It's a weekend

My big project for today was to make a batch of cinnamon rolls. My church is having a bake sale (to raise money for renovation of the nursery) and they asked people - especially those on the Education Committee, which I am now on, to bake something.

I figured I'd do a yeast bread. For one thing, relatively few people bake their own bread these days, and so it might be a bit of a novelty. But also, I thought of something my mother has said on occasion: "Once you get comfortable making yeast bread, it's actually easier to do that than it is to do something like cookies."

You know, I think she's right. The bread takes time - the first rising for this recipe took almost an hour and a half, and the second rise took about a half-hour. But during those times I didn't have to be watching over it, I could just leave it in the bowl (or in the pans) and go work on other things. The total "involved" time was maybe 10 minutes of combining ingredients, five minutes of kneading (this being a sweet dough with an egg, it does not do well with the full 10 minutes of kneading you'd give a plain bread), and then maybe 10 minutes of shaping.

Cookies, especially drop cookies, you feel tied to the kitchen for hours.

I was very pleased with how the rolls turned out. My mom gave me the recipe she usually uses (after I couldn't find one I felt I trusted in any of my books). Since I knew she had made it many times, I figured it would turn out well. It actually is probably the best bread I've ever made, in terms of texture and appearance, which pleases me, because while I'm content to keep under-risen or misshapen bread for my own use, when I'm taking it somewhere, I want it to be as close to perfect as a homemade bread can be.

The recipe made about 2 dozen rolls, I'm going to take 16 or so down to church and keep the rest for myself. (Well, I did eat one after lunch, partly to verify that they turned out well.)

***

Last night, I went to the summer Shakespeare production on campus. It was "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" and as is often the case with current productions of Shakespeare, it was a "historical re-set" - set in a different period than what the original play was.

This time, they did late 1960s/early 1970s. (I thought, from looking at the posters advertising it, that it had to be the "mod" era, a la Austin Powers. Well, maybe a little later than that). The director said he inserted some "Laugh-In" like touches and yes, they were there - several of the entra'actes had the characters chasing one another around the stage. And Eglamour was got up like Arte Johnson's "old man" character. (Though I think someone needed to give the actor a few more tips on how to make it look convincing when walking with a cane...)

As is typical of local Shakespeare, they changed a few of the roles around to have more roles for women: Speed was played as a woman (in a black-and-white mod dress and go-go boots). The Duke/Emperor became a Duchess, and Proteus' father Antonio became Antonia.

(And Antonia was very funny - got up in a Pucci-print caftan and turban, and carrying a martini glass precariously around. It was all the funnier to me because I know the woman who played Antonia.)

Proteus was very good, as was Julia. (Julia was particularly funny when she dressed as a boy for her trip to Milan. For one thing, the codpiece suggested by her ladies' maid was a stuffed sock (!) to go down the front of her trousers. (And the ladies' maid wound up chasing her with that sock during several of the entr'actes.) And when she "remembered" she had to "walk like a man," she put on a hilarious, and not-very-convincing swagger - almost as if she was thinking, "Okay, now I have to walk like I have something DANGLING there that I don't actually have.")

(Interesting how many of Shakespeare's plays - I can think of four, right off - have the plot point of cross-dressing, usually a woman dressing as a man. I suppose part of it may relate to the fact that in Shakespeare's time, all the female parts were played by boys, so they were in drag to begin with. But maybe it says something about us finding the idea of someone dressing as the opposite sex (not entirely willingly, certainly not willingly in the way that drag queens willingly dress up) funny. I suppose that's come down to us moderns in the form of the "blokes" on Monty Python getting dressed up as Mrs. Pepperpot.)

The set was sort of a swinging-60s decor, though a fairly minimal set - a back wall painted with those enormous pink and orange amoeba-flowers (it had sliding doors for entry and exit, and to bring on various bits of furniture), a balcony and spiral staircase, and two bits of carpet (lime green and purple). There were banners hung to indicate the location (Verona, Milan, or "The Forest.") (The young man charged with doing this had a great deal of fun with it: he dressed in leather pants and an open jacket and beads, and he danced - kind of a la Austen Powers - each time he came out to change the banner. By the midpoint of the play, people were laughing and clapping for him.)

