is staying up too late tonight. I think in the last week and a half, I haven’t been to bed before twelve. And as I am up (always) by 6:30, going to bed that late is Just Too Late.
Tonight things will be different.
Tonight I am not making a salt and flour map of the Roman Empire (ca. 1 AD) with William. We did that last night, and were up until 10:15 together working on it, pushing the salty dough into all those dents and dimples around the Black and Mediterranean Seas.
Tonight I am not writing an ad lib script for the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice. That’s what I did last night, after the salt and flour map, after William went to bed. Yes last night I sat on my bed and created for my students a selection of lines they might say as the attending crowd in that famous courtroom scene, the one in which Shylock demands his pound of flesh and Portia reminds him that “the quality of mercy is not strained.” The (almost) entire class is on stage for this scene, and they must needs be acting, which in their case means responding to the words of the principal speakers. But they were having trouble coming up with things to say, so I wrote out some possibilities. It worked well in rehearsal today.
Tonight I am not at book club, eating raspberry chocolate cheesecake and discussing the differences between the book Children of Men and the film of the same title. I am not there, because that was Monday, I am not enjoying the company of Beth or Carolyn or Daun or, this time, Alison, our guest book-club-attendee. And so I am not getting home at 11:30 p.m.
I am also not reading Joseph and His Brothers. No. I have been devoting Serious Hours of my evenings to that task over the last few weeks, and I have finally finished. I am a better person for it, but more on that in another post.
I am not sewing a costume for Junius Brutus, and this because I failed to bring home my sewing machine from school today. I lent it to the school for the middle grades life skills course at the beginning of the semester, and I keep forgetting to bring it home. Which just goes to show how much sewing I do on a regular basis. But Will needs the Junius Brutus costume for Friday, so you can bet I’ll be doing some sewing tomorrow. Not tonight.
And I am not running a dress rehearsal for The Merchant of Venice. That’s tomorrow night, beginning at 6 p.m. It is the fourth quarter project for my humanities class, and we’re working ourselves toward frenzy getting ready.
Nor am I on-hand for my own directorial debut, which will be our performance of the play on Friday night. I’ll be there at 6 p.m. for that, too, and I expect that the cast party will keep me out late into the night.
No, tonight I am not doing any of these things. Instead, I am posting this, and then I am going to bed.
I am Not Sorry In The Least.
