Summertime and the Living Is Easy

Summer approaches; in Sarasota that means a cessation of well over half the cultural activities that characterize the cooler months when the so called Snow Birds arrive to clog the streets with their cars and the beaches, restaurants, and stores with themselves--and fill the concert halls and theaters.  Into this vast emptiness which is summer, the two or three workouts at the gym gives some vague shape to our hot, humid, listless days.  We used to plan a trip to London for the theater, then on to Paris or Wiesbaden for the sheer pleasure of being in Europe, but somehow the allure has gone off it, too many complications to an easy trip.  So what to do?  Today's New York Times has provided my inspiration, two superb articles, one by Wesley Morris on the music of Prince, and the other, a mock obituary, on this the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.  I have never consciously heard a piece of music composed or played by Prince.  Only a few months ago I had a revelation when our local bank manager a woman from Poland introduced me to the music and singing of Freddie Mercury, now I shall take up Prince.  Louis Bayard's mock obituary of the Bard of Avon was just the reasoned, thoughtful array of the facts known to us of Shakespeare's life and production to inspire me to take up my volume of the collected plays and make the reading of them a summer's project.  It will be hard going through the comedies and the speeches of the fools in the tragedies.  I have never taken to Shakespeare's witty verbal games, just as I cannot abide my husband's turns at wit (ugh!).  Here in Sarasota as patrons of the Asolo Student Conservatory and a supporter of one of the students we are privileged to attend the student recitals at end of their Shakespeare class, and thus over the years hear some rather high powered performances of pieces of a wide range of plays.  Now is the time to build on that.  I am nervous, I must admit, afraid that Shakespeare's language has become too remote from me because I see so few of the plays entire on the stage, that I will lose my resolve.  Can the man who stays by Elena Ferrante, even reading the tetralogy twice, who is into the fifth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle falter at the Collected Works of William Shakespeare?