Much Ado about Nothing

For two nights really it was suddenly very hot here in Seattle, temperatures staying high late into the night and forcing me to excessively linger alongside the freezer cabinets in the local supermarket. The cool air helped me to relax and think better but still I have had trouble finding a hook for Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.

Of course the play, like the city, is set on the coast but I don’t think that this fact is the first thing that you associate with the work. I read that one of the motifs of the play is the play on words between Nothing and Noting which apparently were homophones in Shakespearean England and when I later learned that some of this centres on criticism of others, spying and eavesdropping and further that an o-thing was Elizabethan slang for the vagina, even though this also is not most people’s first thought, I was sure It would lead to something.

As it was it didn’t and my own inspiration was sadly lacking until this evening when I casually picked up a copy of Seattle that someone had left in the dressing room at the theatre where Krissie is working. Seattle claims on the cover to be “The Premier Seattle Monthly” so in the interests of research I started to flick through.

The first 24 pages were adverts but then I came to a section called “The Must List” the magazines “top to-dos” for the month. Unfortunately the month in question was July so I was too late, but you will be relieved to hear that number 3 was Shakespeare in the park that I have already mentioned and number 5 was the firework display for Independence Day that I have also covered; this blog is nothing if not Premier.

Number 2 on the list was to go out and pick your own blueberries on any of the numerous organic blueberry farms that surround the city, as July is the best month to do so. I wish I had found this out earlier as my grocery bill for the small purple berry has already reached frightening levels. They are apparently a powerful anti-oxidant and will allow me to live a healthier life as long as the income keeps coming in because I have been buying them in truckloads.

It seems that each time I come to the U.S.A, there is a new way to load up on anti-oxidants and while Wolfgang, a friend and colleague over here from Germany, pointed out that the anti-oxidant phenomena itself takes on exaggerated levels here in the States I always take the opportunity to find out what I should be eating; last year pomegranates were the thing but at least I knew what they were.

When I was a child I only ever saw them at Christmas time, they were something my father would mysteriously arrive home from work with just before the holiday. He worked up in Central London so either met merchants arriving from the orient that never ventured to the suburbs or had access to a more exotic grade of greengrocer.

This year in Seattle the shops are full of Açai – not the berry itself but drinks extracted from them. Açai grow in the Amazon rainforest, and although the carbon footprint I am leaving by purchasing them is sinful, they are apparently three times richer in anti-oxidants than blueberries so my grocery bill may go down. Actually the bottle that I have just finished claims that weight for weight the fresh fruit gives me 167 “something’s” to the blueberry’s 32 so maybe I offset a bit of the carbon footprint too.

There are no adverts for Açai berries in The Seattle, but almost immediately after the Puget Sound Condominium Guide that gives you the next 20 pages of publicity, right there on page 46 is ‘Spotlight” – local art that matters. The title of this month’s piece is -Much Ado About Nothing!

The article describes Luke Burbank who grew up in the city near Green Lake and now hosts a local radio talk show. Green lake is North of Lake Union and is the place to go if you are a jogger, there are so many runners you can imagine you are taking part in a marathon. It is also a great place to witness high level street basketball, learn windsurfing and is one of the easiest places to swim in the city during the summer. The waters of Elliott bay are shockingly cold and Lake Washington, being larger gets choppy as the millionaire’s boats pass; Lake Union has very little direct public access and you have to watch out for sea planes taking off and landing. His talk show, called Too Beautiful to Live is aired weekdays from 7 to 10 pm on KIRO-AM 710, Seattle’s highest rated AM news-talk station.

The magazine describes the show as ‘about, um, well, nothing and everything and anything in between.’ That should cover Açai berries then.

www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=140&cmsid=93