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Tag Archives: Hamlet

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #74: Hamlet (2015)

10 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Gillian Bevan, Hamlet, Katie West, Margaret Williams, Maxine Peake, Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester, Sarah Frankcom

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 2

74. Margaret Williams’s film of Sarah Frankcom’s stage version of Hamlet (2015)

Hamlet poster

The Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester’s gender-bending production film of its stage version Hamlet makes me dwell on this passage:

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of
me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my
mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to
the top of my compass: and there is much music,
excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot
you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me.

Maxine Peake plays our Danish prince. I found her to be a prodigious fairy queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but didn’t know what to make of much of her go as Hamlet. She performed with a surfeit of braying and squawking, which seems like an exaggerated sense of what men speak like (though if so, perhaps she is right). She also didn’t look her fellow actors in the eyes very much, as if she is escaping the male gaze, including her own as Hamlet. Her sense of re- or un-gendering might be a secret she is keeping, like Hamlet’s secret kept from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Peake seems furious, yet aloof, and distracted.

Hamlet 5

One great exception is when her Hamlet is taunting Polonia—the court advisor’s gender was also changed in this version, played by Gillian Bevan, who proves that women can be as pompous as a masculine courtly bureaucrat.

Hamlet 11.png

Before the action of Hamlet, the prince has been courting the advisor’s daughter. Polonia tries to draw out Hamlet’s secrets, and Peake, trying to throw her off the scent, makes Hamlet’s innuendos really adolescently grotesque. To another woman, Peake shows off her character’s misogyny.

Hamlet 9.png

But this was a performance in which one almost had to watch around Hamlet to appreciate the play. The music of the language seemed forever out of rhythm, and off key.

This is not a bad production, though. I am humble enough to consider that there is something to the performance that I am missing. Perhaps Hamlet has to be out of joint, if Denmark is so smooth on the surface and yet secretly so out of joint.

Hamlet 1

Katie West is this production’s Ophelia, and one of my touchstones for any version of Hamlet must be the quality of its Ophelia. West is impeccable. In being heartbroken by her incompatible loyalties, West seems to show every emotional wound.

Hamlet 2

One decision that has to be made in each production is whether or not she and the prince have been sexually intimate, or whether their sub rosa courtship has been more innocent. Most productions indicate that they probably have been intimate, since that would explain some of Hamlet’s self-loathing, as his own lust might incriminate him in sharing qualities with his uncle. West’s Ophelia seems innocent, even though she doesn’t seem like an especially young Ophelia.

Hamlet 6 (Ophelia)

Barbara Martin plays Gertrude, and this is perhaps the best performance in this Hamlet. She is thin, and old, yet conveys a ready intelligence and dignity that makes the queen a truly tragic figure.

Hamlet 8.png

Claire Benedict played the Chief Player, and makes the role seem like much more than a light diversionary detour from the tragedy.

Claire Hamlet

John Shrapnel is fine enough as Claudius.

This is a vaguely modern Hamlet, and Lee Curran’s light design uses dangling lightbulbs to tremendous effect, somewhere between surrealism and minimalism.

Hamlet 4

There is also a smart decision with the props: after Ophelia strips down to her underwear in her second mad scene, the stage will seem to multiply this shedding of raiment, so that loose clothing becomes the earth Ophelia will be buried in. This seems to be a pushing back against Ophelia’s drowning because her cumbersome gown becomes waterlogged, according to Gertrude’s narration. Later the loose clothes will be pushed to the edges of the stage to ring the duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Ophelia leaves her sad trace in the final act of the play in this way.

I expect that crossing the gender line should make the viewer realize how little difference there is between the genders, really, as Virginia Woolf believed, or else make us realize how much of our feelings about gender come down to the quite fallible social construction of reality. Margaret Williams’s film of Sarah Frankcom’s stage version, however, is much more subtle. Perhaps too subtle.


