Yesterday, I skipped the Year in Review feature I usually do on December 31. The reason for this is simple. I did not blog at all in 2022. My last post is literally the Year in Review feature from December 31, 2021. I didn’t even do a “Fifteen Years” post on January 1, like I usually do and like I’m doing now.

So this year’s January 1 post has a question mark. Am I really celebrating sixteen years of blogging when I only actually blogged for fifteen of those years? Or am I instead marking a birthday. The blog is indeed sixteen years old today.

2022 was a pretty lousy year for me. I spend most of it unemployed, begging and borrowing, temping and tutoring, gigging and gagging, trying to stay afloat for another week. It was a lousy year, but it had a happy ending, and I’m hoping 2023 will be a better year because of it.

In November, I got a job as a high school English teacher. I am teaching classes of 9th and 11th grade students. And will I get the chance to teach a certain Renaissance writer who may come up from time to time? Yes, I will. I’ll be teaching Romeo and Juliet to the 9th grade classes and Macbeth to the 11th grade classes in May and June.

So there should be more to write about this year, now that I’m a Shakespeare Teacher.

And the creative project I mentioned last year, Project Bootstrap? I can tell you now that it’s a novel, and I’ve done a lot of work on it in the past year. I still have a long way to go before I’m ready to approach publishers, but I have a lot of passion for the project and look forward to enjoying the process of writing it. Maybe I’ll check in here from time to time to discuss my progress.

Happy New Year!

Well, this is the time that, every year, I list my top ten posts of the year. In light blogging years, I’ve limited myself to the top five.

But this year, I only posted three times. This post will be the fourth, so even a top five list will be difficult.

So let me review the three posts I did manage this year, followed by the usual excuses, pledges to do better in the future, etc.

I started with my annual January 1 Blog Birthday post. I’ll probably do one again tomorrow. This one is full of promises to be a better blogger, promises that ring especially hollow looking back on it a year later.

Later in January, I posted a video I created for an online Shakespeare event. This was meant to replace a real-life Shakespeare event I used to attend back when attending events was a thing. In the video, I splice together two speeches from the same character at different points in his life, taken from two different plays.

Jump ahead to November 1. I posted a challenge I hoped would go viral, inviting visitors to cast a Shakespeare play using only the cast of one movie. I did a couple myself. It was fun. Feel free to give it a try.

So those were my three posts for the year, and this one will make four. So, what happened? Well, honestly, I personally had a truly lousy year, and if I were looking for an excuse for not writing, I wouldn’t have to look much past that. However, the real reason I haven’t been blogging is a lot simpler and a lot more positive.

This year, I embarked on a new creative project. I’m not really ready to talk about it yet, but for the moment, we’ll refer to it as Project Bootstrap. I’ve spent a lot of time working on it this year, and have a lot to show for it, though there is much work left to be done before I attempt to unleash it on the world. Any surplus creative energy I may have had this year was spent on that, which is why I didn’t feel the need to come here as often.

In the new year, I hope to be able to do both. Thanks to those who are still here to read this. Happy New Year!

And a warm Rest in Peace to Betty White who left us yesterday. It was a sad note to play out a lousy year.

I was watching the new Bond movie, and early in the film, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Wishaw, and Rory Kinnear were all on screen together. Instinctually, I found myself thinking “Oh, too bad they’re not doing Shakespeare right now.” And then I thought, “Okay, if I had this cast at my disposal, what would I do? How would I cast it?” And, thus, the Film/Shake Challenge was born.

So, here’s my first attempt, casting Cymbeline using the cast of No Time to Die:

CYMBELINE, King of Britain: Ralph Fiennes
Cymbeline’s QUEEN: Lashana Lynch
IMOGEN, daughter to Cymbeline by his former queen: Léa Seydoux
POSTHUMUS LEONATUS, husband to Imogen: Billy Magnussen
CLOTEN, son to the present queen by a former husband: Ben Whishaw
PISANIO, Posthumus’s servant: Daniel Craig
CORNELIUS, a physician in Cymbeline’s court: Jeffrey Wright
PHILARIO, Posthumus’s host in Rome: Christof Waltz
IACHIMO, friend to Philario: Rami Malek
CAIUS LUCIUS, a Roman general: Hugh Dennis
BELARIUS, an exiled nobleman: Rory Kinnear

There’s a lot you could do with that cast, but instead, let me cast King John with the actors from Dune:

JOHN, King of England: Stellan Skarsgård
QUEEN ELEANOR, King John’s mother: Charlotte Rampling
BLANCHE of Spain, niece to King John: Zendaya
CONSTANCE, widow of Geoffrey, King John’s elder brother: Rebecca Ferguson
ARTHUR, Duke of Brittany, her son: Timothée Chalamet
KING PHILIP II of France: Javier Bardem
LOUIS THE DAUPHIN, his son: Oscar Isaac
DUKE OF AUSTRIA (also called LIMOGES): Jason Momoa
The BASTARD, PHILIP FAULCONBRIDGE, illegitimate son of King Richard I: Dave Bautista
HUBERT, supporter of King John: Stephen McKinley Henderson

Get the idea? Feel free to post your own Film/Shake combo in the comments below!

Back when we used to be able to enjoy things like bars and friends, I used to participate in a monthly event held in a bar called Drunken Shakespeare.

Sponsored by the Night Shift Theatre Company, the event invited anybody who wished to participate to come in and sign up for a slot to perform a Shakespeare piece to the crowd. I was a regular since my first attendance in June 2017.

When the pandemic hit, the event was renamed #SequesteredShakespeare and moved to Instagram. We also did a few socially distant meetings in person in Central Park when the weather was nicer.

