I drove home from Providence feeling shaken up and wide-awake after seeing Trinity Repertory’s production of Othello. Three days later, I saw BlackPantherand left the multiplex feeling like I’d been to church.

And ever since, the Shakespearean tragedy and the superhero blockbuster have been circling each other inside my head.

Black Panther’s release was a watershed event for African-Americans long before it opened and made a zillion dollars. The breathless anticipation was perfectly captured by a viral video of a young man hugging the movie poster and shouting, “This is what white people feel all the time?” 

Can she feel the same kind of pride in Black Panther that she feels about sharing a genome with Olympic athletes?

Black Panther won the gold, in every sense of the word. (Why was anyone surprised by the boffo box office?)

Watching the Olympic athletes in Korea contend with punishing winds and dangerous slopes, I marveled. Those hardy souls who rejoice in snow and ice are a race apart. Most of us are waiting out the winter, wishing it were over, or fleeing if we can. In January, the walls start to close in and by February all the way through March, cabin fever can lead to the heebie-jeebies. So I escaped, not to a palmy island, but to the Cape Ann Museum where I unexpectedly found myself enchanted by an urban landscape called “Winter View from Gloucester Mill,” oil on Masonite, by Anna Comolli. Not sure why, I kept going back for another look at monochromatic, snow-covered warehouses and icy parking lots.

Shakespeare isn’t easy: the vocabulary, the subplots — even the names can be stumbling blocks.

Keeping the characters straight in Julius Caesar was a challenge: Cinna the conspirator and Cinna the Poet? Julius Caesar and Octavius Caesar? Marcus Brutus and Decius Brutus?

But Julius Caesar was a piece of cake compared to Richard III’s roster of intertwined and intermarried Yorks and Lancasters battling for the throne. My eyes crossed trying to read the genealogical tree tacked up on the wall of the Actors Shakespeare Project rehearsal space. I spent several hours in that room, watching the actors practice scenes — usually out of order, which made R3 into a jigsaw puzzle that only exacerbated my confusion about who was who.

I wrote this piece a few weeks ago…. I guess I’ll just keep posting it when this happens again and again and again. In the aftermath of 17 dead in Florida, the reports seem to dwell on the fact that this is the MOST deaths in a high school shooting. Higher than Columbine! Like it’s a contest to see how many corpses it will take before we the people force the issue.

On January 25, I wrote …..

This essay was first published on WBUR’s Cognoscenti

Shakespeare is always timely.

Last fall, I sat in on rehearsals for Actor’s Shakespeare Project’s all-female production of “Julius Caesar,” which shone an Elizabethan light on the #MeToo movement. Nothing like a bunch of women wearing daggers to deliver the message that we will be heard.

In this winter of our discontent, I watched a different ASP cast and crew prepare for “Richard III,” another play about the rise and fall of an ambitious political leader.

I wrote this piece in my blog a few weeks ago…. I think I’ll just keep reposting it again and again. Today is the aftermath of 17 dead in Florida. The reports seem fascinated with the fact that this is the MOST deaths in a high school shooting. Higher than Columbine. Like it’s a contest to see how many corpse it will take before we the people force the issue.On Wednesday January 24, 2018, there was a front-page story in the New York Times under the headline, “A School Attack Every Other Day.” It described three shootings that had happened within the past week: in a small town in Kentucky, in a Dallas suburb, in New Orleans.

This essay appeared previously on WBUR’s Cognoscenti with several great links.

A few years back, the marquee late-night TV talk shows played a game of musical chairs, which ended with all five hosting seats taken, by a man, by men. HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” the latest entry in this elite club, also put a male member behind the desk.

There was grumbling and widespread shoulder shrugging; the boys have hogged the microphone since the beginning of time.

Is it one word or two? If two, does it need a hyphen?

If you want to avoid using an obscenity but need to communicate the word in question, is it better to use ellipses? If so, is “sh…hole” better than “s-hole?”

Should quotation marks be mandatory to indicate The Source in Chief? As the story broke, broadcast reporters and news anchors faced a crossroads: they couldn’t use air quotes so some of them went full -on “sh…le.” Anderson Cooper couldn’t bring himself to cross that bridge, so he said, “s-hole” even as all eight letters crawled across the bottom of the screen beneath his pallid, pained face. Maybe he could have used a phonetic version of the word, with the fricative “th,” — shi-th-ole –as suggested by grammarian Adam Felber on NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me:

Most of us grew up with Hurricanes named Mariah, Suzanne, Henrietta, and Inez. I don’t recall much of a kerfuffle in 1978 and 1979 when the weather service decided it was only fair to add men’s names to the mix, which meant that Hurricane Melissa has been followed by Hurricane Norman ever since. (Had the Internet been up and trolling, there surely would have been angry and obscene objections about this injustice to mankind and manhood.)