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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #26: Strange Brew [Hamlet] (1983)

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Tags

Dave Thomas, Elsinore Beer, Game of Thrones, Hamlet, Max Von Sydow, Rick Moranis, Strange Brew, The Force Awakens, The Seventh Seal

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

26. Strange Brew [Hamlet] (1983)

Ever since I noticed that Jon Finch, who played the title role in Polanski’s Macbeth, looked like Max Von Sydow, I’ve been suffering from some degree of Sydowmania.

The Seventh Seal

The Swedish actor who played chess with Death in The Seventh Seal has recently lent his gravitas to The Force Awakens and Game of Thrones. He has played Ming the Merciless, Jesus Christ, and one of the incarnations of Bond villain Ernest Stavro Blofeld. He is 87 years old, and a titanic talent.

What shocked me is that he has never actually been in a Shakespeare film, as far as I could remember. Is this possible?

strange brew

Oh, right. He starred in Strange Brew, the zany comedy starring the lowbrow hijinks of two dimwitted Canadian brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, whose lives are devoted to the consumption of beer, not that this consumption has any bearing on their general moronitude.

Strange-Brew 1

When Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas transferred these clownish characters from the small screen to the big screen, they decided that these two buffoons could best serve a larger, more epic story than a silly one of their own. At first, Strange Brew seems to be a metacinematic experience about Bob and Doug McKenzie’s failure to produce a Hollywood film. The plot takes a turn, however, when they make a visit to the Elsinore brewery to try and cadge free beer, and find themselves, like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, in a tragic story of a family broken by betrayal.

Strange Brew 9

Max Von Sydow plays a part that should be familiar to any fan of Hamlet: the mad scientist.

Strange Brew 1

So Elsinore is transferred to a brewery, the way so many modern productions of Shakespeare’s work reinterpret his settings. And the brewery just happens to adjoin a mental institution run by the brewmeister of Elsinore beer.

Strange Brew 2

You know he has to be evil, because, you know, the turtleneck sweater.

Strange Brew 8

Because scientists often practice in separate disciplines of science, such as beer-making and psychiatry, no one was curious when aggression and mind-control experiments were performed involving chemically-treated beer and hockey players.

Strange Brew 6

Okay, so maybe the thread leading our way back to Hamlet happens to be rather slender, but then why have the scene in which Claude cajoles his daughter-in-law Pam (presumably short for Pamlet) for being mean to her mother, Gertrude, and holding on too hard to her grief over her father’s death?

Strange Brew 12CLAUDE

You know, Pamela, I don’t want you to think that your mother and I don’t understand how you feel about losing your father.

GERTRUDE

If it had been ME, you’d have been over it by now.

CLAUDE

It’s easy to wallow in self pity–the hard thing is to go on living….

PAM

Don’t you think it’s a little unusual to get married so soon after the funeral?

I find this moment touching, since Strange Brew follows a classic Marx Brothers plot scheme, which is to say that the clowns subvert the story of straight, serious characters around them, and the existence of these straight plots is merely to provide a comic armature and maybe some eye candy. (I am looking at you, Zeppo Marx.)

Marx BrothersThat the seriousness of the A plot becomes momentarily real and Shakespearean is moving. The implication later on that Pam will be perpetually drugged into an unresponsive state is also an odd touch of bona fide storytelling. (Basic catatonia is what Gertrude wanted for her son, isn’t it?)

Strange Brew 13Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis wrote and directed this movie, and while this appropriation of Hamlet is more of an in-joke than a real engagement with the text, nevertheless, the dynamics between the Elsinore family were thought out carefully. The film would have been more memorable if there was just a little bit more tension between telling a real story and relishing in a comedic romp.

In Shakespearean comedy, the rougher clowns tend to be clearly secondary characters who do threaten to steal the show, but ultimately never quite do.

One of the interesting implications is that in this retelling of Hamlet, Claude is a boob, whereas the truly dangerous person is Polonius. The part, though, is written as boilerplate 1970s TV show villain. Max Von Sydow, nevertheless, seems to have had a good attitude about the work.

