The four-day weekend was really enjoyable. I went into New York and celebrated Jay’s birthday with him and, as I think many of you know, we saw three Shakespeare’s in a row. We saw Twelfth Night and Richard the III performed by an all-male Shakespeare group who perform at the Globe Theater in London and are here for three months performing at the beautifully ornate Belasco Theatre. We also saw a performance of MacBeth at Lincoln Centre, another wonderful experience, incredibly visual, full of energy and with three tall male witches who were exceedingly scary! I also saw another theatrical performance on Sunday, something completely different, called Voices of Our Mothers, in which five women play Old Testament Biblical women telling their stories. Also over the weekend I had an hour of therapeutic restorative yoga with Adam (a teacher from the yoga studio where Jay takes classes) and an adjustment from Karen Erickson, a former New School student who is now a very successful New York chiropractor. Karen celebrated 25 years in her practice with a party a couple of weeks ago that Jay and I attended, and she is always willing to give me a gift of her services whenever I am able to go to her office. She is a dear friend and a New School graduate of whom I am very proud (also her mom was one of the founding parents of TNS.)
Of course once we’re back at school it seems like we’ve never been away. Jay’s class was absolutely thrilled that he had managed to go and get 30 tickets for Richard the III in January and I am sure they will love the performance. The group provides a large amount of educational material we printed out from the website and will use it as preparation for the theater visit.
The first New School Shakespearean performance will be the Little Class puppet play of Midsummer Night’s Dream which we will perform for the other classes hopefully before Thanksgiving and videotape to show the parents at a later date. I have been working with the little classers in small groups to write the narration for the play which older classers will read. With Jay’s class we finished watching a video of The Boisterous Bard and saw the second DVD of bloopers, outtakes and Susan sightings which everyone found hilarious. This video was made in 2004 by Nick C. a new school student who went on to study filmmaking at NYU. The video has given current students an idea of the play we put together the last time we studied Shakespeare in depth. Today and tomorrow we are reading an abridged version of Romeo and Juliet. The class had expressed an interest in reading the original Shakespeare play and not a paraphrased version.
As I said last week, it’s great having Meeta back, and she has certainly jumped back into work with great enthusiasm. I have been trying to catch the odd moment here and there to talk to her about her family and her trip home for her father’s birthday. She said he was very touched by the celebration and all the family members that had come to enjoy it with him.
In the middle class I continued my Shakespeare work with a new book on Shakespeare’s life and also finishing my reading of Hamlet from the Shakespeare Can Be Fun series. We are going to do some acting out of scenes from Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet in small groups next week. This class has also started watching the Boisterous Bard video and I have shown one or two excerpts concerned with Midsummer Night’s Dream to the younger class too.
We have another maintenance workshop this weekend which hopefully will be well attended since there is a lot to be done. Now that our backyard is beginning to look so good with the new blacktop, Timmy’s pavers and Kathey’s plantings, we want to work on the other areas needing repair to bring everything to par. There are many jobs inside and out and the weather is supposed to be a little warmer so come and have fun doing stuff for the school. The kids love it when they can see what their parents did at a workshop.