Do I wake or sleep?

Good news: we finished above 10,000 today!

Also good news: I seem to have fixed my TV last night. Crossing fingers, but it was fine this morning.

I watched my DVD of Shakespeare in Love last night and today. I can't adequately express how much I love that movie. It's simply perfect. There's not one thing, not one scene, one character, one joke, one line I'd change about it. I love the way it parallels Romeo and Juliet--I'd caught some of it when I first saw it, especially with that lovely exchange "'Twas the rooster--believe me, love it was the owl" (this is rendered into "'Twas the lark--believe me love, it was the nightingale" in the play). But I noticed a lot more this time--Will first sees Viola at a party, where she meets the man with whom her parents have arranged a marriage. Will dances with Viola at the party, then overhears her talking on her balcony. Viola has a nurse. One lover is falsely informed of the death of the other.

I love how layered the movie is, how even if you don't know Shakespeare all that well, it's still enjoyable. Geoffrey Rush is hilarious with his deadpan English delivery. "How refreshing." And it's so charming and engaging at first--the leads are beautiful, and brilliant (I have no idea why Joseph Fiennes didn't get a Best Actor Oscar nomination), the writing is so clever. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard are amazing--the plot is so well constructed and planned, into finally, perfectly, Viola is Juliet and Will is Romeo, and art is life. And when Viola and Will first become lovers, it's the best mixture of romantic and sexy--the scene when they're making love as they're saying their lines to each other is incredible. And then gradually, like a fine mist, things turn darker and darker: "It is not a comedy I'm writing now. A broad river divides my lovers..."

And oh God, that luminous, lovely ending, as they spin heartbreak into something rich and strange, spun gold, a tale to last the ages. "You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die...It will be a love story, for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name...Viola." I wept at this. There's something about it that touches me so deeply--it's simply perfect. The artist turning heartbreak into art, because that's what we do, that's what makes us artists--we gather up our emotions and experiences and press them into clay, to turn them into something finer.

As I mentioned awhile ago, we're remounting it again. Three actresses have left and we have two new ones. We're performing mostly the same scenes but have deleted and added some. Our performance schedule is as follows: Jan. 2 & 3 at some location in the Village (on MacDougall Street?) and then several more at the Midtown Theater Festival, second week in January. I'll be reprising Ophelia, Titania and Rosalind (because performing as Rosalind twice in five months just isn't enough for me!) and we've added the Alice-Princess Katherine scene from Henry V in which I'll be playing Katherine. Most exciting is that Jane will be gone for the Jan. 2 & 3 nights--Julie split up her scenes between Tracie (new girl) and me, so I'll be doing Viola (letter scene with Olivia) and several scenes of Juliet! Julie wanted me to do Viola--she wanted me to do another britches role--but she left it up to us to decide who does Juliet. I went straight to Tracie and said "Listen, I've ALWAYS wanted to do this role. Are you really attached to it or do you mind if I take it?" She had no problem so I get to do Juliet! It's three scenes: the first is the meeting with J., the Nurse and Lady C. ("How now! Who calls?"), the second is the scene after the Nurse comes back from meeting with Romeo. The THIRD is my favorite, that beautiful monologue of hers ("Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds...I have bought the mansion of love..."). It's giving me chills right now to think of it. I cannot WAIT. I am going to knock that monologue right. Out of. The. PARK.