Strange Brew 3

_______

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

 

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #12: Hamlet (1996)

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Tags

Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

#12: Hamlet (1996)

Hamlet poster

With his Hamlet (1996), the gulf between Kenneth Branagh’s acting and that of his Hollywood peers widens. In the early going of Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Denzel Washington doesn’t quite know what to do. In the early going of Hamlet, Jack Lemmon (like Washington, one of the finest actors Hollywood has made use of) is not quite in the same movie as the other actors. It’s like watching a painting created by artists from different schools (Realist, pointillist, surrealist, cubist), if they don’t quite realize they are from different schools.

Hamlet Jack Lemmon

It’s not that Jack Lemmon does a bad job, per se. Charlton Heston gives one of the last great performances of his career as Player #1, and it is an impressive set piece (likely written to honor one of the elder actors of Shakespeare’s troupe).

Hamlet Heston

Robin Williams plays the unctuous Osiric with a peculiar, self-satisfied glee that reminds me of Claire Danes’s performance in Romeo + Juliet, although Osiric is, in Robin William’s defence, a comic character.

Hamlet Robin Williams

Oh, right. Osiric is in this Hamlet because one of the novelties of this adaptation is that Branagh did the full Hamlet. Normally, Osiric is cut or minimized, since the tedious fact of setting up the duel between Laertes and Hamlet doesn’t seem dramatically necessary and comes in after the three hour mark.

I don’t know about you, dear readers, but this rogue doesn’t like to do even the things he likes to do for much over three hours at a time.

One can tell that Branagh suspected the problem of his own casting, since the principal parts are given to Shakespearean veterans, or at least British actors. He is Hamlet. Derek Jacobi is Claudius.

Hamlet Christie Jacobi

Julie Christie, a Hollywood veteran (Doctor Zhivago), is nevertheless an Englishwoman who studied acting in the Royal Central School for Speech and Drama, whose most famous alum happens to be Laurence Olivier.

Hamlet Polonius

Richard Briars (who was in Branagh’s Henry V and Much Ado) is Polonius.

Hamlet Brian Blessed

Brian Blessed, who can do no wrong, is the ghost of King Hamlet.

Hamlet Winslet

Kate Winslet (British, despite being in Titanic) is Ophelia. Michael Maloney is Laertes (British); he played Rosencrantz in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990). Nicholas Farrell is Horatio; he played Montano alongside Branagh’s Iago the year before in Othello, and was also Antonio in Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night.

When those who have been trained in Shakespeare come across their Hollywood counterparts, the contrast is immediate, no matter the good intentions and intelligence of the non-Shakespeareans. My suspension of disbelief unsuspends itself.

Plop.

Franco Zeffirelli, who happens to be Italian, can mix and match actors from various regions and make them cohere into an idiom that places them in the same imaginative world. Branagh, for some reason, cannot.

There seems to be an impulse to jam American actors into minor parts whenever possible. This is tragically on display during one of my favorite parts in Hamlet, the gravedigger scene. The lead gravedigger is played by Billy Crystal, who performs Shakespearean humor like his normal schtick.

Hamlet Billy Crystal 2

To be fair, if the acting were more Americanized in this film, then Crystal’s performance almost works (although it seems like a sadly watered down version of his wise, marginalized character in The Princess Bride). But you can actually see Crystal acting,  as if there is a delay between him deciding to make a face or a gesture and the realization of that action.

What makes the scene unbearable for me, though, is that Simon Russell Beale, who is considered to be the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, is cast as the second gravedigger.

Hamlet Simon Russell Beale

(If you haven’t heard of Beale, check him out as Falstaff in the BBC version of Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, as part of its Hollow Crown series. SRB is mighty.) Imagine asking Derek Jacobi to step down as Claudius because Steve Martin has agreed to play the part.

In the right production, Steve Martin would be the perfect Claudius. But in Branagh’s hands such a Hamlet would be Cheaper by the Dozen Part III.

