There is no historical record of Shakespeare’s life between 1585 and 1592, after which he became established as a dramatist and playwright. The Bard would have been about 21 years old at the beginning of that period. What was he up to? Nobody really knows, though some theories hypothesize that he was a law clerk, a soldier, a schoolmaster, or an actor.
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582, when he was 18 years old and she was 26. They remained together until his death in 1616. Their courtship began with a rather abrupt start, as Hathaway was several months pregnant at the time of their marriage.
Though it is only rarely mentioned in his plays, Shakespeare lived through several outbreaks of the Bubonic plague in England. He was lucky to have survived it, but lost several of his loved ones to it, including three sisters, his brother Edmund, and possibly his son Hamnet (although Hamnet’s precise cause of death is unclear).
Though the time of his passing has been documented, Shakespeare’s cause of death remains a mystery. An anecdote from a clergyman's diary, written decades after, claims that the writer died from a severe fever, possibly related to typhus, but that has never been proven.
It’s perhaps a modest request that a great playwright wished for his remains to be left in peace, but Shakespeare wasn’t taking any chances. His gravestone at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon reads:
"Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones."
In 2016, a team of scientists used radar scans to investigate the burial site of William Shakespeare and uncovered signs of disturbances around the remains. The evidence suggests that his skull was likely removed from his grave at some point in history.
To wrap your head around time crystals, imagine snowflakes or rubies—crystals that tantalizingly corrupt spatial symmetry. Unlike the perfectly symmetrical empty space, there are spots on these spatial crystals that look different than other spots, such as their edges.
In much the same way, then, a time crystal breaks the symmetry of time: their atoms love being in different points in space at different points in time, shifting directions as if a pulsating force flipped them.
can move without absorbing energy because they’re created from trapped ions—blends of electric or magnetic fields that can capture charged particles, usually in a system isolated from an external environment, with the capacity to tirelessly gyrate, even at their lowest energy-point (their so-called Vladimir Eltsov, an applied physicist at Aalto University in Finland, who, together with professor Grigori Volovik and doctoral candidate Samuli Autti, took a time quasi-crystal and morphed it into a wholesome and superfluid time crystal in May 2018, is electrified by the virtues of time crystals—even if he doesn’t (yet) believe in their power to turn us all into budding Doc Browns.
Elstov instead prefers to think about how time crystals can advance us technologically. For example, time crystals can help us make highly sensitive magnetic-field detectors or components of quantum computers. And such is Eltsov’s faith in these fascinating structures that he believes they can be our ally in tackling the most theoretical and highbrow stumpers related to the fundamental laws ruling the universe.
Thorne offered explanations for several logical conundrums regarding time travel, including the paradox of going back in time through a wormhole and accidentally killing your grandfather, thereby also killing yourself. (How can you exist if your father doesn’t exist, since the sperm half responsible for his conception was destroyed … by you?)
The trick, still, is that you can't leave any fingerprints on the past. That's what they call it - fingerprints. It just means you don't fuck with the timeline. So... we can bring some stuff with us, but we have to bring it back (there's also a cleanup crew that steps just before we go home so they're sure we bring everything back). And, we have to wipe our interactions. Well, we don't, the cleanup crew does. It's really pretty easy. They have an electromagnetic device, and they basically just... what? UNFOLD the brain part that was affected by our visit. So, these poor targets. Every so often, some person from the future drops in on them at some point, we study them, and then they get wiped and we go home and write about our visit. Not that we tell them anything, just we have to be careful that they don't get any inappropriate ideas.
Like, actually, a few guys did - DaVinci, and Sir Francis Bacon. Some Egyptian dude - that was actually a funny one. The first engineer who went back to find out how the Egyptians engineered the pyramids actually ended up leaving the "how-to" that gave the Egyptians the ideas they needed to build the pyramids. It was after that that we started to get really, really careful about wiping the past. I mean, that one ended up being harmless, but it could have caused like a serious anomaly. Well, that's not entirely true - whatever happened in the past happened. Some people have written papers about how paradoxes can't really happen because whatever might have been changed cause you stepped is changed - and if you went back, then you technically can't have erased your great-great-something or you never would have been and that's way over my head and too theoretical. I'm kind of more artistic, right? I just want to go back and act in some Shakespeare plays when they were first happening.
Granted, nothing much new comes of our visits. We haven't seen it all, but Dr. Lloyd made it a priority to have history types go back and they have done their best to be all over the past - I mean, like ALL over it, from the proto-humans all the way up to yesterday. They've met Nero and Jesus and one guy got killed by a big hairy hominid and boy was THAT a mess. I mean, he got his brains beat out in like 7 million B-fucking-C-E!! So his DNA was all over the place, and it took the cleanup crew a solid week to make sure nothing was left, and they had to be so careful not to kill any hominids in the process. (DNA doesn't matter once humans were modern humans, of course.) And who knows - maybe those hominids that saw the cleanup crew are the first ones who decided, shit, there must be a God or something, cuz the cleanup crews have all these amazing tools they use to make things dis-integrate.
Ok, I better finish up for tonight. Nothing much more to do but go to sleep, I guess. I'm serious when I say it's dark. The windows here are really, really small, and all they have for light are these stinky (I mean, they stink!!) candles and dishes of animal fat with a little wick in them. Yuck. I brought my iBrain to talk my notes into (we all do), so I've got books and stuff, but again - same problem - you don't want to get caught with something like that, so we're told to use it just for our notes, then put it back in its hiding place. So, g'night, ttyl.
June 2, 1613
I woke up early today and put on my smelly clothes. Haha. I actually am starting to smell like everybody here, which is probably a good thing, as I don't notice how bad it is so much now. Mrs. Quickly made me something to eat, but I'm SO craving some real food. They eat the most revolting stuff here. They do, thank God, have coffee! In fact, they have these little coffee houses where you can go and get a coffee for a penny (take, that, Starbucks!) and sit around and talk. No 'brains, of course, but all the "educated" folks go there and drink coffee and talk. Boy, do they talk! Of course, we all had to be trained in Elizabethan English before we came, so I've got my thee's and thou's all down to a science, and I can understand them just fine.
What's funny to me is they sound like old movies about Georgia or Arkansas or someplace, not like what we expect Brits to sound like. I had heard recordings, of course, but for whatever reason, they try to not expose us to a lot of Then before we go. I think it's some sort of Intellectual Purity endeavor. So to my ear, anyway, they sound like people speaking with a German-Southern accent, if you can wrap your head around that!
But back to food. They don't really do breakfast-lunch-dinner the way we do. Pretty much the same food is around for every meal, and a lot of it tastes like its way past its sell-by date. There's always meat, but that's cuz Mrs. Quickly is supposed to be a rich widow (she's actually one of us, but she's been here so long I guess she's one of "them," too!). Poor people don't get to eat a lot of meat, actually. Poor people don't get a lot of anything - but more about that, later. They love pie. Really big pie-eaters. Meat pie, sweet types (these are actually pretty good!), fish pie (gross). I guess anything that you can make and keep for a while without refrigeration (there are no fridges, duh!) is good. And they can carry pies around with them, but honest to God, picking bugs out of my food (which you do end up doing) is just disgusting! So anyway, breakfast could be anything from bread and cheese to meat pie to fruit and milk, and I do get to have coffee. So thank God for that but boy would I like a Vitamin Diet Coke.
