the name of Mr. Bottom. Get it!  After which he is plopped in a fancy hotel suite overlooking Central Park and given a pile of money to write a new Shakespearean masterpiece called “The Which of Shakespeare’s Why.” This includes a role for Queen Elizabeth and a slew of other Shakespeare characters like Lear’s daughters, who just happen to saunter by.

 Another requirement is to highlight the 14^th Earl of Oxford. This nobleman will be revealed at the opening, which takes place at New York’s famous Radio City Music Hall, as the author of all the plays now attributed to William Shakespeare. There is a good scene when Harry/Bottom has a drunken conversation with Will’s statue in Central Park, but the long passages that discuss the work of Stratfordian Shakespeare scholars will probably leave most readers cold. You may also find some of the strange druggy sentence structure hard to decipher. The Radio City Rockettes in sequined panties playing some of King Lear’s daughters give us some sex, but the characters created by Mr. or Ms. Light mainly end up having less weight than Shakespeare’s. Even with a pretty good surprise ending, this was still a slog.  

I give it 2.5 stars

What My Mother Told Me or How I Almost Failed Kindergarten

 

I am trying to write up little pieces of memories that will be incorporated in a fuller biography at some point. I did this one for our writing group this past week. 

Not too long ago, I read a brief essay by Robert Reich that told of his expulsion from his day care center when he was a small boy.  Young Bob had refused to eat another tasteless lunch prepared by the dragon-lady proprietor of the school and she had cashiered him out and sent him back to his parents with the dire warning that he was a petulant smart-ass and would never amount to anything. Granted that poor Oliver Twist had wanted a bit more gruel, but the Dickensian echoes do remain.  

Child nursery school behavior has also come up in the PBS Doc Marten series. I remember an episode where the Marten’s young son and only child, James, attracted teacher and parental concern when he did not appear to mix easily with the other children.  This James, like young Bob, was small in stature, but was basically shy rather than outspoken.

All of which leads me into one of my own early confrontations in the educational realm. This story was told to me by my mother a number of times when I was growing up and was the result of my still active penchant not to suffer fools gladly.  In the 1940’s the Milwaukee school system gave a competence test to all kindergarteners before promoting them to first grade. I suspect it involved such things as taking simple words or pictures and putting them into categories or crossing out things that did not belong in a group.  It was a late spring afternoon in  1943 that my mother said she received an urgent and concerned message from my kindergarten teacher and could she please come to the school for a conference at her earliest convenience. 

She diligently turned up the next day right after school with me in tow. The teacher, whose name was Miss Van Raalte, was probably around twenty-five and single although I no doubt thought she was a grouchy old maid. No matter. My mother said she was told that I had refused to complete the required promotion test and would be kept back in kindergarten for another semester if I did not pass it. Not only had I refused to do the required test, I had loudly asserted that I had done all of those exercises before and it was stupid to keep doing them over and over again.

Luckily, I had done what I was supposed to do on one account. I had been instructed to take all my work home to show my parents and I had done that.  My mother brought the papers with her to the meeting and was able to remind Miss Van Raalte that I had indeed not only completed all the various practices for the test, but had gotten lots of good-work stars affixed to the papers. A serious discussion and stern warnings  by both teacher and parent ensued. Both of them insisted that being a student and doing well in practices was never going to be a substitute for passing a required test. At this point, I was apparently convinced of my error and rapidly filled in the appropriate answers on the blank test sheet displayed by my teacher. Come the fall I was happily ensconced in a first-grade classroom and for the record can say that I have managed tests and promotions pretty well ever since.  

Dr. Jim De Young, PhD  2/3/2024  

Sherlock Holmes Returns

 

For total escape reading,  let me recommend the Sherlock Holmes knock-off series by Anna Elliot and Charles Velsey.  I have read two of them (The Last Moriarty and The Jubilee Problem) and there appear to be oodles more. They are quick reads, suitably entertaining, engrossingly faithful to the atmosphere of Victorian London, and many appear to be available on Kindle Unlimited free of charge.