The good news is that Hamlet is largely filled with Hamlet, unlike a Godzilla movie where that shrieking, ginormous reptile tends to be painfully fucking scarce. And Branagh may be a bad director, but he is a breathtakingly good actor.

Hamlet Branagh

So his Hamlet is more wildly uneven then outright bad.

The difference in acting valences might seem fascinating if this were a nightmare Hamlet of the dream realm, as if the oddities of acting idioms might denote the metaphysical torments of creatures from a David Lynch story making their way through the Black Lodge, or living inside a radiator. But the setting of Branagh’s Hamlet is a Denmark that seems like a very proper 18th century British castle in which there is no herring to be seen, but does happen to be coated with a pristine layer of snow.

And at one point King Hamlet is envisioned as sleeping in his frozen orchard at the moment of death–you know, the one where he was, as far as the royal court of Denmark knows, stung by an adder.

Hamlet Brian Blessed 2

This works symbolically, at the total expense of realism, unless we want to think that Denmark is a stupid, stupid place, or else is infested with warm blooded poisonous serpents. And the symbolism isn’t strong enough to make me not crave a story that makes sense on a literal level.

The dream theory cannot rescue Branagh’s demented casting, seen abundantly in Much Ado, and which will get unfathomably worse in Love’s Labour’s Lost, starring (cough) Alicia Silverstone.

Much more to my liking is Branagh’s other, less famous Hamlet, a brilliant, self-aware comedy that lasts about ninety minutes. But you’ll have to wait until next time for me to tell about that.

_______

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #4: Hamlet (1990)

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Franco Zeffirelli, Hamlet, Mel Gibson

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 3

#4: Hamlet (1990)

Franco Zeffirelli is a creature of opera, and was friends with Maria Callas. He directed the version of La Traviata I attended at the Met. Yet when he directs films of Shakespeare, he avoids the bombast and hyperbole of the operatic mode altogether.

Hamlet poster 1990

His Hamlet is earthy.

The problem with Hamlet, as Laurence Olivier simplistically put it in his own epigraph to a film version of the play, is that “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” The prince of Denmark is charged by his father’s ghost to enact vengeance in Act 1. Emerson Venable tried to reconcile the four act delay of this revenge in his short book from 1912, The Hamlet Problem and its Solution—which is a more complex way of saying that Hamlet’s mind was a powerful engine of philosophy and conscience. He delays killing Claudius because he worries his own motives are too impure—his “prophetic soul” wanted to kill his uncle before he knew the new king was guilty.

Zeffirelli gives his Hamlet a medieval setting, and focuses on Hamlet’s worries of mortality, that the mind will become food for worms, then dust. The opening shot is of the prince pouring earth over his father’s sepulcher.

Olivier’s Hamlet isn’t bad, but isn’t necessarily good, either. I hate to say it, but the 1948 film isn’t dramatic enough. Olivier is skinny, and Hamlet comes off as a feckless aesthete.

Zeffirelli’s solution was to cast Mel Gibson, of Bird on a Wire fame.

Hamlet Gibson

Before the sanctimoniousness of Braveheart, before the snuff film of The Passion of the Christ, before his anti-Semitic run-ins with the police and consequent disgrace, Mel Gibson was a talented actor, an athletic one capable of menace. (Except for the ending, Lethal Weapon was actually a good film, before all those sequels.) When Hamlet is told the news of Claudius’s betrayal, he watches the king from above the castle and strikes the roof with his sword, sparks flying. His mind is undoing him, but his body threatens to undo him as well.

Hamlet

Ian Holm is a lucid Polonius, comic and shrewd.

Polonius

Helena Bonham Carter is sublime as Ophelia.

Hamlet Ophelia

The part of Ophelia is really the litmus test of any production of Hamlet—she suffers directly what Hamlet thinks he is suffering. She cannot be the perfect daughter and lover, and is destroyed by what the royal court of Denmark carelessly asks of her. Her mad scene is unforgettable.

