I don’t know how I got on watching a lot of Shakespeare. I think it’s the election. The last time was in 2004 about this time. At that time I was watching a lot of Sir Lawrence Olivier’s version of things. I do not think he meant for his works to be so funny, but they are. How much more over the top can he go than his Richard III? But you say that’s Shakespeare, right? 

Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Hamlet I find are far superior to Olivier’s drama queen on a sugar crash. Hamlet is nearly four hours. Four! I watched it one and a half times the other day. I have no IDEA what is going on, but it’s great. That I have never read Hamlet does not help That’s right, I have never even read Hamlet, I am so dumb. Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, a Midsummer Night’s Dream — these we had to read in school. I think it’s impossible that as a third grader we — the “enriched kids” in GATE — read Romeo and Juliet. Did we read a remedial version? We weren’t that gifted. 

Although in the ensuing decades I have read Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, the Taming of the Shrew, Othello, et cetera. But my favorites still come back down to RIchard III, which we read in eighth grade, and Macbeth, which we read on twelfth grade. If you were to ask me to eliminate one to save the other, I do not know if I could. Because they are not only both great plays, but they are so wrapped up in in the time that I read them.

The funny things about Richard III was that although we read it in class, the field trip to a local community college to see a theater production outshadows my memories of the fiction in its written word. Yeah, Bill S didn’t write this stuff to be read on a page, he meant his words to hang in the air. I can remember I had an entirely different notion of the title character before I saw some theater student’s interpretation. It’s not that the portrayal was any different that any other you may see, it was different than what i had on my mind. In my head, Richard III wasn’t such a bad guy. He was funny, but you kind of felt sorry for him. But any time I see him portrayed, from Yuba College to Lawrence Olivier to Ian McKellen, Richard III is a vile, despicable, over the top lunatic. I guess that’s what happens with five hundred years of anti-York propaganda.

Macbeth had a huge effect on me, in that it was 1989 when the Cure’s gloomy power had a stranglehold over the nation’s youth. It’s not an understatement to say that the Cure were the most popular band my final two years of high school. Everyone loved the Cure – jocks and stoners, art fags and cheerleaders, gloomy kids and teenyboppers, band geeks and invisible kids. There was no word for goth then, that was just the way kids dressed. Well, in my dumb small Oregon town, at least. So when I say that Macbeth hit our small class of Dramatic Literature with a bang was an understatement. 

about ninty-five percent of our senior class took the same classes. There must have been a chart as a frosh that, as a California transplant, ever did see. So, I just took what I wanted. I had an overabundance of graduation credits, due to the differences between California and Oregon standards. I could take four art classes if I wanted. Or just the minimum of Government and English. I already knew that if I was going to go to college I would want to go to an art school, but the idea of four more years of school…oy. 

So, while most of the senior class for English had first term Expository Writing, I already had made up my mind that I didn’t want anyone telling me how I should write essays to impress college professors. What this did in the long term was cause me to doubt anything I have ever written, because I don’t know structure or pacing or focus or how to bullshit your way through my writing. No, there was one way out of Expos Writing, that was Dramatic Lit, which was filed with Drama kids and, I guess, me. Dramatic Lit was the first half of a course called English Lit. Meaning England. When some people say that they read this or that American author, I always have to claim ignorance — unless it’s god damned Steinbeck, I never got out of reading god damned Steinbeck frosh and soph years. One year, because I moved around so damn much, I had to read The Pearl three times. Ugh. No, while you were reading the Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird, I was reading things in middle English, like Beowulf and Canturbury Tales, all the way up to the second term’s focus on Romantic and Victorian Literature.

So I guess I felt lucky that I got to read Macbeth in my Dramatic Lit class. Do kids today get to choose like this? I wouldn’t think so. Do people find it of any import to educate children in the English language greatest assets? Do they allow them to become curious and foster interest in the words we use? I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I had a kid to impart all of this to, because all I can se out of kids is vulgarity in the purest sense of the word. Coco Chanel once said “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity”

Although Macbeth is a popular work of Mr. Shakespeare, I find it seldom performed. This may have something to do with it being considered bad luck. I don’t know. I have a recording on a vinyl record, some wayward performance captured in a radio studio. But I never saw a live performance nor a filmed performance of it until Scotland, PA, which was a black comedy interpretation taking place in Pennsylvania in the 1970s. But as a faithful production may have usurped my fond memories of the Fall of 1989 and the gloomy cloud that hung over a seventeen year old’s very existence, this tongue in cheek interpretation, a real delight for sure, made me love that seventeen year old dope even more for loving the original text in the first place.

