Vasco da Gama, episode #17 (or, “Foiled—curses again”)

     MacSnoopeigh as Macbeth? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

     Here’s another “true confessions” moment. Although I affect a veneer of Culture (pronounced “kul-chuh”), it remains a True and Undisputable Fact that, in my entire culture-veneered lifetime, I have only seen one version of Macbeth. It was Roman Polanski’s 1971 film version, so that’s bound to colour my idea of what makes for a good remount of what superstitious actors (are there any other kinds of actors?) still refer to as The Scottish Play. It probably doesn’t help my staging concept that I can’t remember anything about Polanski’s Macbeth other than a cauldron filled with what appeared to be regurgitated Welsh rarebit and a trio of naked witches. You’d think, this being Polanski, that the witches would all be 13-year-old girls. Polanski’s witches were definitely of age—they all looked like they’d just celebrated their twenty-ninth birthdays—if they’d been born in a leap year, that is.

     I’ll leave you to figure out what that means, and the mental picture it’s bound to conjure up, while I move on to a few mercifully brief notes about this episode of Vasco. It’s a continuation of the theme of the previous episode—everybody uses a stretch of unexpected downtime to talk about the role of bad luck and curses in their lives. In this case, the downtime is caused by circumstances that are a little less like fiction than I care to remember. I should remember it, with the amount of coffee I drink. According to something I just read on the internet, drinking a lot of coffee increases your long-term memory. I find the internet very useful for handy tidbits of information like this. For instance, did you know that, way back in The Year Nineteen-Aught-Eight, the Chicago Cubs had a costumed mascot?

 

     I didn’t say it was a good mascot. It looks not so much like a bear as a cross between a porcupine and a throw rug. I can see why they gave him (her? it?) the boot after just one season. Still, The Year Nineteen-Aught-Eight was the last time the Cubs won the World Series, so maybe that has something to do with the unceremonious way they ditched Porcupine Throw Rug Bear. See how useful the internet is? If I’d known that back when I was writing Vasco da Gama, I’d have done an entire episode about The Curse of Porcupine Throw Rug Bear.

     Unfortunately, another of the effects of drinking a lot of coffee is that your mind tends to race off onto other topics, or just off on tangents, before you’re finished dealing with the first one. Whatever it was…was it a topic, or a tangent? I need another cup of coffee to help me remember. While I’m getting that, you should click on the link and listen to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #17

 

P.S. I’m pretty sure I had something else to say, but one of the things I just remembered, thanks to my last cup of coffee, is that I’m out of coffee. Time to go to the store. Hope I remember where it is.