My summer vacation, Part Three

So after my sister left, I had a number of days free with no particular plans: a "stay-cation," as they say. I did a few things around the place, but mostly I did a lot of reading and relaxing.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The final (pretty much) stage of my vacation is my trip to Ashland, Oregon, with my sister-in-law, to see Shakespeare plays. Tonight we'll see MacBeth, aka "the Scottish play." I've read that show people have a superstition that stagings of MacBeth are plagued with bad luck, and so they call it "the Scottish play" to avoid saying the name. I don't know if that's true.

I'm sure I studied MacBeth in high school, and again in college when I took a Shakespeare class (I was an English major), and then I taught it to high schoolers three times. So I'm pretty familiar with it. The other plays we'll see are As You Like It and All's Well That Ends Well. I don't really recall what those are about.

In addition to seeing plays, we'll do some wandering around Ashland, which is a charming town. We arrived yesterday and went to the Tudor Guild Gift Shop. I was in a mood where everything looked good to me. I bought an Ashland sweatshirt, several pairs of socks, and a fridge magnet with a Jane Austen quote.

I had been wanting a non-hoody sweatshirt. I have two hoodies, so I wanted a different option. I found a pale blue-gray sweatshirt on sale, that has "Ashland Oregon" on the front.

Oh, and we had wonderful news on our drive here. The last two years, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been plagued with smoke from wildfires, so that sometimes they've had to cancel outdoor performances at the Elizabethan Theater. This year, when I bought my tickets, the plays that earlier in the summer were outdoors were scheduled later in the summer to be indoors in the local high school auditorium, so that even if there were smoke they wouldn't have to be cancelled. I was kind of disappointed by that because going to the outdoor theater is a huge part of the enjoyable experience here. Well, the box office called me and I answered on the bluetooth in my car, and they said they were going to be in the Elizabethan theater after all. My sister-in-law and I both yelled, "Yay!"

It's not smoky here this year, which is great. Yesterday when we got here, it was very hot, well up into the 90s, but today will be a little cooler; a high of 81 is forecast, which is bearable. I'm so glad that tonight I'll be sitting in the theater under the sky as the night falls and the great play starts.

The Allen Elizabethan Theatre. I found this photo online; it originates with the OSF.