Every week our family does the landscaping at our church- and it is QUITE a large property. We get there early with another volunteer and work on weeding, edging, mowing and planting as needed. This time we had transplanted some red geraniums that were left over in pots from Pentecost.
Our church is in such an amazing location- right on the river in the heart of Downtown.
After going home, cooling off and showering- we got ready and went to a production of As You Like it.
This fast-paced, Victorian-era production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It pays homage to early Black silent films in celebration of the DIA’s special exhibition Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898 – 1971. Using projection and footage from the era, Shakespeare in Detroit (SiD) and director Lynch Travis tell the story of Rosalind and Orlando, one of Shakespeare’s most popular couples.
Curated for young audiences, this adaptation, devised by SiD Founder Sam White, features one of Shakespeare’s most beloved quotes: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” (90 min., with one ten-minute intermission)
from the DIA
In what I call my “parenting career” one of the things I congratulate myself on a lot is how I helped nurture a love of the arts in the kids. I was raising the first 3 mostly alone in the Bay Area, while Jared was constantly working. All 3 were under the age of 5, and I would take them to all the museums from San Francisco to San Jose. We got memberships to most, and I had a formula. We would go right after they ate breakfast and we would only stay until one of them got bored or started to fuss.
This meant a LOT of 15-20 minute trips (but we were homeschoolers, so we had this luxury of time).
What ended up happening, is that by the time we moved to Detroit and started going to the DIA, my kids were 8, 5 and 3 and could seriously spend a couple hours walking painting to painting… statue to statue. It was a way of life at this point. Sometimes we would go to a museum with a group, on a field trip of sorts… and the kids would keep notes on their phones to let me know what they wanted to “come back and get to see seriously”.
It is hard, in a way, to go backwards and remind myself of this effort paying off in spades. Juniper hasn’t had quite the same introduction with us living on the farm and the pandemic- so we were ALL shocked when she made it 45 MINUTES into As You Like It!!!
When she asked to “take a little break”, we went on our own tour of the Egyptian and Middle Eastern exhibits. It is a WONDERFUL time of day to visit if you want to linger and read all the signs. We spent at least an hour in just these two sections.
The teens were SO IN LOVE with Shakespeare in Detroit’s production- they started looking up future performances before we left the parking lot. TRULY- these were exceptional performers… Im not exaggerating that Juniper was able to catch quite a lot of the meaning just in the way they were acting, without her knowing the story or having read Shakespeare… clearly. 🙂
Shaunie Lewis, as Cecelia, stole the whole show as far as we were concerned. Everyone else was SPECTACULAR, not a single criticism to be had. But seriously- Shaunie Lewis had all three teens chattering non stop the whole way home.
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