My earliest knowledge of Richard III was watching Richard Dreyfus play a flamboyantly gay hunchback in The Goodbye Girl. I didn’t know the story, I just knew Richard was a serious dude with a bad back, and he wasn’t meant to be a joke.
When we visited the Tower of London, we walked through the Bloody Tower […]

I’ve been plottng this tour of Shakespeare in the Movies for over a year now, and what better time than following a trip to England?   Our literary tour of England started in October of last year with Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. It took us through a journey into alternate reality London, and actual real-life […]

One of my favorite lines from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was, “So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.”  It’s poetry really, because when you’ve overfilled your time, you get all discombobulated like that.
I have no time for books or movies these days, just work and […]

No trip to London is complete without a tour of The Tower.  I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I have a disease where words and concepts trigger songs in my head, and then I can’t avoid blurting that song to all who will hear.  My friends have learned to ignore this […]

Embracing the voyage across the sea, I brought my copy of Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, a novel about young Will Shakespeare, a glove maker’s son, bored with his party buddies in Stratford and moving on to much more exciting things. I was glad I’d read it before, because my vacation was too much […]

When I’m in a different country, it’s the little details I notice.  When we first arrived in England, we did three very ordinary things — we used the bathroom at the airport, got cash out of an ATM and exited the parking garage. 
One thing that I would find was pretty common about using public toilets in England […]

When people ask me what I saw when I went to England, I say, “Oh, the usual – Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, the Sistine Chapel.”  When D’s aunt told us not to make any plans for Wednesday, that she had a special surprise for us, none of us could have guessed we’d be taking a day trip […]

I’m all aflutter, waiting for 3pm when I go to the airport for my first flight across the ocean. The longest flight I’ve ever taken was from Dallas to Toronto.  Going from the US to Canada, there are only subtle differences that tell you you’re in another country –  signs in French and English, distances measured […]

Out at dinner with my girlfriends last night, we spent an unusually large amount of time talking about death and funeral customs, burials, cremation, mourning, insurance policies.  It started with M, talking about her recent trip to Houston for her grandmother’s funeral. 
The phrase, “There wasn’t an open casket,” led us in.  J, who’s from China, said […]

That’s not to say that I actually liked Neverwhere as a novel, but I am interested in seeing the BBC miniseries some time.  Although I thought parts of the book were quite trite, the actual concept was cool, and it would be fun to see it played out on the screen, even though I’ve been […]