Glen Close shines as Gertrude, a difficult part to make likable.

HAMLET, Glenn Close, 1990

Alan Bates as Claudius, the venerable Paul Scofield as the ghost, and Nathaniel Parker as Laertes all do revelatory work as well.

Hamlet is a moody play. As my friend Numsiri once had to point out to me, it’s a bummer. But Mel Gibson squeezes out as much mook humor as can be discovered in the part.

Hamlet Gibson 2

The scenes from the play are not only truncated—the Polish plot is withdrawn entirely—but boldly re-arranged as well. This Hamlet moves with a good momentum, and drives its story home masterfully. It is also the Hamlet that turned me solidly into the Shakespeare junkie that I am. It is my Hamlet.

_______

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Shakespearing #23: Hamlet

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing, Theater

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Tags

David Foley, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Stephen Greenblatt, The Ghost

Shakespearing #23 by David Foley

Hamlet

23 Hamlet

For a certain kind of theatre/English lit nerd, Hamlet was our Catcher in the Rye. Hamlet not Holden was the disaffected hero who awakened our sense that we were surrounded by phonies in a messed-up world. I remember being puzzled to learn that scholars argued back and forth about Hamlet. Is he mad or just pretending? To me Hamlet was viscerally real. His world had been turned upside down. How else should he behave?

But Hamlet isn’t an adolescent. He’s thirty, a few years younger than Shakespeare when he wrote the play. This, too, is part of the play’s allure: the perhaps illusory sense that we’re getting close to Shakespeare himself, as close as Shakespeare got to self-portraiture. We can note the deep-dyed sense of personal anguish, Hamlet’s savvy as a playwright, and (less appealingly) his revulsion against female sexuality, a revulsion that bubbles up from time to time in Shakespeare’s plays.

John Austen Hamlet

John Austen, Illustration for Hamlet (1922).

Still, on re-reading the play, the problem jumps out at you, the problem that, according to C.S. Lewis, caused some critics to call the play “an artistic failure” (though he added, “[I]f this is failure, then failure is better than success.”). And the problem is this: plot becomes divorced from action so that character becomes opaque. The problem is not whether Hamlet is mad or only pretending. The problem is that he says he’s going to “put an antic disposition on,” but everything he does seems only the acting out of a soul in anguish. His maddest acts—killing Polonius, hiding the body, arranging for the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are way past role-playing. We can’t draw a line between the plot development—“I must play mad in order to revenge my father’s murder”—and the action.

And it’s not just Hamlet. By the end of the Closet Scene, we think we should be able to say whether Gertrude has genuinely repented or if she’s humoring her crazy son, but we can’t, and nothing afterwards enlightens us. We can’t see what effect the scene produced on her. She’s also the first person who can’t see the Ghost, throwing another mystery into the mix. The Ghost is driving the plot. Has he now become a figment?

Stephen Greenblatt calls this “strategic opacity,” “[taking] out a key explanatory element” and thus “occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that account[s] for the action.” Greenblatt claims that this was Shakespeare’s “crucial breakthrough” in Hamlet, a new approach to character. Hamlet affects us so powerfully because he can’t be explained. We experience him as real because, like us, he’s fragmented.

It’s not just the removal of motivation, but the unlinking of motivation and action that makes Hamlet so disorienting. Our inability to say what effect the Closet Scene has had on Gertrude begins to strike us as eerie. We’re approaching Joan Didion’s “world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended and, above all, devious motivations.”

The other day I picked up Shakespeare’s Montaigne, which has an introduction by Greenblatt. Greenblatt says that Montaigne “experienced existence as a succession of inconsistent and disjointed thoughts and impulses,” with the result that, in the essays, “he is constantly in motion.” Montaigne himself says, “I describe not the essence but the passage.”

