Seeking Benedick.

Last single girl standing.

It's a formidable idea, and a bit of a badge of honor, I should think.

I have a handful of girlfriends that have been confidants and lovely friends since we were children. Since kindergarten, and second grade, and third grade. You know those friendships that are changeless because they've been through so much change? Here's the wonderful thing: they're all matched up. Some are married, some are about to be, and some are maybe just in very wonderful committed relationships.

And then there's me.

I imagine it has something to do with fear. And something to do with the peripatetic nature of my life for the past few years. And also maybe something to do with the fact that I know what I don't want. The problem is: I really don't know what I DO want. From life. Not definitively.

Occasionally, I should imagine, people make a success out of living in perpetual limbo.

But when I am blue (and you may know this), I watch Much Ado About Nothing. And every single time I cry "heigh ho!" for Beatrice, my kindred spirit of merriment and mirth and wit and self-deception.

And every time, every single time, I fall in love with Benedick.

I am seeking Benedick. I am seeking a man's man who's tongue is quick. Who can wink back at me without looking like a child, nor like a creep. (I am, so my friends tell me, a first-class winker. Strange talent. But true!). I am seeking a man who, like me, doesn't know what he's looking for, but is waiting for it to break upon him.

My problem, my perpetual problem, is that I try to become what a man thinks he wants. And then I wake up one day and realize I'm misrepresenting myself and must cut and run.

Which is why I'm waiting for Benedick. Someone who cannot stomach a dependent woman. Someone who has fight in them, but also compassion. Someone who will push back when I push. Someone who is not easy to love for anyone but me.

Sometimes I think that's too much to ask. Most times I think it's worth it to wait. Wait for love to break upon me. My friends tell me I have too many expectations.

I just want someone who's stronger than me.

And dimples wouldn't hurt.... ;)

Shakespeare and Mumford Sat Down to Tea...

Mumford's own sons came around them to be.

Need a little music?

How 'bout a little Shakespeare, too?

Thank you Mumford & Sons.

What an arrangement for some of The Bard's poetry...

With a Hey Nonny Nonny!

I watched Much Ado About Nothing last night for several reasons.

1. After subjecting myself to the dismal, stomach-wrenching sacrilege of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's go at Taming of the Shrew, I was in desperate need of some deftly handled Bard.

2. Much Ado's clever banter always seems to remind me what I'm looking for.

3. It never fails to lighten my spirits.

From those opening lines, with Emma Thompson perched so perfectly in an olive tree, reading to the picnic on the Tuscan hillside, it gets me.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Sigh no more.

Men were deceivers ever.

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into Hey Nonny Nonny!

With a quick opening scene and a prelude of what's to come, the viewer is then surrendered to the joyous strains of Patrick Doyle's masterful score, which sweeps you down the hillside, back to the villa, infecting your blood with the high spirited anticipation of what's to come.

The best part, however, is the masterful execution of banter between Emma Thompson's Beatrice and Kenneth Branaugh's Benedick. After watching an over-the-top Petruchio who milked the audience in awkward silences that he misinterpreted as interest, and the hectic Katherine who threw tantrums, not shrew storms, on stage, throwing Shakespeare's clever lines back and forth at each other at level 11 with little emotional range and less understanding of what they were saying, it was like manna from heaven to watch Beatrice and Benedick. Thompson and Branaugh deliver lines as though they were modern vernacular, as though these words, and none other, sprang to mind. They don't ride Shakespeare's clever coattails. They breathe his artform like it is air. And they leave me smiling.

Beatrice: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.

Benedick: God keep your ladyship still in that mind, so some gentleman or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face.

Beatrice: Scratching could not make it worse on't were such a face as yours...

Benedick: When I said I will die a bachelor, I did not think I would live till I were married...

Beatrice: I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest...

Benedick: Thou and I are too wise to love peaceably.

Benedick: Serve God. Love me. And mend.

Benedick: For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion...

Longing for Shakespeare's Spring.

It's snowing, and the tulips on Pearl street haven't any wool coats to keep them warm.

Being absolutely opposed to venturing outside, I have curled up beneath some down, and will instead take comfort in the dream

of true Spring.

"O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away."

-The Bard, Two Gentlemen of Verona

I found these images over at Dustjacket Attic. This one puts me in the mind of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and all that wandering about in the gardens, overhearing things.

"If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again! it had a dying fall:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stelaing and giving odour!

-Twelfth Night

The Reclamation of Valentine's Day: Part 4

The world's poetic hearts are bracing to quote Shakespeare.

And my heart resounds with the same bard, but with a different angle altogether.

From the angle of the witty woman, the one who disdains the man who cannot outwit her, and the man who can. The one who leaves Aphrodite well enough alone, and has made her peace with Cupid and his pesky arrows. She subscribes to the creed of, "know thyself," as best she can, and "love thyself," with great fervor. And until and unless she finds a man with as much wit as wisdom, she finds great joy in the love of others, and in the sanctity of her own ideals. Be it God's will, she'll die single and happy, and the devil will shun her for her purity, and St. Peter will recognize her joy in banter, and her eternity will be just as happy and clever as her earthly life. For she sees herself as man's equal, and will not compromise.

This is the same Beatrice who's duel of wit and words with Benedick comes to a brilliant climax, for she would be happy with no mean boy, nor any illustrious man, but seeks a balance of both. And it all ends with a Hey Nonny Nonny.

excerpt from Much Ado About Nothing, Act 2, Scene 1:

BEATRICE: He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him. Therefore, I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bear-herd and lead his apes into hell.

LEONATO: Well then, go you into hell?

BEATRICE: No, but to the gate, and there will the devil make me and like an old cuckold with horns on his head, and say, "Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven. Here's no place for you maids." So deliver I up my apes, and away to Saint Peter. For the heavens, he shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long.

ANTONIO [to Hero] Well, niece, I trust you will be ruled by your father.

BEATRICE: Yes, faith. It is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say, "Father, as it pleases you." But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy, and say, "Father, as it please me."

LEONATO: Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband.

BEATRICE: Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be over-mastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none. Adam's sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

photos: www.stumbleupon.com, girl from weheartit.com, Much Ado About Nothing still