LET'S get classical
When it comes to riding a unicycle the most important thing is....
Is there such a thing as digressing from the point when the point has not yet been made? Yes.
LET'S get classical!
Where was I?
Oh...they were COUSINS!
Sorry, "spoiler alert!"
Oops, I think I'm meant to say "spoiler alert" before I actually spoil it for everyone. I always get things the wrong way around like...is it Juice Boost or Boost Juice?
Anyway..can you still spoil something when it premiered more than 100 years ago and possibly half of the world's population who hold English as their first language have read the play? The answer is no because even when you know how a story ends...you sort of make yourself forget because you want to be excited.
It's just like telling someone the Titanic sinks before they watch the movie. Everyone knows the Titanic's fate, however, even watching it for the tenth time your adrenaline from anticipation still kicks in at the end and you have to restrain yourself from shouting: "Rose! Can't you see Leonardo...I mean, Jack is cold! Let him share your floating door, dammit!!!!"
She didn't.
How about The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde though eh?
I must admit it's a bit of a chuckle. Oscar makes fun of absurdities in society and like all the many notable writers before him, he wasn't scared to be a wee bit cheeky. I guess you need to push boundries to stand out and be successful in anything you do. I wonder if he'd mind me calling him Oscar.
This is one of my favourite quotes from the play:
"The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain."(Act 1, pg 55)
Not only do I enjoy Oscar's excessive use of commas (mainly because I like to use commas liberally), but also do I think the quote is just down right hilarious and if someone said that in public in the late 1800s, I'm pretty sure a fan slapping fight would ensue (I mean the hand held fans, you know..often used in high society to show feminine emotion..not electric.. a ceiling fan, standing or otherwise? It's hard to believe, but while it had been a few hundred years since Ben Franklin had ventured into the dark wielding a kite and a key, electricity still wasn't being used in its entirety).
Enough said about discourses and themes and what not...let me tell you about the plot!
The Importance of Being Ernest centres around two men, one, Jack, with a make believe brother, and the other, Algernon, with a make believe friend. The reason they've invented the characters? Pretty much just for "funsies" but also to get out of laborious social commitments. Jack's made up character is his troublesome younger brother, Earnest, while the other, Algernon refers to his old friend Bunbury who is often suffering ill health.
Of course there are the girl characters, Gwendolen and Cecily.
Jack feeds the story of his younger bro, Earnest, to the people he knows in the country including Cecily, his ward. This allows him to escape to the city whenever he feels the need to "attend to his younger brother".
In the city, Jack calls himself Earnest as the city folks do not know the story of the make believe Earnest. The city folk believe that this Earnest is an upstanding gentleman.
Jack makes the mistake of proposing to Gwendolen in the city, and Gwendolen decides she has always loved the name "Earnest" and wouldn't marry anyone without that name. This puts Jack in a real pickle.
The second and third act of the play is set at Jack's country house (they simplified sets back then because assigning an act to a location was best for the budget).
Algernon decides to stir things up and arrives in the country pretending to be Jack's younger brother, Earnest (who doesn't exist, remember?). Of course all 19th century farcical humour is the result! *Insert the "ha ha ha ha" contrived belly laugh here, which I mentioned last week.
While Jack is off doing something...I can't remember what exactly (I'd refer to the book, however it's about two metres away from me and I couldn't be arsed retrieving it) Algernon, who is posing as Earnest, proposes to Cecily.
Gwendolen and Cecily meet and start discussing life's occurrences and both are led to believe they have been proposed to by the same man, Earnest..oh it's just too much!
Where was I...oh they were cousins!
So, Jack, who had been left at a bus station when he was a child finally realises that the woman, Miss Prism who is the educator of Cecily, left him him there while she was a helper of Gwendolen's auntie's family.
"In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the basinette, and placed the baby in the hand-bag." (Act 3, pg 165).
I can't blame Miss Prism really, I've done the same thing - put milk in the cupboard and cereal in the fridge, said sorry when I've bumped a wall when it was clearly not a human and put a shoe on my hand instead of a glove - I don't think the latter even happened... but there's still time!
Anyway, so in the end, Jack realises that Algernon is his younger brother and that his father was actually called Earnest and named his eldest child, Jack, Earnest. So now, Jack and Gwendolen don't care about the close blood line they share and that their children will have blond hair, blue eyes and hip dysplasia (oh I think that's just rottweilers), the couple are just so darn relieved that Jack's real name is in fact, Earnest.
As you would expect the play performs a full circle and ends with the title...something like:
Jack: And now I've realised the Importance of being Earnest.
The audience laughs, the curtain falls, the actors all brace themselves for a full standing ovation - they wait patiently behind the curtain and are about to step forward anticipating the curtain rising, but nothing happens. Oh well, there's always the next night. .
These days, well... there doesn't seem to be too many good looking, well kept, polite guys left, so I don't think any smart girl would care if a guy wasn't named something favourable like...Earnest (ew!) After all....What's in a name? As Shakespeare would say, that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet!
Well played Shakespeare, well played.
Weekly invention:
Is there such a thing as digressing from the point when the point has not yet been made? Yes.