Nothing, and I mean nothing is cold. Well, that wouldn't be true if it were winter, but they don't usually send us in the coldest months of the year cuz there's a lot more illness, and in spite of all the shots we get, it's still possible to pick up some germs when so many people are sick. And we'd get to see less just because it's harder to get around. And these people are so gross, like I told you, they pick their noses and wipe them on their clothes and they spit all over the place, and people pee on the street all the time, even women sometimes, and every once in a while you see someone pooping right there on the street, too. Yuck!! They are just so f'ing dirty it's hard to believe. Even the rich people have dirty clothes and hands - and they wear wigs a lot of them, because like Mrs. Quickly told me, they shave off all their body hair so they don't get so many lice. Lice!!
And bedbugs. Even tho Mrs. Quickly is, by this time's standards, a really clean person (she does have a secret store of some modern chemicals that we bring her, like bleach and soap and stuff), it's still impossible to keep all the bugs out. I mean, for one thing, we sleep on straw! No shit! That took some getting used to.
They get a big bunch of straw, and pound on it to make it kind of soft, and then they fill a sack - we have linen, but I would guess that poor people don't even have a sack - and that's your mattress. It makes all kinds of noise when you turn over, and unless you've done a really good job pounding it, it can be very prickly, but needless to say, it's straw, so there are gonna be bugs in it, and they do escape from the sack. And they're also in the thatch on the roofs of a lot of houses, and they get on your clothes... it's sort of a losing battle.
And of course these people don't have the bug shots that we get, so not only are the bugs not being actively repelled, but they can get all kinds of diseases, like bubonic plague!! - seriously!! - from bug bites. And of course you walk down the street and everybody's faces and arms have bug bites along with the dirt and totally gross-out teeth.
We bring our toothbrushes, but all these people have are sticks they use to clean their teeth, and there's not a lot of tooth-cleaning going on, anyway, so there are all these crooked and missing and black - I mean it, black! - teeth.
Women Mrs. Quickly's age - about 35 or so - they don't have any teeth at all a lot of them. They say "for every baby, a tooth," cuz I guess that having a baby uses up some calcium or something. But there are women who have little babies in their arms and a toddler hanging on their skirts and then they have three teeth left! Weird.
Ok, time for me to go. They're doing a production of MacBeth at the Globe Theater, and Wm. is supposed to actually be there. It's a command performance - MacBeth isn't a new play, and generally speaking, they like to do new plays over old ones - it makes them more money. And they have plays during the day - I mean, think about it - that would be an amazing number of candles and lanterns and things when you do a play in the dark!, so, I have to get over there by the afternoon. And you can't get from here to there real fast when there aren't any cars or buses or even bicycles, for God's sake!
If you know where the Globe Theater was, Mrs. Quickly's town home is on the other side of the river. She has an estate in the country outside of town - where a lot of the "posh" people live - but she spends most of her time in London handling the crystal people. To get to the Globe, we walk or take - which is sort of like a box attached to poles that a couple of big guys carry - to the Thames River. Then we hire a boat and we go across and land on a dock not far from the Globe.
See, Mistress Quickly is in an interesting spot. She's from the future, but she came back before Dr. Lloyd started his experiments, and she got stuck here. Nobody's quite sure how or why but she can't move. She can't go back to her time, and she can't come to our time - to Dr. Lloyd's time. But the thing is with Steppers, they know each other. I mean, like I told you, most of us, yeah, well, we sparkle with the crystals. But Mistress Quickly, she was invisible to other Steppers because she lost her crystals. Dr. Lloyd is working on a theory about that, but he hasn't said anything yet. Oh! Speaking of that - we talk back and forth with the future. Well, not really talk-talk, but we leave communications for each other. It's really kind of obvious in a weird way once you think about it. There's a spot we pick where we leave messages for the future, in a box that we put into a spot we know exists in the future. Somebody on the team checks a few times a day at the sites where they have stepper visiting, and then on this side of time, there's a day tripper who comes through with things for Mistress Quickly, or with messages or things like that.
In 1991, Thorne did some mathematical calculations and found that such paradoxes couldn’t arise, but were instead replaced by an infinite number of other potential outcomes. (You could go back in time and mess around with your grandfather all you want, but there’s no way you could have killed him, otherwise you wouldn’t exist to kill him in the first place.)
Then there’s the theory of the many worlds hypothesis, which could resolve some of the implications of going back in time and altering the future. This hypothesis suggests we live in a near-infinity of universes that have the same physical laws and values, but exist in different states and are arranged so that no information can pass between them. Essentially, with every decision we make, the universe splits into multiple realities, and we’re completely unaware of the alternative scenarios our exact replicas experience in the other universes.
“Time travel would, in the theory of multiverses, have us wind up on one of these other universes, so it would not necessarily be a straight linear path forward to back for us, but a crossing between universes,” says Holler. “I’m not completely sold on it, but there are plenty of smart people working on it and seem to believe it’s very, very feasible,” he continues.
But the incredibly prepossessing theory of multiverses lacks proof in the form of solid calculations, says von Keyserlingk. For him, the problem with the many worlds interpretation and time travel isn’t that they’re necessarily fiction, but that we may currently be missing the mathematical tools and even philosophical ideas to negotiate these things. They’re at the very theoretical end of physics, he says: things that we can really only speculate on, whereas science at its best is just “informed speculation.”
>“It can sometimes happen that nature presents us with issues that no one has figured out before,” von Keyserlingk says. “One of the issues is that we have a fairly fixed idea of what space and time is. Resolving the hardest problems in physics requires throwing away a lot of our preconceived notions.”
In a more mathematically, philosophically advanced future, then, could we discover more time-traveling properties of time crystals? Don’t hold your breath, Khemani says. While the crystals do hold a few tiny secrets of the universe, the only thing they have in common with time travel is just one word: time. That’s at least for now—but maybe not forever.
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The Tempest as Shakespeare's farewell:
https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2020/03/31/prospero-epilogue-tempest-shakespeare-farewell-emma-smith/</
https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2020/03/31/prospero-epilogue-tempest-shakespeare-farewell-emma-smith/</
The rules:
You either can or can't time travel - and only back from your existing time.
Most people can travel for a short period of time - up to roughly a year - without suffering any consequences of illness. Some people can make a permanent transition, but generally it's to a place or person they have a connection to - and only when and if they are replacing a person in that time frame (who has died). People who can travel in time recognize one another (not sure exactly how yet) - but that way they can assist one another in preparing, and even in letting someone know they have this gift. The actual mechanism is time crystals can attach to you, if you have the power to attract them - and for as long as they are attached you can move backward through time. It isn't generally known by anyone but those who can attract the crystals.
For people who want to go back and stay for a long period of time, you can either remove the crystals completely (this can happen accidentally as well), or you can "cover" them for extended periods of time by injecting a stabilizer. You can do this until you begin to feel the ill effects. Then you have to remove them completely, or go back.
(Pregnancy or child in any time period not your own can tie you to that period OR if you are pregnant through a person from that era, you can be permanently attached - this is why Mistress Quickly is stuck in the 1500s, and how Randi gets to stay, and how Wm can finally return to the future - he meets his daughter, she gets pregnant, and his crystals "recover.")
********************************************************88
I don't know why I was so surprised that the past smells bad.
