FPM: Asphalt Shakespeare and The Lovely Fullness of Skirts

Seeing these lovely full skirts around that seem to foreshadow fall. Not that I want the summer to be over. I'm not going to mention the heat. I don't want the summer to be over, although I don't relate to what many people are wearing this season: like strapless knickered rompers. Do you know them?

Summers there is free Shakespeare all over the city. My favorite is The Drilling Company, whose productions in a municipal parking lot on the lower east side are called Shakespeare in the Parking Lot. This past week, I saw their Julius Ceasar in which Ceasar was reconfigured as a Bloombergian bureaucratic dictator, and many of the key roles, like Marc Antony's are played by women. Lots of photos below. (Doesn't this play have the best speeches ever?_

I am writing in a public/private space in an unusual neighborhood. I'll tell you where next week.

I need a camera.

I don't like what I'm wearing.

This week, I read Ann Beattie's novella Walks With Men, which is set in NYC in the very early '80s, back when AIDS was referred to as the "gay cancer." A young woman--a rebellious Harvard grad--makes it big with her writing but is emotionally inhibited and controlled by a variety of men, one, in particular twice her age, becomes her husband and svengali and then mysteriously disappears. Subtle and spare, unlike most of Beattie, who I think is a rather messy writer. I recommend.