Wednesday, Thursday, and This Crazy Weekend

Wednesday: four of us went to yoga in the evening with our Associate Dean of Students, who walked us over the bridge and showed us into a little church community center, where the yogi was very encouraging and helpful. We all felt so energized and relaxed coming back, and then when we got into the house, Jess, one of my housemates, had made dinner for the entire house singlehandedly. Well, this just felt like the icing on the awesome, awesome cake. It was officially the best day ever.

But then it was Thursday, Valentine's Day, when all of us, lacking in any kind of Valentine, or at least separated from one by several thousand miles of ocean, decided to have a really great Valentine's Day as a house. Meghan and I went out and bought brownie mix and the stuff to make chocolate-covered strawberries, and we rented Shakespeare in Love, and Liz and Yeji bought ice cream, champagne, and sparkling cider for those of us who don't drink. After dinner we laid the whole coffee table out with desserts and watched the movie (so! romantic!) with lots and lots of chocolate. It was a truly lovely evening. :) Shakespeare in Love was an excellent primer for the weekend, as well, because it went down like this:

I arrived in London at 5:30 pm and met Anna, fully cognizant of my arrival this time, at a restaurant. Two girls from my house, Meghan and Cali, were already in London for a class trip, taking a Jack the Ripper tour of the city for their Ghosts & Goths class, so we met them and two of Cali's friends there as well. After some yummy sandwiches, Cali split off with her friends and Meghan and I crashed with Anna. At four in the morning, Meghan and I woke up, took a cab to pick up Cali, and then the three of us went to stand in line at the Donmar Warehouse for tickets to Othello.

So listen, it's really cold in England in the first place, and especially in winter, and especially at four in the morning. At least there wasn't any wind, or rain, or anything. But man, it was cold. There were already about ten people in line in front of us (seriously, when did they get up?!), but we were pretty near the front, we could tell, because over the hours more and more people trickled down the street and stood behind us, bundled up in parkas and such. It was quite an experience. At first, we ate some of the food we brought, and laughed and talked about how great it would be if we got tickets, and Meghan did a couple dramatic readings from my pocket copy of Othello, but after a while we were too cold to do much but sit, and curl inwards for warmth, and/or occasionally run around in crazy circles and jump up and down for warmth. Cali ended up making a fortress with our three umbrellas, which I of course took pictures of.

The sun came up eventually, which felt like a wonderful blessing from heaven even though it didn't actually make us much warmer. When McDonald's opened, Cali ventured out to get us hot chocolate, and when the Caffe Nero at the end of the block opened, we took turns buying hot soup (which is so wonderful! how did I ever take soup for granted?). The doors to the Warehouse finally, finally opened at 10 am, and we were some of the last to squeeze inside before they ran out of space. The poor people behind us had to continue to wait outdoors, but man, I am glad we were close to the front. At 10:30 they started selling tickets, and no joke, we got the last six day-seats available for the matinee. (Each of us was standing in for a friend - I was buying Anna's ticket, Cali was buying her friends, and Meghan was helping me out and buying Anna's mom's ticket. You could only buy 2 per person.) It was a total miracle, and we felt really bad about taking all the remaining seats so we got out of there really quick.

Flush with success, totally exhausted, still basically freezing, we went to a cafe and had some sandwiches before navigating the Tube back to Cali's friend's place. I took an hour nap that literally felt like closing my eyes and then opening them again, with no space in between, and then it was time to head back for the show. We met Anna and her mom at Caffe Nero and we all went in to get our tickets - Anna and her mom very kindly paid me back for mine, insisting that I had done all that sitting and not-sleeping.

The show itself - wow. I had never seen Othello done before, and it was a crazy dream of mine to see this production like 6 months ago, when I thought there was no way I'd be in England, or in London, or in time to see it. And then all of those things happened! I can't believe it worked out. I'm still amazed. The theatre was absolutely tiny, so you could see perfectly from every seat. Our 15 pound tickets seriously felt much more expensive - Ewan McGregor was seven feet away! He looked at me once. (Awesome!!) We were on one of the sides, so we couldn't see the actors' faces sometimes when they turned away, but Anna and her mom were on the other side, so at intermission we traded stories about the expressions they made during key moments.

I love this play so, so much, and it was so amazing to see it for real, and Othello was so good - I mean, Chiwetel Ejiofor is just really spectacular. He had this calm, powerful, self-consciously eloquent voice, and this tinge of an African accent, and you just believed his pain and torment when he thought his wife had been unfaithful to him. He could get loud and violently outraged, the way Othello has to, but he also had these moments of near stillness that were exactly as powerful, exactly as heartbreaking. It was amazing. Ewan McGregor was also pretty good. I think the best part was really just seeing a Iago, down there on the stage (we were up in the balcony), living, breathing, plotting. I mean -- seriously, Iago. I love him. The Cassio was also really good, really sweet and noble-hearted and just pretty much a good guy. It's really easy to interpret Cassio as kind of a lout - a good soldier, but a drunkard, and unpleasantly a ladies' man, making eyes at Desdemona and Iago's wife and everyone else. This Cassio was none of those things. He was modest and had an easy laugh, and was truly devoted to his commander. Good choices!

The production was also really wonderful. Venice, in the beginning, included a gutter full of water at the back wall and dark, wet stone floors. Cyprus was full of hazy sunlight (I have no idea how they did that, but it really looked like daylight and it was awesome) and there was this window, on one side of the stage near the back, that had a lovely carved wooden lattice over it, and they did this thing where they shone light through it and reflected the pattern onto the stage. It was the coolest. And when they brought out the marriage bed, huge gauzy curtains unfurled from the ceiling on either side to an accompanying musical flourish. It was dramatic and elegant and tense, and the music was in general really atmospheric and not annoying, and basically I loved everything!!!

And then we took a bus back to Bath, and slept half of Sunday away. It was an amazing experience. I still can't really believe we made it there, got tickets, saw the show - it was just really fantastic luck, I guess. I am happy, happy, happy.