"Happy birthday, dear Billy!"

Three hours and one major sunburn later, I've emerged from the Shakespeare on the Quad birthday shindig. Every year on Shakespeare's birthday (aka, today) the Truman theatre department sponsers a time for people to get together and perform scenes or read sonnets out on the quad. My one-act director, Jill, was in charge of this and required everyone in the cast to "at least go, if for the love of everything you won't perform," so I went, fully intending to sit around and do a little Spanish in the breaks.

That didn't quite happen.

My favorite moments of the afternoon, leading up to the one you probably can already see coming (does Ashley Reed read this blog?):

* singing Happy Birthday and having it echo all over the quad

* the person who merely got on the stage and said, and I quote: "Forsooth! Forsooth? For-SOOTH!!" until someone in the crowd shouted at her to "run around all confused-like," which she promptly did. Apparently, when you study Shakespeare scenes in Acting II, you're supposed to say "forsooth" anytime you forget your line....leading to a big joke to use "forsooth" as much as possible in regard to Billy.

* "His greatest tragedy and perhaps most famous history....The Comedy of Errors!"

* the numerous fight scenes, one of which involved someone beating the other person with the gigantic anthology of Shakespeare's plays

* Titus Andronicus as a cooking show, complete with [apparently, mint-flavored] fake blood all over everything. (If they would've remembered all the lines, the Othello rap totally would've replaced this.)

* I ended up doing a scene as Lady Macbeth, ironically with the very person who told my acting class the whole Macbeth thing during personal imitations. It was the scene when Lady M convinces M to kill Duncan--John's choice--and I must say that it went better than expect considering not only did I throw up right before going onstage [if the grapes taste funky at lunch, stop eating them], but I also didn't actually read the scene until I was up there performing for the quad. Yes, I had much too much fun.