But it really stinks. Body odors, bad breath (omg!), and shit of all kinds - horses, dogs, pigs, people. Old, rotten food and stuff in the streets. Do these people ever wash or pick up stuff? My mom would kill me if my room looked this bad.
So, ok, I'm here. It's May 31, 1613. Crazy, huh? Getting here was TOTALLY un-fun, tho, and I feel like I'm gonna barf. Dr. Lloyd told me it was kinda like a roller coaster - stepping through the hole the crystals let me find. Wrong! It was like drinking a quart of vodka and then going for a ride with Craig Waterman in his stupid jacked-up 2015 Porsche. Ick.
But I'm in the safe house, and there's a woman here - Mrs. Quickly - and she says I should lie down for a while. So...later!
Private Diary. (Private vs personal diary; add that the moon is a time geyser - it it churns space time; more about how time is moved about in, )
June 1, ???
Which is it? Do I say it's now for me (2067), or do I say it's now for the people who live here? (1613?) Anyway, my name is Miranda (Randy) Quilliam, and I'm here cuz I can step - and Dr. Lloyd found me, and said I could travel, if I wanted to. Honest, I thought he was a freak or was trying to get weird with me, but I had to be honest and admit I'd felt the crystals before. I mean, I didn't know what they were. I just felt itchy, and sometimes I found myself somewhere else all of a sudden - mostly some time else - a week ago, or yesterday. Well, anyway. So Dr. Lloyd started to show me how it all worked, and finally said I was ready to go exploring if I wanted to. He said I could go spend a few months, maybe even a year, in some time and place in the past. So, after I thought it over for a while, I chose 1613 because of Shakespeare.
I just love his plays, and most of all, I wanted to be in one of them. Or more than one. But other than some bit parts, I never got cast as anyone like Juliet or Portia or someone. I learned all the lines, and I studied everything I could find about him. Of course, now we know William Shakespeare wasn't who we thought he was - oh, there was definitely a guy named William Shakespeare, but he didn't write all the plays and poems and stuff. He wrote some of them - the tragedies and histories, and a lot of the poems. But then there was this other dude who actually had a thing for Wm., his name was Henry deVere, and he has an amazing sense of humor. Or at least that's the story that's been collected about Wm. - other steppers have been to the 1500s, Wm.'s era , but they're not always focused on him. Maybe it's the plague. Or architecture, or Elizabeth. Who knows. One of the younger guys I met in the program, Darryl, wasn't that impressed with Wm., he says now he wants to go and meet Napoleon. He pulled his crystals before his time was up here and... well, it's actually kind of an amazing process, but right now I'm hungry so - later.
Private Diary
June 1, 1613 (around 8pm)
Dark! Man is it dark here!! How did people stand it! Fortunately, I brought a flash with me, but Mrs. Quickly reminded me I have to be very careful about using it, cuz if anybody sees me, I could literally be assumed to be a witch, and around this time, they f'ing BURN witches!! Seriously, they had a beheading today in the town (oh, btw, I'm in London). It was crazy. I didn't actually watch, I would definitely have puked, but I saw all the people following the cart that was carrying this poor guy - he was a total mess, all filthy and covered with blood and poop and stuff - and he was just crying. And all the people were following along like it was a rock concert or something. WTF. I'm really glad I don't live now. Then. Whatever. In spite of the bug stuff Dr. Lloyd injects into us before we step, I'm still getting bit. At least I won't get any horrible diseases.
Anyway, I said I'd explain about how there's people who can step and people who can't, and if you can, you can recognize other steppers. Some people never find out that they are, but somewhere along the way, one of the brainy types like Dr. Lloyd realized what was going on and managed to actually track the crystals. He says people have been moving in time forever, they just didn't know it, or people thought they were magicians or shamans or just plain crazy, and probably more than a few of them figured out how they could use it to get rich, or just have fun. The crystals are all over the place - like, floating, but they can jump time. Actually, they sort of want to move through space-time. So if you're one of us, they're attracted to you and sometimes they dig into your skin for a little while - and that's when you wake up two days ago. Seriously, it happened to me. Not a lot of time, but I'd be going along and suddenly realize I did all this before.
So, ok, the reason Dr. Lloyd could see me was he said I "sparkled." Sounds like that vampire thing, only it's subtle and we don't drink blood - ha. If you know what to look for you can see it, though I have to admit I'm not really tuned into that yet. Then he decides if he wants to tell you about it. There are a lot of guys like Dr. Lloyd, and they've turned the whole thing into a study, and sort of like a secret society. They don't want to freak anyone out, and they also don't want anybody trying to go back in time and cause trouble. And they definitely don't want it to be some kind of Dr. Evil super weapon. So they kind of test you, at least if you're older, and if you're a kid like me, they'll do some training and let you know that it's serious stuff - and if they don't teach you what to do you'll never get much further than a couple of weeks or maybe months on your own, anyway. And I figure they're really just getting to know you and decide whether or not you'd make a good member of the team. Turns out that there aren't all that many people who can handle this. There are people who attract the the crystals, and who jump around in time, but they hate it and they just think something's wrong. A little downer will shut the crystals up and keep most people stationary.
So, I'm in honors History (haha, believe it or not!), because you have to do a lot of studying if you want to go anywhere special. Some people with the crystals don't want to go anywhere - it's like you told them they have some disease, and they just don't want to know anything about it. But if you want to really work with it, and you're still a kid, you get a scholarship to a special school that trains you and helps you sort out if you want to go, where you want to go, and basically, where the crystals are pulling you. Out of the whole - seriously!! - whole world, there are only a few of us who get to go anywhere major, at least now that Dr. Lloyd and people like him have figured a lot of it out and kind of became the Time Police.
Dr. Lloyd says they haven't known about the crystals for that long. At some point in the last century - actually the late 1900s - they figured out that there were these crystals that they called time crystals, because the atoms didn't obey time - they flipped around. And some other guys figured out a way to use the energy, and then one thing led to another and pretty soon they realized that some living things sort of attracted the crystals, and once you had enough of them, they could drag you around in time. That's kind of what was happening to me before Dr. Lloyd found me. But he and his Genius Posse figured out a way to direct where you went, and then it was off to the races. They were really careful, though, because they figured it was just a matter of time before the "bad guys" would try to create a black market on crystals, or go back and set themselves up to be rich, or worst of all, go back and change history.
You either can or can't time travel - and only back from your existing time.
Most people can travel for a short period of time - up to roughly a year - without suffering any consequences of illness. Some people can make a permanent transition, but generally it's to a place or person they have a connection to - and only when and if they are replacing a person in that time frame (who has died). People who can travel in time recognize one another (not sure exactly how yet) - but that way they can assist one another in preparing, and even in letting someone know they have this gift. The actual mechanism is time crystals can attach to you, if you have the power to attract them - and for as long as they are attached you can move backward through time. It isn't generally known by anyone but those who can attract the crystals.
For people who want to go back and stay for a long period of time, you can either remove the crystals completely (this can happen accidentally as well), or you can "cover" them for extended periods of time by injecting a stabilizer. You can do this until you begin to feel the ill effects. Then you have to remove them completely, or go back.
