For Harry, England, and Saint George

I will forgo the usual apologies for not having blogged in six months. Quick updates: I'm now on a sort of deadline for my Henry V edition, and I've got four other research projects dancing attendance on my brain. I spent far too much pro bono time contributing dramaturgy and text coaching to the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, but I think I may have helped it into better shape than it otherwise would have been, and it did me good to get my hands dirty on a couple of actual shows again. I managed to squeeze out a decent graduate seminar on Spenser last semester, I saw a real-life royalty check, and got imperceptibly more like a real academic.

My state, like most in this recession, is hit with huge budget shortfalls, the more so because of our insistence on a casino-based, boom-and-bust tax structure. So wholesale layoffs at the universities have ensued, and we have no more marching band, oral history department, and equestrian studies program. The days of wine and roses, or at least Thunderbird and carnations, seem to be over at Quadrilateral State. Also, M just got her JD, but since she wants to do good in the world and work for the gubmint, she may or may not have a job once she passes the bar, which has been all her study this year.

And now, I'm winging my way to England for 17 days, or as long as my quaint little "dollars" will last over there, ostensibly to find documents and images in support of my edition's stage history at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the V&A Theatre Museum, and maybe to look up some 1603-plague-related documents in the Guildhall archives, but really, if I'm honest, to see dear friends I haven't seen in four years or so, go for a ramble in Dorset, cram as much theater/-re in as possible, and put myself outside many a pint.

I'll be flying for fourteen hours, so I'm more or less losing a day, with the eight hour time difference, and hopefully I won't be too shattered to meet up with my old Warwick University Dramatic Society cast of Henry V, which was comprised entirely of 20-year-old women who now presumably have careers and interesting lives and husbands and potbellies. Catching up should be fun. All right, possibly not potbellies. Sorry everyone. I'm projecting my own abdominal fat.

I somehow managed to get a hotel in Bayswater, a block or so north of Hyde park with a view of the Serpentine. Hooray for Hotwire.com, I say. Too bad I'll be spending most of tomorrow/Friday sleeping off jetlag.

More to come.