Meeting Lyn's brother...

[fajrdrako]

Lyn has been my good friend since the 1970s, but I have never met her brother Michael or his wife Heli. They have lived in Calgary for a very long time, and have never come to Ottawa - until this week.

Lyn wanted her local friends to meet them, so she rented the party room at her condo building and invited us all over. We made it a pot-luck supper, and had a wonderful time. It was a bit like a Who Cares revisited.... A Who Cares was a kind of party we used to have every second Saturday night in roving locations, in which anyone associated with local fandom was welcome to turn up, and bring their friends.

Those days of easy socializing are behind us, but we had a wonderful time. There was a vast amount of food, and Beulah brought some delicious carrot cake.

I liked Michael and Heli, too. I expected Michael to resemble Lyn's father, whom I'd met, but he didn't. Nor did he resemble Lyn. He was just... himself, I guess, which is fair enough.

Afterwards, Beulah drove me home and we dropped in on maaseru to share some of the leftover carrot cake with her and maaboroshi. (Amazing, that there should be leftover cake, with that crowd!) We chanced on the beginning of the Kenneth Branagh As You Like It which instantly charmed us (and hooked us) with its multicultural melange of nineteenth-century Americans in Japan, Tudor England dialogue, ninjas, and Star Wars ambience. (And, muttered maaboroshi and I to each other, all this and femslash too. Gotta love Branagh.)

I didn't see more than the first third of it; dying to see the rest.

maaseru said that As You Like It was the first live play she saw, and that marked the moment when she fell in love with Shakespeare and with theatre. And she hasn't seen that particular play since, not even in movie form.

I don't think I've ever seen it at all - I've just read it.

Comments

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

If he had been perfectly normal, would Aral have spent so much time with him during the Regency years, when he was young?

You'd hope so, but perhaps he wouldn't have felt the urgency to do it.

I've been listening to Paladin of Souls lately, and the description Illvin gives of his and Arhys's childhood maps very closely to Miles and Gregor -- Arhys the heir with the missing father, raised by Illvin's father alongside him. Except that Arvol dy Lutez was a reasonably good man with a very bad reputation, and Serg Vorbarra was the exact opposite [g].

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Interesting parallel between the two books - I still haven't read Paladin of Souls, except for the first paragraph.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

So, what's it going to take to get you to read beyond that first paragraph? [eg]

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

So, what's it going to take to get you to read beyond that first paragraph?

A few hours of leisure at a time - ? An impossible dream, I know!

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Only usable as an excuse if you haven't been reading anything else. Because then you could be reading Paladin!