There was also the "Renaissance Hippie Chorus" - a group of people that provided (entirely acapella) incidental music. At the start, they did a somewhat-in-the-style-of-the-Swingle-Singers version of the Peter Gunn theme, and they did a lovely, slow-ballad with several-part harmony rendition of "My Funny Valentine" (!), and there was a rousing rendition of "I Got the Music In Me" (featuring two African-American women who soloed on it, and were doubtless chosen to do it because of their amazing voices). And then, at the end of the play, they went back into Swingle Singers mode and did "Soul Bossa Nova," better known as the theme music for the Austin Powers movies. (I wondered when they were going to work in an Austin Powers reference...)

Not all of the singers were dressed as hippies; a couple of the guys looked more like beatniks (dark slacks, dark turtlenecks, sunglasses) and several of the women had maxidresses that were far fancier than what any hippie chick would wear.

Also, the band-of-thieves became pot-smoking hippies. (They actually "toked" on a cigarette - and yes, I'm sure it was just a cigarette, I could smell the smoke from it) and laughed uproariously.

And when Proteus recited "Who is Sylvia," I think he was kind of channeling the William Shatner/Leonard Nimoy rock-lyric albums they put out in the sixties. ("Lucy....in the SKY....with DIAMONDS....")

So there were a lot of those little references. I probably didn't even get them all, seeing as all of my knowledge of the sixties (and much of my knowledge of the early 70s) comes via watching stuff in re-run.

After I got home, I thought, "I should start reading that play." I found my copy of it, the first thing the introduction said was something like "This is a problematic play..." because of the attempted-rape scene at the end. (Apparently Proteus tries to take Sylvia by force? That was very downplayed in this version - what I got was that he was more trying to worm an admission of love out of her, but didn't get it...and at the end, it was clear in this production that Valentine was going to marry Sylvia, and Proteus was going to marry Julia, her having been discovered to be "more grace than boy."

That said - I did start reading it, and the literary-critic's introduction notwithstanding, am enjoying it. There's a certain amount of the wordplay I missed hearing it up on stage (trying to follow the action as well, and sometimes the archaic usages fly past me from the stage, whereas I get them when I read them).

Shakespeare's comedies (the real comedies, not necessarily the plays that are "comedies" because they don't all die at the end - like A Winter's Tale, which I gave up on) are a lot of fun because of all the wordplay - there is a lot of punning, there are a lot of subtle bawdy jokes. (It's hard for me to explain my feeling about those kinds of jokes. When it's all Farrelly-Brothers-Movie in-your-face, I get kind of like, "meh, no, I don't like this," but when it's subtle - like in Shakespeare - or when there's that sly sort of "ha ha, look what we are getting away with" like in Mel Brooks, I can find it very funny. It may be the differences in tone, like my Great Books professor talked about contrasting Bocaccio's Decameron and Petronius' Satyricon: that Bocaccio was basically celebrating life, laughing at foibles, and that there was fundamentally an optimistic outlook to it, whereas he felt the Satyricon was fundamentally a sort of debased humor and pessimistic and decadent in the worst sense of the word. (I don't know, I don't remember a whole lot about either book, as that was 25 years ago and we had to read at such a fast clip to keep up that I don't remember content that well, but I do remember liking the Decameron and being somewhat depressed by the Satyricon. So it may be what I'm responding to in Mel Brooks is that he's Bocaccian on a way - that he's laughing at life and the absurdity about it, and that for me, some of the modern "gross-out" comedies are, I don't know, they seem kind of in-the-bad-way decadent to me?

It's hard for me to explain.

But I do find the borderline-dirty jokes in Shakespeare funny. Perhaps I do in part because they're so well disguised, you can breeze past one and then go, "Wait...oh no he di'int!" when you realize what the person said.)