By Catherine Swarmy

Well, I don’t know what it was, but I found myself in the Greenwich Village in May of Ought-Seven looking for this Arab fellow I bought this lamp from in 1967.  Before you start on a tear and rush off to your desk and drop pen to paper, no, that lamp in question was not one of those with a genie in it.  When I bought it for twenty-four dollars in 1967, the lamp merchant assured me that my purchase was to have a lifetime guarantee.  Well, here it was not forty years later and the lamp was as dead as a damn dog.  Yes, yes, I had tugged the lamp with me as I relocated from New York to Serbia to France to California and back to New York.  And yes, you are not mistaken, with this is the same lamp I hit Alan Alda, the actor, with square over the mellon.  You call that an accurate portrayal of George Plimpton?  Well, I do not! Nor do I appreciate the grope, thank you, sir.

Oh, but I can hear you mutter under your garlic breath, “Catherine Swarmy, you have mistreated this lamp for decades, surely its degradation is your cross to bear.”  This is where your are wrong, and you should shut your mouth because you are stupid and stupid people should just shut the hell up.  It does not matter how many rings of hellfire this lamp had passed through, I still had the receipt, I still had my guarantee, and I intended to get the lamp replaced.  Or my money back!  Otherwise, we live in a society without rules rich people can enforce on others.  And if that happens, just put a gun in your mouth and suck it.

Only, get this, I hadn’t been down there in probably thirty years, and I must confess,  I was more than a pinch lost.  Not a block from where Christopher, Greenwich and Sixth Avenue intersect was, I had in my mind, was where this swarthy semitic charlatan turned his faulty wares into crisp cool American cabbage.  Once I stepped out the taxi cab I was not sure.  I mean, the whole neighborhood was different.  People lining the sidewalks eating breakfast in the afternoon.  The afternoon?

Obviously, I thought, I was in the wrong neighboorhood.  I had stepped out in a working class neighborhood where all discernible demographics worked “swing shift”, and two in the afternoon was their nine am.  That had to be it, I was in…oh, what was it called…Queens.  Well, I tried to stop the driver before he peeled off, but I was out of luck.  He may have been in a rush to his cave to take in a shower.  I would hope.  I dropped the lamp down on a vacant table with a notable “clump”, and you would not believe, all these breakfast on the middle of the god damned afternoon brats swung their heads around with no haste and great displeasure, mouths agape with eggs and toast, as if I had set off a god damned grenade in church.  

“Christ, you’re eating breakfast on the street,” I hissed under my breath.

I was not in Queens, I discovered.  The fuzzy typeface ten feet above said I was on Avenue of Americas, whatever that meant, but the on cross from it said Christopher, so I don’t know, maybe I was in Manhattan after all.  It’s so hard to know where one is most of the time.  France?  No, Houston.  God, that actually happened to me once.  Ending up in Houston. Christ. 

So I was riffling through my handbag for this ancient lamp receipt. Looking at the address ,and by Christ, I couldn’t make the damned thing out.  I thought it was 411 Sixth Avenue, but at that moment it looked like 911.  I mean, in that classic fancy script, look at those numbers side by side one day, they are almost identical.  Well, I couldn’t make heads nor tails if it, so I asked a passing waitress if the number looked like nine eleven or not.  Well, you had never seen anyone more offended.  So, I asked a passing police officer, because i figured that he’s out on the street all day, he should know where things are.  Well, you would have thought I just said the Virgin Mary was a common street prostitute and gave his crabs in his big fat bushy mustache.

Honestly, New York.

That’s when Joe Torre pulled up in his car and said to me, “It looks like you need some help.”

Well, he was right, I did need help!  He was pretty swift, that one.  I’ll tell you more later, long story short, he ended up poisoning me and following me back to California to stalk me some more and…oh, I’ll tell you later.