The set-up is that the young Sherlock had an affair with a well-known concert violinist and the relationship produced a daughter named Lucy.  She has been educated by her mother in America, on the continent, and in England, but has been kept in the dark about her parentage until the present. When she discovers her true father while working as a singer in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with the D’oyly Carte Opera Company, she manages to join Sherlock and Watson in the solving of new cases. She has Holmes’ hyper deductive mind, a young person’s devil-may-care attitude toward personal safety, and a thorough familiarity with physical combat. If she lays a kick in the chops on an attacker, they go down for the count.  

In The Last Moriarty members of the now dispatched great villain’s family return to do battle with Holmes and the British government. In The Jubilee Problem a bomb threat on Queen Victoria during her great Jubilee celebration nearly brings the empire to its knees.  When I want more easy-going fun mysteries set nicely in Victorian London, I will return to books in this series.  ***  

How are you at meeting US presidents?

The Name of the Game is Fame

 I think of myself as a fairly ordinary yet lucky individual. I had two loving parents who were hard workers and made it a point to help me get the kind of education they never had access to. I got that education and was able to parlay it into a career as a Professor of Communications and Theatre Arts in a small mid-western town. My wife and I raised our family there and we were residents for over fifty years.

 

Since most of what happened in those fifty years is pretty hum-drum, I am going to take the liberty today to tell you about how I happened to have been able to see in person three United States presidents in those fifty years. Now there was nothing buddy-buddy or intimate about those encounters, but in two of the three cases I was close enough to get a handshake and a short conversation.   

 

I don’t know if my experiences are in the realm of a normal percentage or something unusual for the average citizen of a small town. What I can tell you is that Jeff Rankin, a local historian, friend, and a long-time neighbor of ours, wrote an article in 2021 that appeared in our local newspaper. It reported that our tiny town had had visits from at least eight men who would become, were serving, or had been U.S. Presidents.  

 

Rankin wrote that the first recorded presidential visit to Monmouth was that of Abraham Lincoln. He visited as a circuit lawyer in 1834 and again in 1858 when he was running for an Illinois Senate seat. In 1858 he gave a speech, had his photograph taken, and stayed overnight. The following day he traveled the 13 miles to Galesburg, IL where he took part in a debate against a man named Stephen A. Douglas, who was his opponent in the race.  President James Garfield visited in 1861 long before he was president and Ulysses Grant in 1879 after his term had expired. The only visit by a sitting president came when William McKinley came to town in 1898.

 

This was followed by a long dry spell that was broken by Gerald Ford, who at the time of his visit was the Republican minority leader of Congress not a vice president or a president. He spoke at Monmouth College on Valentine’s Day in 1964. I was in my first year of employment at the college and am sorry to say that I have no recollection of his visit so I will not count it as one of my presidential contacts.

 

In 1976 Ronald Reagan was the next to visit and he became the first soon-to-be president I had ever met. He was really no stranger to the town since his family had lived in Monmouth from 1918 to 1919 and he had attended both first and second grade at a local school. His return in 1976 was during his campaign for president and I do remember that visit well. His advance team actually produced his old first grade teacher and had her sitting in the front row to be introduced during his speech. I was one of the volunteers who helped prepare the college gymnasium for his visit. We helped set up chairs, hang placards and flags, and pass out programs. According to Jeff Rankin’s article, there were over 2000 people in attendance and I can attest that the place was packed right up to the rafters. Like the consummate politician that he was, Reagan made sure that he pressed the flesh of all of the helpers backstage. It was a quick shake and a word or two and we had no idea whether he would win the election or not. Even though I was already a Democrat,  it was still quite a thrill. Many years later, when I was the Director of Acquisitions  for our county historical museum, I helped to collect and catalog the available President Reagan materials for future exhibits.

 

My second presidential meeting was not with a president-to-be, but with a former president. On Mother’s Day in the year 2000, George Herbert Walker Bush was gave the commencement address and received an honorary degree from  Monmouth College. By that time, I was a tenured full professor and occupied a spot rather high up in the marching order. Ex-President Bush was in the platform group just ahead of me and as we were all gathering on the sidewalk waiting to process in and take our seats, he made a point of walking back to talk to several of us and shake our hands. Bush had two Secret Service bodyguards with him. They had donned academic caps and gowns just like all the rest of us, but did stay pretty much in the background. The following morning Mr. Bush, who had stayed overnight at our president’s home, went out to the local golf course and played a round. I didn’t get to join that group, but a nice picture of him with our pro still hangs in the clubhouse at Gibson Woods. 

