Daily Prompt

A Grand Purpose

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In Act 2, Scene 2, of Hamlet, the doomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are chatting with Prince Hamlet. They are his old college buddies, and King Claudius (Hamlet’s step-father) and Queen Gertrude (his mother) have sent for them to attempt to learn what is bothering the young man, who has been acting with an “antic disposition” and saying strange things, half to himself and half to, well, no one can figure out who.

Hamlet greets them and speaks in the same riddling manner that he has been using with the rest:

HAMLET: Let me question more in particular, my good friends, what you have done to deserve such fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord?
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then the world is one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We don’t think so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. [Emphasis mine.]

Hamlet quickly determines that they are not merely dropping in to talk about sports and the weather or to compare Klout scores but are indeed spies. Ultimately, he manages to have them both killed.
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Not Angry

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Angry, barking angry. “Ass-hat angry,” neither of my grandfathers would have called it, because neither of my grandfathers ever said “ass-hat.” The kind of angry that both of my departed grandfathers in the hereafter would have been forced to come up with pretend back-country colloquialisms to describe their grandson, also known as me. That frustrated and angry.

The story has a happy ending, of course. And the anger departed the moment it was expressed at the anonymous Newark-ian who knocked me over. It was a night in which Jen and I discovered that there are no short-cuts on the path to meeting good people.
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A Flying Circus

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The only circus I have attended made its debut on the BBC on October 5, 1969. I was less than a year old that day and more than seven or eight years away from encountering it for the first time, on American television, PBS to be exact.

PBS, America’s Public Broadcasting Service, is a non-commercial broadcaster, and its hundreds of member stations must each do what they can to fill the broadcast day. This is less true for New York City’s PBS station, the famous Channel 13, or Los Angeles’s PBS station, as these two have many subscribers and can afford to create their own programs.

When the BBC started to make its programs available for sale in the 1970s, episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus started to appear on American television sets. On PBS stations, because the BBC was selling the rights for not very much money at all, as I understand it. As a viewer of Channel 13 when I was a pre-teen, because it aired many (inexpensive to produce) children’s television shows, I wound up seeing Monty Python’s Flying Circus at perhaps too young an age. Seven or eight. Perhaps my parents thought something along the lines of “It’s on Channel 13, and it says it is a ‘circus,’ so it must be a kid’s show.” To this day, I sometimes watch episodes of Monty Python with that thought—it’s a kids’ show—in mind.
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