(Pregnancy or child in any time period not your own can tie you to that period OR if you are pregnant through a person from that era, you can be permanently attached - this is why Mistress Quickly is stuck in the 1500s, and how Randi gets to stay, and how Wm can finally return to the future - he meets his daughter, she gets pregnant, and his crystals "recover.")
********************************************************88
I don't know why I was so surprised that the past smells bad.
But it really stinks. Body odors, bad breath (omg!), and shit of all kinds - horses, dogs, pigs, people. Old, rotten food and stuff in the streets. Do these people ever wash or pick up stuff? My mom would kill me if my room looked this bad.
So, ok, I'm here. It's May 31, 1613. Crazy, huh? Getting here was TOTALLY un-fun, tho, and I feel like I'm gonna barf. Dr. Lloyd told me it was kinda like a roller coaster - stepping through the hole the crystals let me find. Wrong! It was like drinking a quart of vodka and then going for a ride with Craig Waterman in his stupid jacked-up 2015 Porsche. Ick.
But I'm in the safe house, and there's a woman here - Mrs. Quickly - and she says I should lie down for a while. So...later!
Private Diary. (Private vs personal diary; add that the moon is a time geyser - it it churns space time; more about how time is moved about in, )
June 1, ???
Which is it? Do I say it's now for me (2067), or do I say it's now for the people who live here? (1613?) Anyway, my name is Miranda (Randy) Quilliam, and I'm here cuz I can step - and Dr. Lloyd found me, and said I could travel, if I wanted to. Honest, I thought he was a freak or was trying to get weird with me, but I had to be honest and admit I'd felt the crystals before. I mean, I didn't know what they were. I just felt itchy, and sometimes I found myself somewhere else all of a sudden - mostly some time else - a week ago, or yesterday. Well, anyway. So Dr. Lloyd started to show me how it all worked, and finally said I was ready to go exploring if I wanted to. He said I could go spend a few months, maybe even a year, in some time and place in the past. So, after I thought it over for a while, I chose 1613 because of Shakespeare.
I just love his plays, and most of all, I wanted to be in one of them. Or more than one. But other than some bit parts, I never got cast as anyone like Juliet or Portia or someone. I learned all the lines, and I studied everything I could find about him. Of course, now we know William Shakespeare wasn't who we thought he was - oh, there was definitely a guy named William Shakespeare, but he didn't write all the plays and poems and stuff. He wrote some of them - the tragedies and histories, and a lot of the poems. But then there was this other dude who actually had a thing for Wm., his name was Henry deVere, and he has an amazing sense of humor. Or at least that's the story that's been collected about Wm. - other steppers have been to the 1500s, Wm.'s era , but they're not always focused on him. Maybe it's the plague. Or architecture, or Elizabeth. Who knows. One of the younger guys I met in the program, Darryl, wasn't that impressed with Wm., he says now he wants to go and meet Napoleon. He pulled his crystals before his time was up here and... well, it's actually kind of an amazing process, but right now I'm hungry so - later.
Private Diary
June 1, 1613 (around 8pm)
Dark! Man is it dark here!! How did people stand it! Fortunately, I brought a flash with me, but Mrs. Quickly reminded me I have to be very careful about using it, cuz if anybody sees me, I could literally be assumed to be a witch, and around this time, they f'ing BURN witches!! Seriously, they had a beheading today in the town (oh, btw, I'm in London). It was crazy. I didn't actually watch, I would definitely have puked, but I saw all the people following the cart that was carrying this poor guy - he was a total mess, all filthy and covered with blood and poop and stuff - and he was just crying. And all the people were following along like it was a rock concert or something. WTF. I'm really glad I don't live now. Then. Whatever. In spite of the bug stuff Dr. Lloyd injects into us before we step, I'm still getting bit. At least I won't get any horrible diseases.
Anyway, I said I'd explain about how there's people who can step and people who can't, and if you can, you can recognize other steppers. Some people never find out that they are, but somewhere along the way, one of the brainy types like Dr. Lloyd realized what was going on and managed to actually track the crystals. He says people have been moving in time forever, they just didn't know it, or people thought they were magicians or shamans or just plain crazy, and probably more than a few of them figured out how they could use it to get rich, or just have fun. The crystals are all over the place - like, floating, but they can jump time. Actually, they sort of want to move through space-time. So if you're one of us, they're attracted to you and sometimes they dig into your skin for a little while - and that's when you wake up two days ago. Seriously, it happened to me. Not a lot of time, but I'd be going along and suddenly realize I did all this before.
So, ok, the reason Dr. Lloyd could see me was he said I "sparkled." Sounds like that vampire thing, only it's subtle and we don't drink blood - ha. If you know what to look for you can see it, though I have to admit I'm not really tuned into that yet. Then he decides if he wants to tell you about it. There are a lot of guys like Dr. Lloyd, and they've turned the whole thing into a study, and sort of like a secret society. They don't want to freak anyone out, and they also don't want anybody trying to go back in time and cause trouble. And they definitely don't want it to be some kind of Dr. Evil super weapon. So they kind of test you, at least if you're older, and if you're a kid like me, they'll do some training and let you know that it's serious stuff - and if they don't teach you what to do you'll never get much further than a couple of weeks or maybe months on your own, anyway. And I figure they're really just getting to know you and decide whether or not you'd make a good member of the team. Turns out that there aren't all that many people who can handle this. There are people who attract the the crystals, and who jump around in time, but they hate it and they just think something's wrong. A little downer will shut the crystals up and keep most people stationary.
So, I'm in honors History (haha, believe it or not!), because you have to do a lot of studying if you want to go anywhere special. Some people with the crystals don't want to go anywhere - it's like you told them they have some disease, and they just don't want to know anything about it. But if you want to really work with it, and you're still a kid, you get a scholarship to a special school that trains you and helps you sort out if you want to go, where you want to go, and basically, where the crystals are pulling you. Out of the whole - seriously!! - whole world, there are only a few of us who get to go anywhere major, at least now that Dr. Lloyd and people like him have figured a lot of it out and kind of became the Time Police.
Dr. Lloyd says they haven't known about the crystals for that long. At some point in the last century - actually the late 1900s - they figured out that there were these crystals that they called time crystals, because the atoms didn't obey time - they flipped around. And some other guys figured out a way to use the energy, and then one thing led to another and pretty soon they realized that some living things sort of attracted the crystals, and once you had enough of them, they could drag you around in time. That's kind of what was happening to me before Dr. Lloyd found me. But he and his Genius Posse figured out a way to direct where you went, and then it was off to the races. They were really careful, though, because they figured it was just a matter of time before the "bad guys" would try to create a black market on crystals, or go back and set themselves up to be rich, or worst of all, go back and change history.
And the truth is, some people just step without any plan, or even knowing what they're doing. But that's a whole other subject - but it is kind of scary when you think about it. Just imagine, waking up in another when, and not know how you got there, or why - but everything looks different, and you have no idea why you're there. Ugh.
The trick, still, is that you can't leave any fingerprints on the past. That's what they call it - fingerprints. It just means you don't fuck with the timeline. So... we can bring some stuff with us, but we have to bring it back (there's also a cleanup crew that steps just before we go home so they're sure we bring everything back). And, we have to wipe our interactions. Well, we don't, the cleanup crew does. It's really pretty easy. They have an electromagnetic device, and they basically just... what? UNFOLD the brain part that was affected by our visit. So, these poor targets. Every so often, some person from the future drops in on them at some point, we study them, and then they get wiped and we go home and write about our visit. Not that we tell them anything, just we have to be careful that they don't get any inappropriate ideas.
