Plenty of news and happenings here! I'll let the pictures to the talking and run though both the last 36 hours and the weekend's upcoming events. First, we had our second high table dinner (celery soup, duck, creamy chcocolaty thing) before which Christopher Ricks, major literary critic spoke to us in the room where Lena, Heather and I are seated above (Heather L. is snapping the photo.)

THEN! The next night, last night, I joined the Page to Stage class (Alison's in the class, as pictured above) for a ride into London to see "Midsummer" at the Globe. We left at 2:30 in case there was traffic, but made great time and had time to see more things (Tate Modern!) in the neighborhood before dinner and the play.

Here's Ali outside the Globe and its list of productions this season.

We moved on to Tate Modern, which is next door to the Globe. For some orientation, the Globe and Tate Modern are on the south bank of the Thames, facing St. Paul's giant cathedral dome. Tate Modern is massive (think MoMa... feels even larger) and is housed in a converted power plant. It's collection is also not organized as a linear school-by-school march through modern art, rather thematically. Artists who did not overlap might be displayed in the same room if the room's theme is achieved. The "Poetry and Dream" room, for example, might have mostly Surrealists, but with someone like Francis Bacon added if he complements another artist or the "poetry/dream" theme. In the hour we had, we saw probably 1/8 of the collection and will definitely go back. I'm pictured above sending a free Tate video greeting to Ed.

Here I am, leaving the Tate (check at right for more photos of the Tate as well as some other details of the Globe) and heading off to meet Ali's colleague (in town for a National Endowment for the Humanities Chaucer course), who urged her to take her first teaching job, and who treated us to dinner at a yummy Greek restaurant nearby.

After dinner, we headed off to the Globe itself, built to recreate the experience of Shakespeare's Globe and completed in 1997.

For me, on this first trip to the Globe, the experience of seeing theater in that kind of space dominated the show (which was very good, though I prefer most aspects of the production we saw in Stratford Monday night). I had a seat in that third level (you can see my view from the photo above), so I tromped happily upstairs and took my wooden seat overlooking the groundlings (the 1,000 or so people who stand and watch from the ground-level as they did in Shakespeare's time, only then they might have packed in 3,000) and the beautiful stage. That bit of balloon you see overhanging the stage is a suspended moon-balloon that lit up later in the production.

Here's a detail of that "moon effect."

And a shot of the stage from groundling level.

As the show ended, folks got out their cameras and took a picture of the curtain call. Driving home, we saw many of London's landmarks illuminated at night: the Tower Bridge, the London Eye, the OXO Tower, St. Paul's, Parliament, and Big Ben. I return with the Page to Stage class in a couple of weeks for a Globe production of "King Lear," then will head in another weekend for more London exploration. Now, here's where Blogger won't let me break for a new paragraph, so I'll roll on to this weekend's activities: Lena and I leave on a train in just a few hours for Keighley (pron. "Keithley"), just outside of Leeds. From there, we'll walk or bus the couple of miles to Haworth, where the Brontes lived for most of their lives. We'll stay tonight (Friday) and tomorrow night in a hostel overlooking the town and go tromping out on the moors. I'm taking my camera, but am leaving my computer chained up here at my desk. I'll blog next Sunday night my time, so look forward to my next post perhaps noonish Sunday PST. Have a great weekend, everyone!