For you of the Milton tribe with access to my Facebook photos, you'll be happy, or disturbed, to see that the Harold Gorringe shirt returned with a vengeance last Saturday night. It was called for by the occasion, which was our apartments' Midsummer Night's Dream costume party. Hannah and Sarah gelled and glittered everyone who walked through the door, and then we gave them a nametag designating their Midsummer character: "Hello, my name is COBWEB." Knowing we'd run out of names, we expanded the pool, so there was also a Lady Macbeth, Portia, Shylock, Kate, and Dogberry running loose somewhere. I chose Nick Bottom, and unbelievably a few people showed up at the party carrying a stuffed lion or with their face painted like a brick wall, so instantly the party had a full troupe of Rude Mechanicals. Meanwhile we played a muted Much Ado about Nothing on the TV, just as ambiance, and then guests started crowding around and paraphrasing Beatrice's lines to the silent moving mouth of Emma Thompson. Eventually the party slipped into anachronism when someone finally played Ace of Base, and Shylock kept spilling screwdrivers and singing Wu-Tang Clan (you know who you are), but the party kept the spirit of Midsummer, I think, and by 2:30 or so we even had two separate couples making out in our dining room, which seemed like the appropriate ending for the party considering the original text.

To prevent this from being a big fat Shakespeare post, I'll mention very briefly that I also spent 4 hours in the library with The Winter's Tale yesterday until, suddenly, all the disparate parts and passages I'd been tracking for my Junior Paper clicked perfectly into place together. To celebrate, I rented Love's Labours Lost, which is worth any price to watch over and over Kenneth Branaugh as Berowne stuff a piece of paper in his mouth and then give a cartoonish "Who, me?" look. Finally, this led me to discover that Branaugh is putting out As You Like It later this year, and then I saw that Kevin Kline will play Jaques, who I've recently become really fascinated with after accidentally watching Dave three times over spring break. After reading that, I just collapsed and slept for 8 hours, woke up, and now I'm drinking coffee out of a mug that has flecks of stray Midsummer glitter on the inside.

OK, it's a big fat Shakespeare post.