This seems to be Shakespeare’s method in Hamlet, to get not the plot but the passage, the motion of a soul. The irony of the play may be that Hamlet, done in by plot in the end, nevertheless escapes plot’s prison. He eludes those who would, in his own words, “pluck out the heart of my mystery.”

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

In Boozo Veritas # 52: La Mer

28 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in In Boozo Veritas

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Hamlet, In Boozo Veritas, Sanibel Island, Teege Braune

In Boozo Veritas # 52 by Teege Braune

La Mer

Caught amidst the tension of a dual nature, I have suffered. In the struggle between an unfortunate tendency towards anxiety and hesitation and an urge towards impulsivity and spontaneity, anxiety has admittedly most often won out. Like Hamlet, this has been the catalyst for my greatest tragedies. I won’t tell you that my impulsivity hasn’t been the source of trouble from time to time, usually when the vice of alcohol was stirred into the mix, but I feel that my best moments have come about when I listened to that voice crying, “Leap into the darkness and trust the hands of fate to deliver thee unto the next shore!” Nearly every week, for example, I find myself procrastinating in my duty to compose In Boozo Veritas, yet invariably I always do my best writing before dawn several hours past my deadline. This morning I am speaking to you from a hotel room in Sanibel Island. This sleepy beach community is Jenn’s and my annual summer retreat. After several nights of this Edenic return, we are calibrated for the rest of the year. I’m not encouraging you to drive out here and find out for yourself. On the contrary, stay far away from this place.

sanibel lighthouse

 

Last year I came out here escaping the stresses that came with my job in sales. Only now in retrospect can I look back at that brief jaunt and recognize that the short break from bartending was something I need in order to prioritize my life. While I had the job, I simply felt miserable. Faced with the daunting prospect of having to leave our paradise and return to the drudgery of commerce, on our final morning in Sanibel Island I awoke with a delightfully impulsive thought running repeatedly through my brain. I will propose to my girlfriend today, I thought over and over again despite having no ring nor plan to do so as I was drifting off to sleep the night before. Now is not a good time, insisted that nagging, anxiety-ridden counter-voice that I sometimes listen to despite its ugly tone and implications. Wait until you have a ring. Wait until your circumstances in your life aren’t nearly so stressful. Wait until evil is banished from the earth and the lion lies down with the lamb. Silencio! I shouted, albeit only in my own imagination. Taking the fiend by the throat I banished him into the dark recesses of my brain. Though he will no doubt return once more, I said, again only in my own head, today I shall choose romance.

Pulling off the rest of it was no small task. Taking a cue from Jenn’s obsessive love of sea shells, I decided to buy an engagement ring made out of one as a stand-in until I could buy her a nicer ring. This meant bouncing from shell store to shell store looking for the perfect ring while Jenn sat in the car wondering what in the hell was wrong with me. I have been told that cemeteries are the worst places to propose, but as Jenn has never once done what she was told, I decided to follow in her spirit and drove her to one of our favorite places in the world, the tiny cemetery adjacent to The Chapel by the Sea, the final resting place for many of Captiva Island’s initial settlers. With the ocean crashing no more than a yard away I asked the love of my life to intwine her’s with mine. Jenn was so surprised she actually thought I was joking for a brief minute (before accepting my proposal through a gushing of tears). Rather than the depressing trek back to the real world, our drive home was a joyful plunge into a refreshed reality.

shells

Jenn loved her seashell engagement ring so much, she told me that she needed nothing fancier. Unfortunately, the inexpensive ring did not last long before breaking, and I thought that Jenn’s heart would break with it. While I may not have something as lofty as a marriage proposal to offer her this year, tomorrow for her birthday I will return to my shell store and buy her every sea shell ring that fits her beautiful finger. When each one passes on, another will be prepared to step up and take its place. We shall mourn the loss of each fallen soldier before passing the symbolic, romantic duty to the next until a year from now when we return to Sanibel once again to replenish our supplies and purchase every sea shell ring on this magical, little island.

___________

 

us

 

Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

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