Most of the time, I try to be happy. I think everybody does. Either we find that’s a good way to deal with the world or we think that’s what the world wants from us. But sometimes, happiness isn’t an appropriate choice for what’s going on in our lives. Now a motivational speaker might say the thing to do when you’re sad is paste a smile on your face anyway. Fake being happy until you cheer up again. While there’s something in the “fake it till you make it” idea, I don’t believe in divorcing yourself from your real feelings. Sometimes, the only way to deal with grief is to feel the grief. When that happens, I reach for Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons. It’s a guidebook for the broken heart. At first glance Caro Venable wouldn’t seem like the right kind of guide to learn about grief. For one thing, she’s got a life most of us would kill for. She’s got some talent, a loving spouse, a son that’s doing well and two houses, one on her very own island. Sounds perfect right? But Caro’s still tortured by the memory of her daughter’s death five years ago and there’s…
There’s a wonderful line in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that says, “Everything will be all right in the end…if it’s not all right, then it’s not yet the end.” There’s more than mindless optimism in that phrase, that’s an expression of faith. It encourages you to keep going, and not be dismayed, even in the face of disaster. It’s a faith Jane Austen endorsed when she wrote Persuasion, her last story with a sensible heroine. Austen wrote about two types of women, those who think before they speak and the rest of us. The impulsive, strong-willed ones like Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse and Catharine Moreland are easy to identify with because they say what they feel and they cause most of their own problems. The responsible heroines are a little bit deeper. Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price and Anne Elliot are always aware that odds and circumstances are against them so they’re careful about what they say and when they speak. Most of the time, this is a good trait but in Persuasion, Austen shows the downside of being too careful. In case you don’t know it, Persuasion’s set-up is simple. At nineteen, Anne Elliot broke her engagement to Lt….
For most people believe plays are just another form of entertainment. An audience goes to a theatre and pays for the actors to entertain them. If the performance is acceptable, the company is praised with applause. That’s a fairly simple transaction but it’s also a limiting one. Theatre, great theatre does more than make people happy, it makes them think. This would upset the audiences who only want to be entertained, if many of them hadn’t learned to watch a play while ignoring what it has to say. Then, a play like Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” appears with meaning that can’t be ignored and the world turns upside down. The world of Europe in the 1800’s could safely be described as belonging to men. Males held most of the money and power and almost all of the “good” jobs. (Even a monarch like Queen Victoria had substantially limited power.) Women were expected to be decorative, passive guests in mens’ lives. Enter Nora Helmer, a little woman with a big, serious secret. Years ago when her father was ill and her husband close to death, she took matters in her own hands. She illegally borrowed the money needed to heal her…
Once upon a time a woman named Mary decided to write a play. A war was going on at that time and many people were sad so Mary wanted to make them laugh. Now Mary knew something about writing and she’d written plays before but she had a hard time writing this comedy. Not only is it hard to make people laugh when they’re sad, it’s hard to find time to write when you’re raising three boys and freelancing to bring in a paycheck. (Mary’s other plays had not been successful.) So in the evenings, when her boys were asleep, Mary scribbled away at her story. It was an unusual tale about a gentle man named Elwood who turns his conventional town upside down when he insists his best friend is a Celtic spirit, or pooka. A pooka that looks like a rabbit. A six-foot-three, tie-wearing rabbit. Mary spent the next two years perfecting her play. She read it aloud to anyone who would listen and rewrote it at least 50 times. (Plays are as tricky as chemistry experiments; one mistake can make the whole thing explode.) Eventually, a producer read her play, and liked it enough to have it performed…
The idea of travel always seems attractive, doesn’t it? To leave behind our humdrum, everyday world and enjoy life as a tourist. To picture ourselves in an exotic environment and perhaps, be transformed by our time in that place? Fortunes have been made over the years in books on this subject: A Year in Provence; Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun are just three examples. But the fact is, wherever we go, we take ourselves with us and most travelers come back home. Lucy Honeychurch would be the first person to tell you that. Lucy is one of those Edwardian, English girls who will tell you real travel isn’t the flight of fancy you’d imagine. She’s supposedly on this trip to Italy, to pick up some of the culture and sophistication of the continent but she hardly allowed within speaking distance of anyone truly Italian. Her irritating, old-maid cousin is always at her side, the hotel’s land-lady has a cockney accent and all the other guests there are English as well. To make things worse, the reservations got mixed up and she didn’t get A Room With a View. That’s the opening situation in E. M Forster’s story…