Like, actually, a few guys did - DaVinci, and Sir Francis Bacon. Some Egyptian dude - that was actually a funny one. The first engineer who went back to find out how the Egyptians engineered the pyramids actually ended up leaving the "how-to" that gave the Egyptians the ideas they needed to build the pyramids. It was after that that we started to get really, really careful about wiping the past. I mean, that one ended up being harmless, but it could have caused like a serious anomaly. Well, that's not entirely true - whatever happened in the past happened. Some people have written papers about how paradoxes can't really happen because whatever might have been changed cause you stepped is changed - and if you went back, then you technically can't have erased your great-great-something or you never would have been and that's way over my head and too theoretical. I'm kind of more artistic, right? I just want to go back and act in some Shakespeare plays when they were first happening.
Granted, nothing much new comes of our visits. We haven't seen it all, but Dr. Lloyd made it a priority to have history types go back and they have done their best to be all over the past - I mean, like ALL over it, from the proto-humans all the way up to yesterday. They've met Nero and Jesus and one guy got killed by a big hairy hominid and boy was THAT a mess. I mean, he got his brains beat out in like 7 million B-fucking-C-E!! So his DNA was all over the place, and it took the cleanup crew a solid week to make sure nothing was left, and they had to be so careful not to kill any hominids in the process. (DNA doesn't matter once humans were modern humans, of course.) And who knows - maybe those hominids that saw the cleanup crew are the first ones who decided, shit, there must be a God or something, cuz the cleanup crews have all these amazing tools they use to make things dis-integrate.
Ok, I better finish up for tonight. Nothing much more to do but go to sleep, I guess. I'm serious when I say it's dark. The windows here are really, really small, and all they have for light are these stinky (I mean, they stink!!) candles and dishes of animal fat with a little wick in them. Yuck. I brought my iBrain to talk my notes into (we all do), so I've got books and stuff, but again - same problem - you don't want to get caught with something like that, so we're told to use it just for our notes, then put it back in its hiding place. So, g'night, ttyl.
June 2, 1613
I woke up early today and put on my smelly clothes. Haha. I actually am starting to smell like everybody here, which is probably a good thing, as I don't notice how bad it is so much now. Mrs. Quickly made me something to eat, but I'm SO craving some real food. They eat the most revolting stuff here. They do, thank God, have coffee! In fact, they have these little coffee houses where you can go and get a coffee for a penny (take, that, Starbucks!) and sit around and talk. No 'brains, of course, but all the "educated" folks go there and drink coffee and talk. Boy, do they talk! Of course, we all had to be trained in Elizabethan English before we came, so I've got my thee's and thou's all down to a science, and I can understand them just fine.
What's funny to me is they sound like old movies about Georgia or Arkansas or someplace, not like what we expect Brits to sound like. I had heard recordings, of course, but for whatever reason, they try to not expose us to a lot of Then before we go. I think it's some sort of Intellectual Purity endeavor. So to my ear, anyway, they sound like people speaking with a German-Southern accent, if you can wrap your head around that!
But back to food. They don't really do breakfast-lunch-dinner the way we do. Pretty much the same food is around for every meal, and a lot of it tastes like its way past its sell-by date. There's always meat, but that's cuz Mrs. Quickly is supposed to be a rich widow (she's actually one of us, but she's been here so long I guess she's one of "them," too!). Poor people don't get to eat a lot of meat, actually. Poor people don't get a lot of anything - but more about that, later. They love pie. Really big pie-eaters. Meat pie, sweet types (these are actually pretty good!), fish pie (gross). I guess anything that you can make and keep for a while without refrigeration (there are no fridges, duh!) is good. And they can carry pies around with them, but honest to God, picking bugs out of my food (which you do end up doing) is just disgusting! So anyway, breakfast could be anything from bread and cheese to meat pie to fruit and milk, and I do get to have coffee. So thank God for that but boy would I like a Vitamin Diet Coke.
Nothing, and I mean nothing is cold. Well, that wouldn't be true if it were winter, but they don't usually send us in the coldest months of the year cuz there's a lot more illness, and in spite of all the shots we get, it's still possible to pick up some germs when so many people are sick. And we'd get to see less just because it's harder to get around. And these people are so gross, like I told you, they pick their noses and wipe them on their clothes and they spit all over the place, and people pee on the street all the time, even women sometimes, and every once in a while you see someone pooping right there on the street, too. Yuck!! They are just so f'ing dirty it's hard to believe. Even the rich people have dirty clothes and hands - and they wear wigs a lot of them, because like Mrs. Quickly told me, they shave off all their body hair so they don't get so many lice. Lice!!
And bedbugs. Even tho Mrs. Quickly is, by this time's standards, a really clean person (she does have a secret store of some modern chemicals that we bring her, like bleach and soap and stuff), it's still impossible to keep all the bugs out. I mean, for one thing, we sleep on straw! No shit! That took some getting used to.
They get a big bunch of straw, and pound on it to make it kind of soft, and then they fill a sack - we have linen, but I would guess that poor people don't even have a sack - and that's your mattress. It makes all kinds of noise when you turn over, and unless you've done a really good job pounding it, it can be very prickly, but needless to say, it's straw, so there are gonna be bugs in it, and they do escape from the sack. And they're also in the thatch on the roofs of a lot of houses, and they get on your clothes... it's sort of a losing battle.
And of course these people don't have the bug shots that we get, so not only are the bugs not being actively repelled, but they can get all kinds of diseases, like bubonic plague!! - seriously!! - from bug bites. And of course you walk down the street and everybody's faces and arms have bug bites along with the dirt and totally gross-out teeth.
We bring our toothbrushes, but all these people have are sticks they use to clean their teeth, and there's not a lot of tooth-cleaning going on, anyway, so there are all these crooked and missing and black - I mean it, black! - teeth.
Women Mrs. Quickly's age - about 35 or so - they don't have any teeth at all a lot of them. They say "for every baby, a tooth," cuz I guess that having a baby uses up some calcium or something. But there are women who have little babies in their arms and a toddler hanging on their skirts and then they have three teeth left! Weird.
Ok, time for me to go. They're doing a production of MacBeth at the Globe Theater, and Wm. is supposed to actually be there. It's a command performance - MacBeth isn't a new play, and generally speaking, they like to do new plays over old ones - it makes them more money. And they have plays during the day - I mean, think about it - that would be an amazing number of candles and lanterns and things when you do a play in the dark!, so, I have to get over there by the afternoon. And you can't get from here to there real fast when there aren't any cars or buses or even bicycles, for God's sake!
If you know where the Globe Theater was, Mrs. Quickly's town home is on the other side of the river. She has an estate in the country outside of town - where a lot of the "posh" people live - but she spends most of her time in London handling the crystal people. To get to the Globe, we walk or take - which is sort of like a box attached to poles that a couple of big guys carry - to the Thames River. Then we hire a boat and we go across and land on a dock not far from the Globe.