 

My final presidential encounter was also with a future president. On a warm late July afternoon in 2004, shortly after his impressive keynote address at the Democratic Convention, a young Illinois state senator was scheduled to make a short speech at Monmouth College. He was in the midst of a grueling thirty-nine city tour in pursuit of one of Illinois’ U.S. Senate seats. His talk was originally scheduled for a small second floor room at the college, but the crowd got so big that it had to be moved to the college chapel.  It was there that the audience, including me, was enthralled by his short address. I don’t think I need to remind you that Barack Obama won that Senate seat and then in 2008 made his lasting mark with a successful run for the presidency. I didn’t have any personal contact with him and I don’t remember if Michelle was there, but the now famous Obama smile was on full view along with his oratorical skill. I felt as though he was speaking just to me even though I was only a small part of a large crowd.  I proudly voted for him in 2008 and again in 2012.   

 

There you have it. An ordinary American in a small town in the USA was able to have short but close contact with three American presidents. I consider that pretty lucky and am grateful for it. I’d love to hear about your experiences in seeing or meeting any of our presidents or even other famous people. 

 

Jim De Young  1/11/2024      

 

FOLLOWING CAESAR book review

 

I recently had the opportunity to read Following Caesar, in an advance publisher’s copy before its formal release in December of 2023. The book covers an extended trip through Italy and the Adriatic by a reporter who loves Italy, Roman history, and the magnificent roads the Romans built to make and administer one of the largest empires ever created.

 

Keahey’s modis operendi was to rent a car and drive the routes of three great Roman highways—The Via Appia, the Via Traiana, and the Via Egnatia. As he proceeds along the modern roads that sometimes mirror, sometimes parallel, and occasionally deviate from the ancient ones, he enlists the aid of local guides to help him locate now exposed sections of the ancient byways. At many of his stops he merely sits and contemplates the grandeur and historic importance of past. You get the bloody stories of Julius Ceasar, Mark Antony, Brutus, Octavius, Cicero, Hannibal, Hoarce, Virgil and other not so notables who marched along on the carefully groomed ancient stones and made history with their footfalls.

 

This is not a dry academic treatise. Keahey dispenses with footnotes and keeps the style unassuming and down to earth. He concentrates as much on the current sights, the food, and the morning coffee he consumes en route as he does on the history. My guess is that if you have traveled in Italy or studied at least a bit of classical history, you will enjoy his travel journal more.  Even if your knowledge of Julius Caesar is confined to “Beware, the Ides of March” you may still find some pleasure in this short and easy read.   

 

 

 

Holiday Greetings from Jim and Jan De Young

 

Volume L                                                                                      December, 2023

                                                   Christmas 2023

 Would you believe that this will be the fiftieth consecutive year for this letter? The first one was on a ditto (only old people will know what that was) dated 1973. Our family had just returned from a year in our favorite city in all the world—London, England.  

Where are we now? The pair, who will soon celebrate their 64^th wedding anniversary, are beginning their third year of residency at Grand Living. We don’t travel much anymore; covid put a real stopper on that. We still drive for medical appointments and to our daughter’s first grade classroom where we spend an hour once a week reading stories and tutoring. Jan’s special project has been working with a little girl who just arrived from Mexico with zero English. She is finding her college Spanish is a bit rusty. The rest of our activity is pretty much focused inside our home community. Jim is on the resident council and chairs the Activities and Sales sub-committees. We both work on tending the building’s two libraries and we lead a book and creative writing group.

 Daughter Amy and her husband Todd live ten minutes from our apartment. She still teaches first grade at Hiawatha School in Cedar Rapids. Her life is a whirl of activity mostly devoted to her students, and her fellow teachers (all of whom are facing educational challenges that have not receded even though Covid has diminished.) She has inherited some of my appreciation of clever humor and recently sent me this one. “Have you seen the ad from a company that makes yardsticks promising that they won’t make them any longer?” Todd is officially retired and is now waiting for a surgical implant that we hope will alleviate his back pain. He is doing a lot of the cooking and is so good at it that he can even make brussels sprouts taste good. His skills also extend to marksmanship. He bagged a wild turkey and a deer with his crossbow last month. The year’s jerky supply is ensured.

