Bruce Ogilvie wasn’t anything like Willy Loman. He was successful and popular, a football star in high school who grew up to be a star on the local golf courses. He only sold a product if he believed in it. And he didn’t outlive his usefulness as a salesman, a father, husband, provider, or human being.

I worked for Bruce during some pretty formative years in my life. Straight out of college, I didn’t know what I was going to be when I grew up.  So I worked for Bruce six years until I figured it out. He just laughed at me, this young idealistic hippy chick, watching me figure stuff out, while he listened to Rush Limbaugh, knowing I’d eventually become the capitalist he expected me to be. He watched me go through phases where I wanted to be an air traffic controller, a librarian, a teacher, a novelist, until I figured out I just wanted people to pay me to write, anything.

Bruce was a mighty good man. He loved his wife and his kids so much. I loved hearing him talk about Patty as an East Texas princess, and how he met her at the Byron Nelson.  His kids were so beautiful.  They would come to the office, and we’d make art and play with the copy machine. Now the oldest is going off to college, and she never expected she’d be starting this new life without her daddy to fall back on. And Patty and Bruce should be comforting each other as their nest starts to empty, but that won’t work out as expected either.

Ten years have passed since I worked for Bruce. He just turned 60 a few weeks after I turned 40. I keep thinking I’m going to call and have lunch with him, but it’s too late now. God bless you, Bruce, in your heaven. You will be missed.

I have friends who belong to the gay religious right, family who epitomize the religious left, parents who sit around singing 60s peacenik songs while spouting unadulterated Republican rhetoric, a sister who cried and didn’t talk to our parents for weeks after W got reelected. Me, I’m a corporate ho with hippy tendencies, hanging with The Pretenders in their private cul de sac. 

I love working in cube city in corporate Dallas. I’m a kick-ass project manager, climbing the ladder, trying not to kiss anybody’s ass while keeping my CLTs in check. And despite its abuse in corporate USA, I’ve loved the word “synergy,” ever since the first time I heard it from a high school substitute teacher who was a recovering drug and alcohol addict trying to keep us kids off drugs, but that’s another story altogether.

But even though I love folk music and I don’t wear make-up, even though I fancy myself a writer, and even though I’ve been collecting drums and percussion instruments for over ten years, I had never been to a drum circle before yesterday. Yes, that’s right, I was a drum circle virgin until August 2, 2008.

I know going to one drum circle doesn’t make me an expert or anything, but I thought it was a pretty good circle, high energy, very well attended, belly dancing, children, chanting, the works.  That’s right folks, the hippies are alive and well in Texas suburbia.

And you thought we all lived on ranches and wore cowboy boots.

Shakespeare’s formula goes something like this — tragedies end in death, and comedies end with a wedding. So a tragic comic is a bit of an oxymoron.  Back in the days when my man and I were “just friends,” he was a big fan of the band Extreme. Gary Cherone was always a goober, but Nuno Bettencourt was (and still is) a guitar god. And despite people wanting to classify Extreme as a worthless hair band, he’ll argue that Pornograffiti was one of the greatest guitar albums of all time.

Now, if we were comparing our relationship back in those days, he would’ve been Gary, and I’d have been Nuno, even though he played guitar and I sang.  My man always was a jokester, a cute little clown who turned cartwheels and told tall tales.  And I was long and slender, catlike in my sensuality, with music pouring out of me.

We were falling in love, though neither one of us wanted to jinx things by actually talking about it.  But when he discovered the song “Tragic Comic,”  it just seemed to sum us up perfectly. Breaking the ice of the friendship zone, he gave me the lyrics and played the song for me.

I’m a hapless romantic
St-t-tuttering p-poet
Just call me a tragic comic
Cause I’m, in, in love with you

Of course, it all ended as a proper comedy should. He turned out to be not so tragic after all.

I’ll admit it. Strange Brew is my favorite Hamlet tribute film of all time. It’s got a heroine (Pamela) instead of a hero, and instead of a prince, she’s an heiress to her father’s corporate empire. It has the ghost of her father communicating from the dead through an 80s video game machine, and a duplicitous uncle who pretends to be a father figure. But most of all, it’s got beer. And lots of it.

The clue that gave it away for me was the name of the brewery. They called it Elsinore after Hamlet’s own home in Denmark. And there were two Elsinores - the brewery and appropriately, the insane asylum. Who’s to know if Pamela’s visions are part of some insanity, or if she’s just plain drunk?

Hamlet aside, here are some of my favorite movie quotes from Strange Brew:

• Who horked our clothes, eh?
• I gotta take a leak so bad I can taste it.
• You’re so nice. If I didn’t have puke breath, I’d kiss you.

I wouldn’t ever pretend to be a Shakespearean scholar or a philosopher. I’m a dabbler, a generalist. I think lots of things are interesting, so I follow threads on whims. I don’t need to know everything there is to know about a subject. I don’t want to be an expert on anything. I love to read, but I wouldn’t really belong in Academe.

I’ve read Plato’s Republic, and I wouldn’t fit into his ideal world where people do one thing only, so they can do that one thing exquisitely. It just doesn’t work for me. I think that things I learn in one subject can help me to understand another, and everything crosses over, filling in pieces of a larger puzzle.

