Great Shakespeare and Awful Chinese Food

Every time Plot and Duck venture across the BOB (Big Orange Bridge) into Marin County, Plotnik remembers there is a completely different world up there. The people speak English, but more thoughtfully, perhaps because they are chewing on really awful Chinese food. You drive through the Waldo Tunnel and once you're on the other side the fog is gone, the sun is shining and there are lots and lots of Volvos, older, dusty Volvos with empty containers of reprehensible Chinese food littering the back seat.

Last night Plot and Duck went to the outdoor amphitheater at Dominican University and saw "Julius Caesar," written by this English guy in 1599. There can't be a nicer place in the world to see Shakespeare: second or third row, warm, gorgeous night under the stars, terrific actors and excellent staging.

First they stopped at Ping's Chinese Food For Dummies Restaurant in San Rafael -- you know, the kind of gringo crud where everything is covered with sweet, thick sauce flavored with Toxic Avenger Powder. The waitress asked Plotnik "How were scallop?" and he just stared at her. "I bring you check," she said.

"Julius Caesar," on the other hand, was wonderful. This play is like your favorite "Greatest Hits" soundtrack. Every few minutes you hear another famous quotation you hadn't realized first appeared here and then has been repeated by half a zillion people for the next 400 plus years.

Such as:

Marc Anthony, to the Roman people as he stands over Caesar's dead body:

"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him
The evil that men do lives after them
The good is oft interred with their bones
So let it be with Caesar."

Caesar says of Cassius:

"Let me have man about me that are fat
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o'nights.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous."

Marc Anthony eulogizes the dead Brutus:

"This was the noblest Roman of them all
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: "This was a man!"

The senator Casca says:

"This is all Greek to me."

The soothsayer tries to warn Caesar:

"Beware the Ides of March"

Act One is wonderful, as Shakespeare generally is, though Act Two becomes bogged down in offstage battles, all of which lead to each conspirator committing suicide, one by one, which may have been the theatrical convention in Shakespeare's time, but today is pretty damned boring. Act One is worth its weight in gold; Act Two just makes you appreciate Act One.

Plotnik may have gotten old enough to appreciate Shakespeare. He never has liked it much before, but he has generally seen it from the back of the Fifth Balcony, or in Middle School productions.

When he hits seventy he will make another attempt at opera.

Plottie forgot one other great speech. Brutus is telling his fellow generals, after Caesar's death, that they shouldn't wait any longer to confront Marc Anthony's legions, because:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures."

Here are two more ways to say the same thing:

"Strike while the iron is hot."
"Shit or get off the pot."

As always, Shakespeare says it better.