Grandson Mikel will be graduating from Upper Iowa University in May. His next steps are not clear at the moment, but he likes the outdoors and it looks like he will land somewhere in the area of conservation or the environment. He now has his own apartment and is working part time while he finishes his senior year.

Big brother Taylor, a paramedic and firefighter in Texas, is also embarking on something new. He has announced his engagement to be married in March. His bride-to-be is employed by the

police department and both of them are familiar with the hours that must be kept by the people who work to heal and protect us. A commitment to helping others runs deep in our family and we wish them well.

Our son David and his family live in Finland. He works in IT (Information Technology) and reports that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is all the buzz. His wife, Lotta, still finds time for her Gestalt Therapy clients and their two girls (Frida and Selma) are up to their winter caps in school and activities. This brings us to the event of the year. BRUNO, David and Lotta’s 3^rd child, arrived in January. We didn’t meet him in person until this fall when everyone visited us in the USA. The young charmer took his first unassisted steps while here and with his twinkling eyes and wide smile endeared himself to everybody-- especially his uncle Mikel who seemed to develop a special bond with him and was a godsend as a caregiver during the visit.

 

Perhaps, in this season of giving, you will also give a thought to a bit of wisdom from Andrew McCall Smith: “Gracious acceptance is an art most of us never bother to cultivate. The very best gifts have no conditions attached to them and you must realize that accepting another person’s gift is allowing them to express their feelings for you.” With that in mind, we send you this gift of love which is enduring and carries no strings. May your season be merry and your new year bright.

 

Yours, Jim and Jan De Young.

dramajim@gmail.com janetwdeyoung@gmail.com  http://stirringthepudding.blogspot.com

Book Review of William Kent Krueger's THE RIVER WE REMEMBER

 

Krueger, William Kent The River We Remember

 

William Kent Krueger is a “sneaky” writer. He begins The River We Remember as a standalone, straightforward detective story. A man, Brody Dern, with a dark WWII past, is now a county sheriff and is called out, on what was celebrated as Decoration Day in 1958, to the site of a vicious death along the banks of the Alabaster River. The victim is Jimmy Quinn, a local man of considerable means, who has accumulated more than enough enemies over the years. The traditional questions of a murder mystery are broached. Was it suicide, was it murder, or was it a tragic accident? Then, quietly, we begin to meet some of the suspects and other people in the town. Things rapidly get  more complicated. The Alabaster River harbors dark secrets that go back through the history of the town and we begin to see how the hopes, the fears, the adolescent longings, the interlocking love affairs, the racial hatreds, and the violence of wars have impacted the lives of those who live in the ironically named farming community of Jewel, Iowa.    

Krueger writes with profound sensitivity about the scarred lives of the folks who live Jewel. His characters appear normal on the surface, but many are lost in their past secrets and sins. The narrative flows on and is continually deepened by references to both modern and ancient literature. We have lost adolescents who seem drawn out of Holden Caufield; we have lives compromised by alcohol and drugs; and we have the maimed veterans of modern wars whose lives could have easily been pulled from the pages of Homeric legend.  All of these folks now live near the quiet banks of the keynote river. The book moves you most specifically by dealing with the deep seeds of hatred toward the American Indian and the Japanese that have been planted in our history and continue to grow today in the rich soils of the USA. Each of the lives depicted leads inexorably to a violent resolution that takes you through more twists than a pretzel in distress.  

I must admit that this book caught me up. I read most of the last third in one sitting. The plot is solid and convincing, the characters seem spot on, and the overpowering inclusion of the sad history of our land puts a rich and satisfying sauce on an already well-made meal. Through it all, the Alabaster River runs with a current that sweeps all contents “from our beginning to our end.” As Kreuger says in the epilogue, there are many stories to be told and in all of them there is some truth and a “good deal of innocent misremembering.”  Separating it all out remains the ultimate challenge of living.

Jim De Young 12/11/23