I thought Irving Stone’s characterization of Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy was pretty close to the Platonic ideal of a man so focused on his craft that his creations were of the highest quality imaginable. He didn’t even want to have a mate, simply because it would distract him from his work.  But even Michelangelo dabbled in painting and architecture, art forms that only helped him to perfect his talent as a sculptor.

Sure I like to be good at what I do. I just think life would be too boring if I only did one thing all the time. And speaking of the Republic, I keep passing by this place that looks like it could be a restaurant but more likely some sort of exclusive club where you have to be invited by someone in the inner circle. The sign says “Republic” and nothing more. 

I had to know, so I searched the Web for “Republic Las Colinas” because it wasn’t even listed on Guidelive, which is supposed to know everything about restaurants in the DFW area, except there’s a bunch of restaurants still listed in Irving and Las Colinas even though they’ve been out of business for two years or more, but I digress.

So their Web site pretty much confirmed it. The way the signs made it look like an exclusive club was intentional, good marketing I guess. The description on the Web site starts off, “Located in trendy Las Colinas…” Ew.

I’ll go anyway.  I don’t care if they stare when they see my disheveled hair. I’m following the thread, following my nose, searching for new flavors and a new adventure.

You know, when Disney does Shakespeare (or anything, for that matter), there’s always a happy ending, regardless of whether it’s based on a comedy or a tragedy.  Hamlet is no exception.  I watched Be Kind Rewind this week, and they made subtle reference to The Lion King’s roots, calling it, “Shakespearean.” I just smiled because I knew how true the statement was.

Evil, power hungry uncles and fratricide aside, the story even includes a part for Hamlet’s college buddies.  Young Hamlet lion cub (Simba) goes off to the school of life and meets Rosencat (Timon the Meerkat) and Guildenboar (Pumbaa the Warthog), who teach him about friendship and survival. It’s beautiful, really.

I went to see The Lion King performed last year, and I was enraptured by the puppetry, all those moving parts coming together to make magic. And when I recognized the story, it just added to the appeal.  I don’t ever think of it as stealing when I see a classic Shakespearean story being retold. I think of it as tribute, and the honoring of a tradition of storytelling that goes back way beyond Shakespeare.

It’s Father’s Day, and we could talk about Katherina’s good father Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, but we won’t.   Instead, we’ll talk about the evil step-father who kills his own brother to attain the throne - Hamlet’s uncle/father Claudius. It’s not that I don’t love my father, because I do. It’s just that I know plenty of people who don’t.  And even bad dads are supposed to be honored this day.

Hamlet is probably the most filmed Shakespeare play of all time. Check out the search list on IMDB to see what I’m talking about. Since young Prince Hamlet pretty much steals the show, you hardly think about Claudius, except in the havoc he wreaks. But he’s one bad dude. Not only does he kill his brother to get his throne and his wife, he also kills poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who weren’t hurting anybody.

Anyway, I have a few things to say about young Hamlet, and we’ll talk about that soon.  But while I’m on the topic of wicked step-fathers, I can’t help but think of the TV show Lost.  Terry O’Quinn, who plays John Locke on Lost, has been in a hundred different things, but every time I see him, I can’t get The Stepfather out of my head. Jerry Blake was way more blood thirsty than Claudius. Of course, it’s hard to compare a slasher movie with a classic tragedy. But there, we just did.

Happy Father’s Day.

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 which wasn’t always called the Bloody Tower. It was originally called the Garden Tower, a name associated with life and greenery instead of death and blood.  The bloody deed that started the tower’s new name was the murder of two young heirs to the throne.

The most popular theory of the murder was that it was commissioned by Richard of Gloucester, King Richard III.  This is the theory portrayed in Shakespeare’s play about this foul, deformed villain.  I really liked Ian McKellen’s 1995 movie version of Richard III with its surreal 1930s setting, but I gained an all new appreciation with Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard. Of course that was the whole purpose of the documentary, to make Shakespeare more accessible to American audiences, to give them a real appreciation for the stories, the language and the art of acting.

Pacino obviously loves his craft, and he has a passion for Shakespeare. We get to learn the background history of what was going on in politics when the play starts. He breaks down every scene to make us love it the way he does.  He even gives us a better understanding of the poetic language used, the rhythm of the iambic pentameter.  Love the language, ride the wave.

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 London. 

The movie versions of Shakespeare’s plays are obvious, mostly because they have the same name as the play — movies like Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing and Othello.  But some of my favorites are modern day stories with modern day scripts that take their stories from Shakespeare, with such classic musical examples as Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story.  Some may call it stealing, but I like to think of it as paying tribute.  Then there are movies like L.A. Story and 10 Things I Hate About You that make it point to play up the tribute.

We’re about to explore some of my favorite references to Shakespeare in the movies. What are your favorites?

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 more work, and by gosh it’s springtime, so I have to be outside, buzzing with friends and family, which means cleaning my house so when people can come over I create the illusion of keeping a clean house. Somebody had the great idea of having a crawfish boil, at my house, and as fate would have it, we found someone who’d come by and bring his pot and a bag of bugs and do it all for us, and with my schedule these days, you know I was jumping all over that. Whew!

What I do have time for is half-hour sitcoms on DVD.  They not only keep me laughing, but they keep me on location in London.  I’m not sure that US network television would ever be ready for Coupling, but it’s exactly what I need.