Shakespeare

So we collected our paperback scripts, went through our parts individually with Lance, and got costumed and made up at Dramashop. On the big night, a numerous and locally-stellar congregation did in fact assemble on the folding chairs.

I wish I could provide a coherent account of the performance. You’ll have to use your imagination, and it’ll fall short. You really had to be there. One brief example, to illustrate the difficulty. My excellent friend and fellow MIT Concert Band clarinetist Joe Goldfarb drew (again I doubt the randomness) the rôle of Moonshine in the play-within-a-play. Where (Act V, Scene 1), in his truly spectacular Brooklyn accent, he intoned:

This lanthorn doth the horned moon present…
Myself the man i’ the moon do seem to be…
this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.

To get the full flavor of this comic climax, you have to assimilate Joe’s classic manner of speech, in which, for example, “this dog” has three syllables, resembling, sequentially, “diss” “dough,”and “ugg.”

Near the outset, I delivered my first resonant line: “Full of vexation come I, with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia!…” Then for much of the rest of the performance, I hunkered in the President’s yard, behind its surrounding wall, in company with other bit-players. Including, as it turned out, the lovely Laurie Stratton, whom I had heretofore admired from afar but actually met only on rare, rather formal occasions.

Well, as it happened, Laurie’s somewhat skimpy fairy-costume wasn’t really adequate to the chilly evening, and she gave some visible evidence of distress, even in the moonlit gloom. Fetched up as a gentleman, what else could I have done? I invited her into the coziness of my big wool cape, and we kept each other warm in the most chaste manner imaginable, until one of us had to arise to the call of another cue.

For bashful, virginal, nineteen-year-old me, this innocent little interlude was fraught with a great deal of hormonal electricity. I don’t flatter myself that it was so for her. I don’t recall that Laurie and I ever met again.* But I suppose that you need to know about this part of the story, if you’re to decide what to believe of the rest of my account.

…For my recollections put this evening in a very sparsely-populated category: that of perfectly magical, one-off, irreproducible occasions of amazing joy. I’ve been blessed with a few such; this is the most secular of them and therefore the one I feel most free to recount here. For each, I won’t live to return enough thanks to the Source of all marvelous things.

*Laurie’s father’s extended 1994 obituary, published by MIT, lists her among his survivors as Mrs Laura Thoresby of London. I ran into Kay Stratton at an Alumni Council function in the 1990s and inquired after Laurie. Mrs Stratton replied that her daughter had divorced “her barrister” and was working as confidential secretary to a Saudi prince. Also that I shouldn’t feel lonesome for having had a crush on Laurie. Much of East Campus and Senior House seemed to have shared the experience.

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Updated Aug 2014

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