See, Mistress Quickly is in an interesting spot. She's from the future, but she came back before Dr. Lloyd started his experiments, and she got stuck here. Nobody's quite sure how or why but she can't move. She can't go back to her time, and she can't come to our time - to Dr. Lloyd's time. But the thing is with Steppers, they know each other. I mean, like I told you, most of us, yeah, well, we sparkle with the crystals. But Mistress Quickly, she was invisible to other Steppers because she lost her crystals. Dr. Lloyd is working on a theory about that, but he hasn't said anything yet. Oh! Speaking of that - we talk back and forth with the future. Well, not really talk-talk, but we leave communications for each other. It's really kind of obvious in a weird way once you think about it. There's a spot we pick where we leave messages for the future, in a box that we put into a spot we know exists in the future. Somebody on the team checks a few times a day at the sites where they have stepper visiting, and then on this side of time, there's a day tripper who comes through with things for Mistress Quickly, or with messages or things like that.
Anyway, Mistress Quickly recognized some of the steppers and eventually got up the courage to ask one of them "when" they were from. Turns out she's from the 1960s or so - so way before my time. But she didn't know what to do, cause like I said she was stuck here without crystals, and she was running out of options. Women in this time don't have a lot of options, it turns out. If they don't have money, or a husband or father or protector, they can be servants or sell themselves on the street. So the stepper she approached turned out to be one of Dr. Lloyd's team, and when they realized she was from the future but stuck in the past, they figured they had to find all the Stucks. They figured it would be easier for them if they had someone here, so they started a whole program to find people in some of the "nexuses" of time, places they wanted to study or times that were popular with visitors. Needless to say, Elizabethan times, around Shakespeare's life, was a very popular tourist spot!
And here's the other interesting thing: there are a lot of people lost in time. Dr. Lloyd is working hard to find them, but the team is small because Dr. Lloyd doesn't want to take any chances. Turns out the time paradox theory is probably not correct, like, you can't go back and kill your great-great-great grandfather, because if you could, then you'd never have been alive to go back and kill your ancestor (as if that makes any sense), but says he's not counting on it. Meanwhile, Mistress Quickly was established as a wealthy widow of a planter from the New World who returned home with her brother. Now she receives visitors from the future and helps them navigate the past. She's ok here, all in all, but there's something sad about her. People have tried to help her catch a new batch of crystals, but you can't feed someone yours, and nobody can get them unless the crystals want to be gotten - more or less.
Anyway, Mistress Quickly doesn't keep many servants - because that would just be a pain, under the circumstances - so she has a few for her town house, and hires temporary help when she goes shopping or to an entertainment or something. She has a story about difficult health that gets her out of a lot of the socializing and servant hiring she'd normally have to do.
Anyway, to get to the Globe, we have to get down to the river, and then we get a boat to take us over to the landing near the theater. If we had to walk, we'd go down to the river, hang a left, and keep walking til we got to London Bridge. Over the bridge - more about that later - and then take a right and look for the flags over the theaters til we see the Globe's.
Later!
June 3, 1613
Wow, that was totally different! I mean, we're studying Shakespeare's era, obviously, so I've seen a lot of his plays, and I've seen "the Scottish play" about four times, and this was completely different.
So first, the theater: like I said, it's called The Globe, and it's this big, I don't know, maybe 100 feet? in diameter, more or less circular building the floor space is about 300 feet in circumference. One side is all what looks like box seats, and the other is the stage area - it's got a thrust stage, which is a stage that actually extends out into the audience. The floor of the theater is just this big pit thing where all the poorer people stand. They stand up, the whole time, and this is like four hours or something. OMG. And they eat and talk the whole time, too, which is really bizarre, and a little annoying. Anyway, there's no roof over the pit part. The rich people sit up in the box seat area (where I actually was able to sit, which was quite cool).
I guess it costs a penny to stand in the pit, and I'm not sure what Mrs. Quickly paid for my entrance, all I know is I was sitting in a wooden chair in one of the boxes with her, and there was a family there with us who seemed to know her pretty well. They weren't from our time, though, that's for certain.
So, it was like seeing MacBeth for the first time, totally. For one thing, none of it was cut. I mean, nothing. And this sucker is loooong. And I love the play, I really do, but come on! My butt was so sore by the end, and I totally had to pee but there is NO way I'm going to the outhouses where all those pit-people were going, and then they had these screen and a bucket up in the stalls for us, but again, no way in hell I'm doing that, either. So I just bit my lip and crossed my legs.
But I have to say they had quite the special effects going for them. Not exactly like today, but they did have people - the ghosts - flying in from the ceiling (it's called "the heavens, and it's even painted to look that way). And the scene with the three witches on the moors - that was pretty fucking amazing. Fireworks, and whatever they were doing to make thunder. The whole thing was almost as good as Saw 22.
Ok, then the other thing was, of course, all the actors are men. I mean, I knew that, but it still was kind of surprising. One of the more surprising parts was that I think I'd always envisioned the men-playing-women thing as kind of like Late Trans in our day, but they weren't. Some of them if I hadn't known better I would have sworn they really were women. After a while, I forgot all about it and just went with it. Maybe it would bother me more in a play like, say, Romeo and Juliet? I'm not sure. I'll see that, too, before I leave, if I can.
Oh, in case I haven't told you - I'm scheduled to be here for a couple of months. I mean, we go to all the trouble of getting prepped, so they try to give us as much time as they reasonably can. Trained adults can step for years at a time, but then, they're professionals. It does make you wonder what it would be like to take up that profession, and that's partly why Dr. Lloyd recruits people with crystals. Honestly, there are so many other time periods I'd love to visit - the Civil War, I'd love to meet the real Ghengis Khan. But actually, that's not all that possible. See, one of the limitations of stepping is your looks. That is to say, you have to blend. So, here I am a blue-eyed blond girl, so there are places and times I just can't go. Here is ok cause I'm in the middle of a lot of blue-eyed blonds, and I have a woman who acts like my Aunt or cousin or whatever, so I'm safe. But I couldn't go to pre-Columbian Mexico, for example, cuz I'd stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Now, there are a handful of really dedicated steppers who've gotten plastic surgery so they could go and spend time in a particular time period and place - like, they got their eyes done and their skin dyed so they could go live in China in the year 1 or something. But that's pretty radical, and naturally, nobody my age is gonna go there. So, you are limited in your choices of authors to one who lived in a place where you'll not look too odd. Of course, for all the more modern writers, even 19th, 20th, and 21st century writers, it really doesn't matter much cuz people were all mixed up by then, more or less.
And of course, there's the language. If you're really going to step, it's hard enough - even with sleep-learn - to adopt a reasonably good version of English. But if you're talking Egyptian, for God's sake. I can't imagine what it was like for the first people who went there. They were guessing what it sounded like, for sure. Well, actually, there's more to that story: the first few people who went to any of those really remote periods just went with recorders. They had to go grab handfuls of language, costume, any sense input so that they could come back to Real Time and extrapolate. Otherwise, anybody who went to really study the period would be really at risk. There are stories in the dorms about people who got left where they were because somehow they figured out that whatever they did, they had to stay in that time stream. I can't even begin to imagine.
Ok, so back to the theater. The other thing that was really, really different is that they just kept going - there was no mingle/drink/pee break in the middle. And their style of acting was just bizarro. All these postures and I don't know, it seemed so formal somehow.
