A Second Go

With 15 days left in England, it's time to start making some choices.

I promised myself that if I really liked something, I'd go back and visit it again before I left. Today I did that with The Globe and the British Museum.

When you buy your tickets online, you have a free tour and admission to the exhibition hall. I took advantage of that today, and while it's no substitute for attending a performance (which EVERYONE should have the chance to do before they die), it's a great stand-alone experience.

A well-informed guide walks you through the theater and gives a presentation about the theater itself, its construction, and Elizabethan times. If you've attended a performance, or have drama experience, or love Shakespeare, then odds are most of it will not be news to you, but that's okay. It's fun to watch other people get stoked by the experience, too.

The exhibition is a wonderful little museum, filled with play artifacts and interactive displays about the different aspects of play production at the Globe, which is really unlike play production anywhere else. It's important to remember that a play at the Globe is not just a play performance, but a play performance done under Elizabethan conditions. In other words, no miking, uniform lighting at night, and virtually no electronics.

My favorite part of the exhibit was the giant bear (as in, Exit, pursued by a ...), the Elizabeth I costume, and the musician scores/director's books on display from different plays. Makes me very excited about seeing 'Anne Boleyn' next Saturday afternoon.

I hit a couple of book stores I had read about. (I picked up Antigone from a store called SKOOB. Get it? 'Books' spelled backwards. It's a second-hand shop, and I could plunk down a LOT of money in there if it wasn't for my budget.) Then I trekked north to the British Museum to revisit Sutton Hoo, the Rosetta Stone, and a few other items, but also to see the stuff I missed the first time. There's a great Japanese wing with a bunch of cool crap from the Edo period (samurai armor, amazing statues and prints, and a daimyo's clock that really looks like a Dalek). There's also an Enlightenment Wing that covers the Renaissance and later...but the coolest discovery I made on the second pass was a statue of Thalia (pronounced tha-LIE-ah), the muse of comedy.

Should have left an offering!

The National Portrait Gallery

Went to The National Portrait Gallery this morning after typing out nearly 1K on Ghosty 3 in nearby Trafalgar Square. (Hoping some of the Britishness rubs on my characters.)

What was cool about the NPG? Number one was the Romantic painting of George Gordon, Lord Byron. I have got to get me an Albanian costume. Also, pretty much all of the other big shot writers I love had portraits there, too...Coleridge, Keats, Cassandra Austen's portrait of her sister Jane...of course, there were the famous Warhols of Liz Taylor and Mick Jagger, too...I was told that going to the NPG is like looking through someone else's yearbook, but I disagree. It's like looking through a history book of famous English figures in history, art, music, literature, and popular culture. Pretty cool, and at 3 stories, it won't kill your knees, either.

Lots of sculptures, too. There's a cool one of Darwin, and one of Tennyson that makes him look like Santa. There's a painting of Bernard 'Monty' Montgomery pointing at Normandy that just oozes smugness. Well done, painter!

I bought a ticket to go see 'Anne Boleyn' at The Globe on Saturday. It's a matinee, and it's a groundling ticket. Don't know the show at all, but I can hardly wait. (AnnieB is Henry VIII's 2nd wife, the first to be executed.)

I also visited the Museum of London (free). Some cool stuff about the Anglo-Saxons and the Great Fire, but if you're interested in 20th century London, you're much better off going to the Imperial War Museum. Still, pretty cool for free. AND it's right next to the original wall of Londinium outside, so there's that. Well, rubble of it anyway. It's been like 2000 years.

Well...back to writing!