The most recent Sequestered Shakespeare was held online this past Monday. Here is the video I put together to share with the group.

Enjoy!

Caption: Shakespeare’s Prince Hal envisions his reformation and his future as king.

I don’t have much to say today, but I did want to pop in and wish the website a Happy Birthday.

I started this blog on January 1, 2007. I liked the idea of the beginning of the site starting on the New Year. But, really, there’s no reason to think everything is going to change after the ball drops.

Here it is, 2021. And even though we all (including me) celebrated the passing of the awful year 2020, what’s really different now? We’re still in the middle of a cultural civil war, with seemingly half the country unable or unwilling to acknowledge the dangers of a devastating pandemic, the realities of systemic racism, and the results of a democratically decided election. Happy New Year.

Fear not, because I’m back now. Can a well-timed Shakespeare Anagram provide the necessary perspective to bring our country together on a particular issue? Can a weekly riddle provide distraction and entertainment during a stressful time? Can a… wait, what else do we do here besides riddles and anagrams? I remember there used to be more.

Well, maybe now is the time to bring it all back. Or maybe it’s time to start something new. Got a feeling ’21 is gonna be a good year. And if it’s not, we can just pretend that ’22 will come along and fix it all.

I look forward to our continuing this journey together.

The day before each year is an invitation to reflect back on the previous year, and today I can say that I was a fairly crappy blogger this year. Most of the posts from this year are riddles, and even among those, not since August 6.

What can I say? I was pretty well fed up with the state of the world and depressed about any number of things. Ideally, the blog is an opportunity to channel my frustrations into creating something, but it hasn’t been that very much in 2020.

Still, there are a few posts I think are worth highlighting, but only five this year instead of ten. And if you’re reading this, thanks for coming back. I hope to do better for you in 2021.

5. Shakespeare Anagram: Julius Caesar (February 1)

When the Republican-controlled Senate decided to deny the American people an impeachment trial for our criminal president, I wrote this anagram to remind us that we had the power to remove him ourselves in November. And we did!

4. Science is Real (July 4)

One of the prevailing feelings I’ve had about the world for the past few years is helplessness. Everything’s wrong, but what can I do about it? I can vote, sure. I’ve also started writing a poem each Fourth of July, in the hopes of sharing my patriotic spirit with my fellow Americans. This year’s wasn’t my favorite of the three, but it made a point I thought was important.

3. It Is Upon Us (April 10)

It was the fourth anniversary of the death of one of my closest childhood friends, and I took the opportunity to tell a funny story involving him. He would have hated this year just like the rest of us did, but he’d have found a way to make the best of it. This I know.

2. Read Shakespeare Online! (July 17)

One of my favorite things to do is gather with groups of friends to read Shakespeare plays. That was taken from me this year, but my friends continued to meet online to continue our reading groups on Zoom. This post encouraged others to do the same, and shared the resources we use to do it (including the resource page I have on this site).

1. Macbeth 2020 (April 21)

Living in isolation, I was driven to create something, even if I had to do it “all by myself,” as the song goes. Fortunately, the monthly Shakespeare event I used to attend also moved online this year. When the Night Shift Theatre Company transformed the Drunken Shakespeare event (held in a bar) into the Sequestered Shakespeare event (held on Instagram), it gave me the opportunity to reimagine the cauldron scene from Macbeth as a Zoom call in 2020. I posted the video here as well.

Have a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2021!

I’m a brand name that in a record store goes;
An identity marker that too little shows;
I’m the writing on maps; I’m a tag that’s on clothes;
And a sticker with info a customer knows.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Asher. See comments for answer.

I’m a TV detective who asked for the facts;
I’m that ill-received video: Rebecca Black’s;
I’m a series of films where Ice Cube mainly acts;
And I’m Crusoe’s manservant he saved from attacks.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Asher. See comments for answer.

I’m the portion of time that you currently spend;
I’m an answer for roll call; a gift for a friend;
A grammatical tense that is spoken or penned;
And a vote that will only affirm you attend.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Asher. See comments for answer.

In the before-times, when social contact was allowed, one of my favorite things to do was to gather with friends and do readings of Shakespeare’s plays. We would choose a play in advance, meet together at an agreed-upon time, divide up the roles, and read the play out loud from beginning to end.

When the world shut down, I was part of four such groups, each of which met on a monthly basis. This seems like it would mean a weekly reading for me, but in practice, the dates tended to cluster, and I often attended several in one week.

Since the COVID shelter-in-place, all four groups have shifted online, and I now participate in regular readings via Zoom. To be clear, this doesn’t come close to replacing getting together with friends and reading live, but it does replace not having a reading at all quite nicely.

And it occurs to me that there may be some folks within the sound of my voice who might be looking for something fun to do with friends from a distance. If a Shakespeare reading sounds like fun for you, I want to show you how easy it can be to put together.

First, find some friends who like Shakespeare and want to do this. One person should have a Zoom account so they can create a room, but if that’s not available, there are alternatives like Google Meet that can also work.

Last year, I put together a resource page for groups who want to meet live to do Shakespeare readings. That’s not an option right now, but the page is just as useful for online readings.

You can choose the play in advance, or wait until everyone has met and choose a play based on the recommendations for the number of readers you have.

There are 24 plays that have sections on the page, and each play section links to the Folger Digital Text for that play, so everyone will be using the same text. Each section also contains divisions to assign roles from the play to 2 to 12 readers.

All that remains is to randomize who is assigned each reader number, which can be quickly done at this website.

So, if you’re looking for a fun way to connect with your long-lost Shakespeare-loving friends, online Shakespeare readings just might be the thing to try!