Nowadays actors try so hard to be natural. To say and do things so that you get no hint that they're acting. Like you're just eavesdropping on their conversations, and like the words are just spilling out of them the way we talk without planning what we're going to say. Back then it was more like, what, like giving a speech. The comedy parts were silly - lots of falling down and farting and rude stuff - but the serious parts were - well, my teacher talked one time about actors "declaiming," and that's really more what they were doing. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it was too long and a little too stagey for me, on the whole.
Anyway, Wm. was there. But man, he doesn't exactly look like I expected. I would maybe have recognized him from his portraits, believe it or not - kinda big nose, balding, longish hair. A little out of shape looking, but then people did all kinds of things to help nature with what they thought they should look like. So they padded their stomachs and shoulders and, yeah... and omg, he really was wearing an earring. Seriously. Cool little hoop in one ear.
Of course, everybody dresses very cool in this time period, even if their clothes are smelly. Well, I should amend that. The rich people wear cool clothes. The poor people wear nasty smelly rags. I mean, rags. Lots of people are barefoot, but some people have their feet wrapped up in rags. And some people just walk around in these sort of sacks of really rough cloth - kind of like a burlap bag - maybe tied in the middle. And that is it. They must f'ing freeze in the winter. (Mrs. Quickly pointed out to me that there actually are a lot of people missing fingers and toes where they got frostbit and rotted off. Gross.)
But the rich people, or richer people wear all these cool fabrics, like lace and brocade. Unless of course you're a Puritan, and then you were very plain, dark clothes with a collar. Lots of collars on everyone, but if you're rich it's more likely to be lace or something. Or ruffs - now, that, I think looks amazingly stupid. These funny starched clown collars. What is that all about? Well, I guess you could say what are our hologram t's all about now? Just fashion, I guess. But like I never got the huge pants from around 2010 - I mean, how uncomfortable to walk around just holding your pants up! - I don't really get the ruff. At least our hologram t's are comfy, even if you do have to charge them now and again.
Anyway. I'm tired, so I'm gonna stop now, even though I haven't gotten to the best part. I'll just give you a hint: his name is James.
May 2, 2010
I saw James again today! (James is related to the deVeres and is an actor)
He was loitering outside Mrs. Quickly's house when we went to the market. He bowed and tipped his hat to us, and then walked with us to the market, but then he had to leave.
Ok, wait, let me back up: James is this truly delicious boy I met at the theater yesterday. I know, I know, no fraternizing is the rule for stepping. But honest to God, he is so cute, and hardly smells at all, and his teeth are even clean and pretty! And he kept looking at me instead of at the play. Now, you gotta understand - in my time I'm only a sort-of good looking girl. I'm not one of the more popular ones. I'm not a loser, but I'm not one of the beautiful set, either.
So, at home I attract the middle-of-the-road boys, too. I mean, they really want the beautiful girls, or the sluts, but they end up dating us "so-sos." What's really funny is that most of the beautiful girls are actually beautiful cuz they've had plastic surgery - nose jobs, boob jobs, chin implants. It's all pretty cheap these days - or, those days! haha, I'm not sure how I should refer to it! - but my mom won't let me or my sister get any until we're legally adults. Jeesh. Every once in a while she goes into this religious rant but, never mind, more about that another time. Doesn't she remember how it felt to be in high school?? And not be one of the cool crowd? I mean, this is my one and only high school experience, and it really, really sux to have to live with small boobs and a just-ordinary face. I think if I got my lips done I'd be more than halfway pretty. My eyes are really blue and big enough, and my nose is pretty ordinary. I've got freckles, but not really ugly big coppery ones like Cheryl's, so that's ok.
My hair is one of my better features, and I wear it very long so I didn't even have to get extensions or anything for coming back here (women pretty much all wore their hair long in this time period, or else totally shaved off and with a wig). Unmarried women (me!) could wear their hair loose unless they were Puritans (who wore it all tied up and hidden under a bonnet). So I get to shake my hair around a lot, just to tease the boys. Haha.
But here, in this time period, I'm one of the pretty ones. Besides my hair - which, due to regular conditioning is in ultra-great shape - I've got excellent teeth (my mom did allow braces, thank God!), very clear skin (other than the freckles), and a very nice shape (other than the smallish boobs, but here in this time period, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Here, you want a small waist, and that I've got!).
But James seemed to like it. My hair, I mean. He was sitting a couple of chairs over, with his family - mom, dad, three kids all somewhere in their teens, I'd guess. Two boys and a girl. The girl, she didn't seem to be all that excited to see me. She kept looking at me too, except she was giving me that "who the fuck are you?" stare. And giving her brother that "don't even think about it" look. She was actually very pretty in an extremely Anglo-Saxon way: red-gold hair, high-bridged, slightly broad nose, full lips, round face. Maybe a little on the big-boned side, but not fat or anything. She was probably used to being the prettiest girl at the prom, so she no-doubt didn't like it that here was another girl right in her territory, and that girl had clear skin, good teeth and really pretty hair. Ha. Well, I'm not used to being one of the prettiest ones, either, so, too bad, chiquita! I was enjoying this!
So, even though I really had to pay attention to the MacBeth, and also keep an eye on Wm. Shakespeare (after all, that's why I was here!) I was stealing glances at James as often as possible, and every single time I did, there he was, looking at me. Cool.
Before we left, Mrs. Quickly (who I am pretty sure picked up on this vibe between me and James) introduced me to the DeVere's. Yes, that DeVere, believe it or not. But a cousin. The dad, Robert, was a cousin of Henry, the bi-guy. Robert, on the other hand, was pure hetero, judging by the way he looked at me and every other woman - Mrs. Quickly, included - who came within 20 feet of him. His eyes went straight to the bust, then to the face, little bit of time on the eyes and then to the mouth, then back to the bust. Talk about obvious! But he was, I gotta admit, a handsome man. It was clear where James got his good looks.
So there was the dad, Robert. I never heard the mom's name because women's names don't get mentioned. Just Mrs. or Mistress or Miss or whatever. Unless you're a girl - like me - in which case your name would be said. So James did get to hear that my name is Miranda.
So, James' brother is Francis, and his sister is Kate.
When you meet someone new in this time period, girls have to curtsy. It's kind of cool in a way. But you have to learn this whole protocol: the depth of the curtsy depends on the significance of the personage you are meeting. Or, that's how my teacher, Professor Cantor, put it. Just by-the-by (that's an old English expression, by-the-by, cute, huh?), we call our teachers Professor now, cuz of the old Harry Potter books series! Even though they're not really Professors, a bunch of kids back in the 2020s started calling their teachers Professor cuz that's what they call them in the Harry Potter books, so some kids though it'd be cool to call their teachers Professor, and it just kind of stuck. So, there you go, a little trivia.
Anyway, back to the curtsy. Now the problem for a stepper is that we don't really know who's who in this era. I mean, we do get schooled quite a bit about the period we're going into, so that we understand the basic manners and all, and we have a "handler, " (that would be Mrs. Quickly for me) who is with us pretty much 24/7 when we're out and about, but there is still quite a bit we don't know - for example, all the ranks of all the nobility. There are so many degrees of importance in this social order that we just don't have in ours. This duke and that duke aren't necessarily the same in terms of importance. So I'd curtsy a little more to this duke than that one, and if it was the king, well, it would be a total drop to the floor curtsy with a head bow.
