"Inside this Wooden O"

I’ve finished my writing for today - I think. I may have to do the next part. We’ll see. Yesterday I only managed 2,567 words. Today I’ve finished an important link and come up with 4,667. This is extremely weird. My count from Thursday was 4,669. Two words different. Don’t you find that strange?
The total now stands at 11,903.

I've just uploaded the whole thing to NaNoWriMo. They say their word counter is "generous". I should say so! They have given me 12,621!! As we used to say in my rodeo days: YEA-HA!!

There are going to be too many words. That is something that I already know. I’m going to have to cut it to pieces. Or make three books out of it. Who knows.

I have had several people ask me about the half-timbered Tudor building at the end of my first writing entry. Some asked if it was my home. I wish. If I ever make a million dollars I will build a house that looks just like this. I’ll put it on a hill above Ashland and it will be the biggest, giant cliché that Southern Oregon has ever seen!

This building is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Elizabethan Theater. It is patterned on the original Globe Theater in London.. My story centers around Shakespeare and this Shakespeare Festival. This particular view of the back of the Lizzy and the Swan Pond is going to be very important. Here is a piece I wrote a few years ago that speaks of the magic of this building.

“Inside this Wooden O.” The smaller one in Cedar City, Utah, where I was born. The larger one in Ashland, Oregon, which is now my home. Both are modeled on the original in London. So much magic has transpired here that it is sunk deeply into the wood; yet if you touch that wood, during the day, you will not feel the magic shuddering under your fingers. It sleeps until it is time for it to come alive. When the trumpets sound, when the flag is hoisted, it will wake and begin to glow. Then it will simmer and sing for a few precious hours while the stars wheel over head, in a night breeze that smells there of sage, here of pine."

I am hoping to be able to catch some of that magic in this story. My children began going to the Utah Shakespearian Festival when they were tiny. In Utah you have to be five to attend to the Adams Theater, the Elizabethan Theater there. Both my daughters went at three, standing on their toes underneath their long dresses, they broke the law for the first time. By the time they were five they were seeing tragedies as well as comedies. We read them together before going to Utah. They acted them out. By the time they were ten they were so conversant in Shakespeare that they scared people. We went to the Utah Shakespeare Festival for ten years. And then we moved to Ashland, where we live with this magic every day.

This painting at the beginning of this entry is titled, “Closing the Lizzy.” At the end of the season, after the last play is performed in the Elizabethan Theater, there is a closing ceremony. After the darkness that signifies “Curtain”, everyone who works for the Festival comes into the theater, each carrying a candle. There is usually a single musician, a violin, a harp, a lute; who begins playing Greensleeves. Soon everyone in the theater has begun to hum along. When all the candles are inside the theater, one of the actors comes out on the stage and speaks these lines, that Shakespeare gave to Prospero at the end of The Tempest:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(The Tempest IV, i)

When the last words are spoken, the audience hums along with Greensleeves for one more chorus, in what seems a single breath, all the candles are blown out - and the theater is closed for the year. It is simple. Elegant. Utterly magic. “Inside this Wooden O.”