I just got back from Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent three days at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. That wasn’t all I did: I spent my mornings seeing such intriguing sights as Hank Williams’ grave and Martin Luther King’s church. I also paid a visit to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, whose holdings include Edward Hopper’s New York Office and two paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald, and thanks to the timely intervention of a reader, I even managed to eat something approaching my fair share of really good barbecue. Nevertheless, I came to Montgomery to see plays, and I managed to work in five of them while I was in town, one on Thursday night (Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing) and two each on Friday (As You Like It and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons) and Saturday (The Taming of the Shrew and Coriolanus). It was the first time I’d ever seen live performances of two Shakespeare plays in a single day.
Am I tired? Am I ever. You can’t fly nonstop to Montgomery from New York, so I had to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, and take a puddlejumper the rest of the way. Thursday was a long, long day, and Sunday wasn’t much shorter. The good news is that my flying phobia seems to have left me–I actually enjoyed it up there! I’m awfully glad to be home, though, and I think I’ve earned a good night’s sleep, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
I have three appointments and a deadline on Monday, but that doesn’t mean I won’t blog some more. (Nor does it mean that I will.)