OK, so a couple of nights back, I had the coolest Shakespeare geek experience…
Monday night, my wife Lisa, son Kyle and I went to Patton Oswalt‘s Levity Live stand-up show in Oxnard, and since we got there early, we were right up against the stage…
During the first half of the show, he asked me what I did, and made a little fun of how geeky my answer (“write a little code, do some blogging”) was. Then asked me what I blog about… and when I said, “Shakespeare,” the geek flag flew. He asked me what play I was blogging about now (Coriolanus … and he talked a little about the plot and the recent Ralph Fiennes movie), asked what was next (Cymbeline … didn’t know much about that–but who does?), and what my favorite was. I said Titus Andronicus…and he went off on a whole riff on what a freakshow the play is–recounting some of the weird violence in the play, and saying that it must have been some kind of patron request (“I want a rape, some chopped-off hands, and if you could mix in some cannibalism, that’d be nice…”)–and asked me if I’d seen the Hopkins film. At one point during all of this, he turned to the audience and said something to the effect of “You all can go, we’re just gonna talk Shakespeare here…”
That, my friends, is Shakespeare geek nirvana.
Patton Oswalt is just freaking awesome….