Love's Labours Lost

For someone (me) who grew up in the London suburbs, Seattle can feel a lot like Croydon, and Seattle in the summer can feel a lot like Croydon on a hot July afternoon: it’s kind of noisy, concrete, dusty, parochial.

The down town area is imprisoned between two seething highways, one next to the shoreline the other not so far away along the lakeside.

As it turns out Seattle is on the eastern shore of Puget Sound but what was probably once a beautiful freshwater lake nestled near a virgin shore is now a downtown "desirable residence" crowded, water-recreational area linked by a dug channel to the sea.

Sea planes take off and land heading for Vancouver and Canada to the north, yachts wait for the weekend to sail and joggers run on asphalt whilst the traffic pounds in and out of downtown all around.

There is a constant hum, even at four in the morning, that is never turned off, you just get used to it; it’s like living with a washing machine constantly running.

Sometimes something reminds me that I am no longer in Croydon - my linguistic non-comprehension of the locals for one.

Two weeks in and I still say “sorry” when I bump into them, when I know that it should be “excuse me’ and I am still baffled as to the correct response to the incessant greeting “howyadoing”: I try a ‘great and you!’ but I must be doing something wrong as the looks I get are strange.

Settling down on my picnic rug with a bag full of buttered popcorn at the "Movie on the Pedestal Night" (see previous post) it took me several minutes to understand the dialogue of the lead character, Juno a 16-year-old girl. I think I missed some of the best one-liners in the film because of my inability to fine-tune my ear to the nasal accent. But it was a great film and I had somehow, at the time, missed the news that it had won an Oscar for best screenplay.

From the film, or more precisely tracking down the soundtrack the next day, I discovered a music genre I was unaware of - anti folk. I think I always believed that Rock was in someway anti-folk, - isn’t that what Dylan did at Newport?

Seems though that it is a separate genre altogether, it even gets its own entry in Wikipedia.

Juno wasn’t my first open air cinema event this trip, that honour goes to my visit to the "Float In Movie" organised by Sidewalk Cinema that helps create open air film events in the Seattle area. This time they worked with the Wooden Boat festival held each year at the beginning of July on Union Lake, the aforementioned water play and live area.

To finish the event they invited boats to float in - and a few pedestrians to stroll up - and watch, first a Popeye cartoon and then African Queen, the film that gave Humphrey Bogart his only Oscar, I learnt this from the film trivia competition that obligatorily precedes an open air screening.

Anyway, what does this all have to do with Shakespeare?

Well, I discovered that there is an online search engine that will scour all of the Bard’s plays and sift out every reference of a particular word.

I didn’t try Queen or Africa but Juno, - probably because she is the Roman Goddess of Birth (the film is about an unplanned teenage pregnancy) - was used by Mr Bill no less than 21 times, and since the film begins and ends with a chair I would choose this quote.

“Let me sit down. O Juno! Antony and Cleopatra: III, xi

Unfortunately Anthony and Cleopatra is not included in the challenge set at the beginning of this blog so I am forced to settle for this.

Juno but an ethiope were; Love's Labours Lost: IV, iii