meanwhile, the world goes on

in other news i am learning through the grapevine that gwayne the cute knight from hotd is gay?? hell yeah brother. nothing gets passed my feline-like senses. if a character in the grr martin universe has a sniff of queerness about them, i just sense it. like a cat would towards a fruity little mouse. even if said cat has never watched a second of said media.

tonight i saw a free production of Othello in the park and it was a packed house -- there were folks sitting on the floor between the bleachers and there's no way to say this without sounding so polly anna but i really never, ever get tired of watching shakespeare with a public audience. at this point, i've seen more free productions of shakespeare's work than ones i've paid for and they never fail to make me so moved by the power of art to speak to people across centuries. shakespeare wrote othello in the 1600's and yet, on a summer night in 2026 and in the heart of harlem, people still sigh and laugh and gasp and curse at the play in much the same way i imagine they did so many years ago. i love when a company makes it to their mission to make art accessible, especially art that has been so gatekept and made to feel so elite and untouchable for the general masses. and the nice thing is that, when you watch a good shakespeare production, the actors make the otherwise difficult language sing -- the jokes carry, the insults land and make the audience hiss, the monologues feel as though the characters are asking us specifically for intervention and validation. and it worked! there were times where i stopped looking at the stage and just watched the audience: saw teenagers tense and lean in during the final act in othello and desdemona's bedroom, saw elders laugh and shake their heads when othello becomes convinced of desdemona's dishonesty, listened as someone whistled at a kiss between the leads and folks gasped and collectively side-eyed their friends at some labored, homoerotic moments between othello and iago. to think that art is the closest we ever get to time-travel or immortality: someone creates something and for centuries to come it moves people, earns a reaction out of them, makes them feel something. it's the most beautiful thing in the world.