Happy Birthday, Pumpkin!

Cuyler

Kindergarten

Cuyler

Pre-school

Cuyler

2010

Just Ask Jeeves...

Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster & Stephen Fry as Jeeves

Post Card with Detail of Samford Hall at Auburn University

...if you want to know a little bit about the Auburn Spirit. This is an excerpt from the film documentary Stephen Fry in America. Of course, this event was a couple of years ago before Cameron Newton came to the Loveliest Village of the Plains.
"I say, Jeeves, do you know anything about a Number One ranking? "

Something Wicked This Way Comes

1914 Poster

My Postcard from Oxford

(click on image to enlarge)

Some people just have perfect timing. This is the postcard I received on Friday, my first day of a four day, long weekend/ fall break. I have been immersed in school, not on Blogger (with the exception of one magical evening at THE Ball) and certainly not writing to the people who should be hearing from me. Quite naturally, of course, this card was from my dear friend Anne of Cumnor Hill, Oxford! I had just the day before swore I would call or write to her. My how the time flies while re-reading elegies, Beowulf, ballads, and Chaucer! Then--there is the teaching and grading papers and posting grades! Whew! Next it will be time for my favorite: Good old gory Macbeth and his even more blood thirsty Lady! (My son was showing me some Shakespeare Flair on Facebook, and one badge featured a new product line: Lady Macbeth Hand Soap! Gotta have it!) The card above is 5x7 and quite detailed! I have scanned it in and will be using it as a desk top at school! ~~~~Believe it or not, I used to teach a version of the play to my seventh graders when I worked at a junior high school! I had developed what you might call an enrichment unit to introduce Shakespeare at an early age. I used a story form of the plays artfully composed by Leon Garfield. I actually had his book Shakespeare Stories featuring about eight or so of the Bard's best told in unique narrative form and embroidered with just the right quotes from the plays, but I had not used MACBETH. These stories were just perfect for the young adolescent audience I taught. I had just returned to my classroom from a spring break trip to Scotland with three of my favorite seventh grade girls, (no wonder I refer to it as my Miss Jeane Brodie tour), to find our favorite read of the time--a set of the latest classroom literary magazines--waiting on my desk.

Now dear readers, get this: The four of us had--just days before --toured Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. We were doing our very best to be attentive and listen to the thick Scottish accent of our tour guide in the ballroom lined with portraits when our eyes fixed on a most sinister portrait. A close examination of the descriptive plaque under the painting revealed to us MACBETH! Suddenly he was very real. His gaze was piercing. Until that moment, I was not even certain he had been an actual person, nor had I ever taught the play. (My first 22 years of teaching were all at the junior high level with mostly seventh graders.) I must have thought he was one of Shakespeare's inventions. I consulted my Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare in which he gives detailed historical background on each of the plays. I learned that King Macbeth (reign 1040-1057) was indeed a very real feudal king, and that Shakepeare had written the play after Queen Elizabeth's death to appeal to his new patron, King James of Scotland who was very interested in witchcraft! So imagine my great surprise when the feature article of our Scope Magazine was Leon Garfield's MACBETH!! (Play the spooky music!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So that is how it began for me, and even with my high school seniors, after we read and discuss and study the play, I always like to share and/or revisit
Ray Bradbury's story Something Wicked This Way Comes. The novel is admittedly deeper and darker than the film which was released in 1983, but the the Disney studios made a masterful interpretation of Bradbury's tale of an aging father (Jason Robards) and his young son coming to terms with their fears, all stirred up in a bubbling cualdron of emotions by Mr. Dark. (Jonathan Pryce). The story is told from the point of view of the son, and focuses on the autumn of his twelfth year when a most unusual carnival comes to town. And, I must say, this is not your typical Disney tale, but it is a classic at our house. (I believe Bradbury wrote the screenplay.) If you have never seen it, you are in for a real Halloween treat!

"By the pricking of my thumbs...
Something wicked this way comes..."

from Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1