No place like home...

Photo courtesy of PublicDomainPictures.net

An excerpt:

     Aunt Em had just come out of the house to water the cabbages when she looked up and saw Dorothy running toward her.

     "My darling child!" she cried, folding the little girl in her arms and covering her face with kisses. "Where in the world did you come from?"

     "From the land of Oz," said Dorothy gravely. "And here is Toto, too. And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!"

~ from The Wizard of Oz,

written by L. Frank Baum

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting every day in the last week or so. Things around our house have been very, very busy. Our high school theatre and music departments are currently putting on a production of the musical The Wizard of Oz (three shows down, three more to go!) and our family has been involved with that. My husband helped build the set, my daughter and I painted many, many of the set pieces, I've created several of the props, plus my husband and I have helped with decorations in the hallway, a special meet-the-cast event, and much more. AND my son Ben is in the show, as a Munchkin and citizen of the Emerald City. 

Needless to say, we haven't been home much! I feel like Dorothy, so glad to be here at home today, getting a bit of a break before the next show. While I'm here, I thought I'd post this excerpt from one of my favorite books. I have always been a HUGE fan of The Wizard of Oz -- the book, the play (I was in it many years ago, as a 6th grader, and played a Munchkin, just like Ben!), the musical, and especially the movie. While I can appreciate Baum's words above, and I almost always prefer books to their movies, in this case I like the final line of the movie better: "And, oh, Auntie Em! There's no place like home!"

Menagerie

This week's word is menagerie [muh-naj-uh-ree], a noun generally meaning "a collection of wild, unusual animals, especially for exhibition".  It can also mean "an unusual and varied group of people".  I remember hearing this word for the first time in high school, when our class read the script for The Glass Menagerie, written by Tennessee Williams. (I love that play, by the way!)  It seems to me that whenever I learn a new word, I start hearing it everywhere after that -- and "menagerie" has been no exception.

Here are a few sample sentences using the word:

My son Nick has quite 

the menagerie in his bedroom; 

it includes a leopard gecko, a betta, 

and two fire-bellied toads.  

(True story.)

An amazing menagerie awaits you at Brookfield Zoo.

Sitting in the mall, I enjoyed watching 

the menagerie of shoppers walking past me.

How would you use the word menagerie?

Living "Les Miz"

Ultimately, I'm going to blame it on a book.  This book, in fact:

Les Miserables, 

written by Victor Hugo, 1862

This French historical novel -- considered "one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century" -- follows the lives of several different characters between the years of 1815 and 1832, particularly the life of ex-convict, Jean Valjean.  Major themes of the novel include justice, grace, and love.

I started reading this book when I was in college, but I'm pretty sure I never finished it.  I'm planning to give it another try, though.  My 17-year-old daughter recently read it from beginning to end, and absolutely loved it!  (She had read -- and enjoyed -- a highly abridged version of the book for a class in middle school.  My parents gave her the copy shown above this past Christmas, which is also abridged, but much less so, and she liked this version even more.)

In 1985,  Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boublil, and Jean-Marc Natel turned the story of Les Miserables into a musical, known affectionately as Les Mis or Les Miz.  Just a few years later,  I attended the Broadway production of Les Miz as part of a theater package for college students.  I immediately fell in love with it.  I bought the soundtrack to the musical and listened to it ALL the time.  (I'm sure if you asked my housemates from that time, they would concur.)

Earlier this month, students at my daughter's high school performed seven shows of Les Miz.  They were amazing.  I'm not saying that just because my daughter played five different characters in it:

Emmalie as a constable, April 2013

Emm as a female Montparnasse, April 2013
She also played a factory worker,
a townsperson,and a serving girl.

or because my seven-year-old played a street urchin in it:

Ben, April 2013

or even because I helped paint 90% of the set.  The cast and crew were all SO talented and they worked SO hard to create a show that audience members will never forget.  Amazing, I tell you.

You may be wondering why I'm mentioning all this on a blog about children's books.  Well, it has to do with the lapse between this post and my last, over a month and a half ago. (And also the smaller gap before that, which lasted for two weeks.)  Ever since the auditions in November -- and especially for the last two months -- our family has been living and breathing Les Miz, from morning till night. Between set builds and rehearsals (and school, work, and daily life), we've had NO free time.  Blame it on the book. ;)

For me, no free time meant not having any time to read (gasp!) or write, among other things.  At first, I thought surely I would at least be able to keep up with this blog.  I was wrong.  I've really missed it, though, and I'm glad to be back.  I'm still getting back into the swing of things now that Les Miz is all over, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to find the time to make (mostly) daily posts once again.  And I'm hoping that my readers will return to join me on this blog journey....

Double, double toil and trouble

Image courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery

An excerpt:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake:
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

~ from Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1,

written by William Shakespeare

I've never actually seen a performance of Macbeth, and I'm not sure that I've ever read the entire play, but I have read through parts of it before, including this scene.  I love Shakespeare's eerie chant-like rhymes....