A speculative mind

  When I was a kid, my father was appointed as a justice to the state Court of Appeals. Two years later, he had to run for reelection. My father had earlier been elected a state legislator a few times, but this was the first time he would be running for state-wide office. To make matters more difficult, the former state Attorney General decided to run against my dad. Not only that but the former Attorney General had previously run for governor. Everybody in the state had heard of this guy’s name. No one (outside of our former county) had ever heard of my dad. This was going to be a difficult election for him to win. One of the strategies he decided on was to get out and meet people. This included visiting some African American churches in the Portland area. On one of those visits, I went with him. I was twelve years old. I was about as milk-white as a white boy can be, and my family was the epitome of middle-class milk-white. The places I had grown up had very few persons of colo...

  A number of years ago, our theater company had a proposal to do The Diary of Anne Frank. I was not wild about the idea myself. I felt it was depressing and everyone knows how it will end. What can I say, I like comedies. But the other board members felt it was a good idea, and I was not going to stand in the way. We had two casting calls, one for the adults and one for the two girls in the play (Anne and her sister Margot). I got cast as Otto Frank (Anne’s father). I went to the casting call for the girls just to observe. I walked in the room to a plethora of little girls. I had no idea that so many girls in our community wanted to play Anne Frank. I don’t even know how many girls there were, 40? 50? I thought it would be difficult to choose one. But when one girl named Madeline read for the part, I thought to myself, that’s her, that’s Anne. I was not involved in selecting the cast, but I was not alone in my opinion about Madeline. Everybody thought she was perfect. And I hav...

  I recently watched the film Hamnet and I had some thoughts. First, we should recognize that this is a work of fiction. The film was based on a novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Though the big life events are correctly placed (births, deaths, marriage) everything in between those events is speculative. There is very little we know about Shakespeare’s personal life. For example, it has been theorized that Shakespeare did some private tutoring to make ends meet. This is depicted in the film. But we have no direct evidence that he did so. So little is known about his life that people have speculated that the man from Stratford (Shakespeare) did not write the plays and sonnets at all. A variety of other authors have been proposed. Personally, I believe that the man from Stratford was the playwright. None of his contemporaries ever doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. There was no theory running around at the time that Shakespeare’s plays were written by somebody else. Those theories...

    Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before   Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back   No you cannot Go back Star Liner