LET'S get classical!
Where was I?
Oh...they were COUSINS!
Sorry, "spoiler alert!"
Oops, I think I'm meant to say "spoiler alert" before I actually spoil it for everyone. I always get things the wrong way around like...is it Juice Boost or Boost Juice?
Anyway..can you still spoil something when it premiered more than 100 years ago and possibly half of the world's population who hold English as their first language have read the play? The answer is no because even when you know how a story ends...you sort of make yourself forget because you want to be excited.
It's just like telling someone the Titanic sinks before they watch the movie. Everyone knows the Titanic's fate, however, even watching it for the tenth time your adrenaline from anticipation still kicks in at the end and you have to restrain yourself from shouting: "Rose! Can't you see Leonardo...I mean, Jack is cold! Let him share your floating door, dammit!!!!"
She didn't.
How about The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde though eh?
I must admit it's a bit of a chuckle. Oscar makes fun of absurdities in society and like all the many notable writers before him, he wasn't scared to be a wee bit cheeky. I guess you need to push boundries to stand out and be successful in anything you do. I wonder if he'd mind me calling him Oscar.
This is one of my favourite quotes from the play:
"The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain."(Act 1, pg 55)
Not only do I enjoy Oscar's excessive use of commas (mainly because I like to use commas liberally), but also do I think the quote is just down right hilarious and if someone said that in public in the late 1800s, I'm pretty sure a fan slapping fight would ensue (I mean the hand held fans, you know..often used in high society to show feminine emotion..not electric.. a ceiling fan, standing or otherwise? It's hard to believe, but while it had been a few hundred years since Ben Franklin had ventured into the dark wielding a kite and a key, electricity still wasn't being used in its entirety).
Enough said about discourses and themes and what not...let me tell you about the plot!
The Importance of Being Ernest centres around two men, one, Jack, with a make believe brother, and the other, Algernon, with a make believe friend. The reason they've invented the characters? Pretty much just for "funsies" but also to get out of laborious social commitments. Jack's made up character is his troublesome younger brother, Earnest, while the other, Algernon refers to his old friend Bunbury who is often suffering ill health.
Of course there are the girl characters, Gwendolen and Cecily.
Jack feeds the story of his younger bro, Earnest, to the people he knows in the country including Cecily, his ward. This allows him to escape to the city whenever he feels the need to "attend to his younger brother".
In the city, Jack calls himself Earnest as the city folks do not know the story of the make believe Earnest. The city folk believe that this Earnest is an upstanding gentleman.
Jack makes the mistake of proposing to Gwendolen in the city, and Gwendolen decides she has always loved the name "Earnest" and wouldn't marry anyone without that name. This puts Jack in a real pickle.
The second and third act of the play is set at Jack's country house (they simplified sets back then because assigning an act to a location was best for the budget).
Algernon decides to stir things up and arrives in the country pretending to be Jack's younger brother, Earnest (who doesn't exist, remember?). Of course all 19th century farcical humour is the result! *Insert the "ha ha ha ha" contrived belly laugh here, which I mentioned last week.
While Jack is off doing something...I can't remember what exactly (I'd refer to the book, however it's about two metres away from me and I couldn't be arsed retrieving it) Algernon, who is posing as Earnest, proposes to Cecily.
Gwendolen and Cecily meet and start discussing life's occurrences and both are led to believe they have been proposed to by the same man, Earnest..oh it's just too much!
Where was I...oh they were cousins!
So, Jack, who had been left at a bus station when he was a child finally realises that the woman, Miss Prism who is the educator of Cecily, left him him there while she was a helper of Gwendolen's auntie's family.
"In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the basinette, and placed the baby in the hand-bag." (Act 3, pg 165).
I can't blame Miss Prism really, I've done the same thing - put milk in the cupboard and cereal in the fridge, said sorry when I've bumped a wall when it was clearly not a human and put a shoe on my hand instead of a glove - I don't think the latter even happened... but there's still time!
Anyway, so in the end, Jack realises that Algernon is his younger brother and that his father was actually called Earnest and named his eldest child, Jack, Earnest. So now, Jack and Gwendolen don't care about the close blood line they share and that their children will have blond hair, blue eyes and hip dysplasia (oh I think that's just rottweilers), the couple are just so darn relieved that Jack's real name is in fact, Earnest.
As you would expect the play performs a full circle and ends with the title...something like:
Jack: And now I've realised the Importance of being Earnest.
The audience laughs, the curtain falls, the actors all brace themselves for a full standing ovation - they wait patiently behind the curtain and are about to step forward anticipating the curtain rising, but nothing happens. Oh well, there's always the next night. .
These days, well... there doesn't seem to be too many good looking, well kept, polite guys left, so I don't think any smart girl would care if a guy wasn't named something favourable like...Earnest (ew!) After all....What's in a name? As Shakespeare would say, that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet!
Well played Shakespeare, well played.
Weekly invention:
- An ejection type of device that is connected to your alarm. If you press snooze you are immediately ejected from your bed and into the cupboard...ready for dressing.
So, next week? I'm thinking, let's get physical...physical.
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