So, I watched Mrs. Quickly very carefully when she curtsied to get the feel of how far I should go, and then, cuz I'm younger, made it just a teensy bit deeper for Mr. Robert DeVere; about the same as Mrs. Quickly did for Mrs., and even-steven for the kids (who were all within a year or two of my age). James is the younger brother, and Francis is the oldest kid. So it's Francis (about maybe 19?) then his sister, (17 or 18) and then James (who's about 16 or 17). It's a bit hard to tell how old someone is in this time period, too. They seem to grow up a lot faster than we do - and grow old a lot faster, too! I mean, my mom and dad look like kids compared to the DeVere's. Especially her. She looks mad and mean and wrinkled. He has a lot of lines and grey hair, but he's got all his hair and he's not fat - in fact, he's got quite the body. And, as I said, a real handsome face.
The boys, of course, bow, which I have found I really, really like. I'd love to bring that custom home!
Anyway, we all chatted it up a little, and of course it became known that I was visiting Mrs. Quickly from a small town in "the north." And the DeVere's said they wanted us to come and dine with them "on Wednesday next" when they would be having a small gathering, and Mrs. Quickly said that would be "most pleasant," and so we said goodbye (which is, of course, God be with you), and went off, cuz I still hadn't had a chance to listen to Mr. Shakespeare at all.
Now, in those days a lady might go to buy supper in a public house when she was traveling, but she didn't typically go unaccompanied into a "pub" as a matter of course. So fortunately, Mrs. Quickly had a "brother," who was really another operative from the future, Mike (Reginald). They had to be really, really and I do mean really careful about how they behaved in public, because if anybody'd ever heard them talking to one another out of character well, they would have had to step forward in a big hurry.
So, Mike went with us and we went out for a meal.
And that's when I finally got up close to Wm. Shakespeare.
May 3, 1610
So, what can I tell you about a public house? Smelly, noisy, the floor is covered with rushes plus all manner of food and spit and dog shit and other putrid things; there is sometimes music (whether from people singing or sometimes someone playing an instrument); lots of beer and ale drinking (some wine, too, but really that's reserved for the wealthier people). Yes, there are "wenches," which are basically bar-sluts who take a "copper" and go out back with some smelly, toothless guy for a literal roll in the hay (yuck, I hope they change the hay now and then, haha). And there are a lot of drunk people. So, all in all, a lot like your modern bar!
You can buy drinks, you can gamble, you can get a meal (in most of them). So we bought bread, cheese, a "joint" (which is basically a roast something, like beef or pig or mutton), and wine. People drink a lot in this time period, but one of the reasons is nothing more than sanitation. Water isn't really safe - the alcohol kills any bugs in the drinkables, so that's safer to have. People drink cider, too, both sweet and hard.
When you get your cheese, you usually have to cut the mold off the outside. But that's ok, that's just cheese. The meat is usually reasonably fresh, and even though it's not the soft, white Wonder Bread type bread if today, the bread is very tasty and fresh - they bake just about every day in 1610.
In fact, one of the few good smells about this time is the daily bread baking. Mrs. Quickly has a few serving girls - I think among them they have an IQ of 50, but they are big and strong and work hard and don't ask a lot of questions. A couple of them is before we wake up and stokes up the fire and bakes bread and starts breakfast and empties chamber pots and that sort of thing. Another is more of a wash up and clean type, she washes dishes and sweeps. There's a cook, and a girl who dresses us and stands around to run errands. We live in a town house, so there are no real chores other than keeping house. Mrs. Quickly supposedly was left her fortune by a husband who had ships and they lived on one of his estates in the Indies, and then he died and she sold off everything and returned to England. She has a "son" who arrives to visit every so often, and another "brother," who has an estate "on the continent," and he also visits from time to time. B(why mistress Q has chosen to stay)
All of us, Mike (Reginald, Reginald... I have to remember to call him Reginald, even to myself, or I'm going to forget), Mrs. Quickly, and the serving girls, live in the townhouse, and Mike tends to all Mrs. Quickly's business and protection needs, while the girls take care of the maintenance of the home. That leaves Mrs. Quickly to look out for her pupils, and conduct her own study of the period, which is actually focused on the history of medicine. Mike was studying musicology, so when he wasn't busy making contacts and putting on a good show for the town, he was learning all he could for his studies. He stays in this time for six months or a year, goes back to see Dr. Lloyd and check in for a little while, then back he comes.
Nobody in this time period has much "stuff," at least, not the way we think about stuff. As I mentioned before, the average person is lucky to have a single pair of shoes, let alone the 40 or 50 that I have in my closet back home. Most fine ladies have only a handful of dresses (even if they do have pearls and things sewn into them!), and most of the rooms look downright bare by our standards. Glass is precious, so windows and mirrors and things like that are scarce; tables and chests and so on are heavy and dark and sturdy - but there are usually only a few items in any room.
Furniture isn't upholstered - God what I wouldn't give for a nice recliner or sofa sometimes!! You get serious butt-ache in this time period! - and like I said, floors are either plain wood, or strewn with straw and herbs and stuff to minimize the smells and catch hold of the wet spills.
So, anyway, there we were in the pub, and we'd told the serving man what we wanted, and who walks in but Mr. Wm. Shakespeare himself? He had a whole posse of friends with him - men and boys, no women - and they were all laughing and talking and carrying on the way all those "theater" people do. It's the same now: we've got a bunch of aspiring ac-tors in our school, and they all hang out together and act theatrical. Very self-conscious and posy and all. It's obnoxious.
So, here's Wm., looking, as I said, older and more tired than I'd have pictured (I mean, the guy was only 52 or so when he died, making him about 46 now, but he looked a lot older than my friend's dads, who are about the same age). And he's got all these gay guys and probably-not-gay guys (from the way they were checking out the women) with him, most of them extraordinarily good-looking, well-dressed and sexy.
Mrs. Quickly knew her job: she is acquainted with Wm., and part of her job is to be sure her charges get at least one conversation with the great man. Granted, it's easier when this student is a boy, but Wm. is, from what I can gather from my short conversation with him last night, a very affable man. Mrs. Quickly "spotted" the playwright, and had "her brother" go over to extend our compliments. He, Wm., of course, then had to come over the greet her, which he did. (Mrs. Quickly is a patron of the theater, so she always gets special attention.)
I was introduced, and for one in my mouthy life found it hard to make sentences. I mean for fuck's sake, this is Wm. Shakespeare, in the flesh!! I mumbled something about having seen MacBeth and enjoying it, and he thanked me and there was some witty stuff between him and Mrs. Quickly about my visit and then we were headed back to our table. But not before Mrs. Quickly had arranged for me to be present at a rehearsal for Merry Wives. Wm. had written this play in 1602, so it wasn't new, but it was a favorite. And it featured a character named after Mrs. Quickly.
The truth is, I don't know exactly what their relationship is, but my... whatever she is, guardian?... and Wm. are good friends, and know one another rather better than it's usual to do in this day and age. I'm not suggesting anything funny is going on, Wm. is married, after all but ... he (Wm.) was clearly really happy to see Mrs. Quickly, and she was really happy to see him.
Now here was the really odd thing: when Wm. met me, he acted a little weird. First he acted startled - and let me tell you, I'm not the kind of girl who startles 40-something men because I'm so drop-dead good looking. Like I said, I'm good enough, and a little better than good-enough for this time period, but it's not like I'm driving anyone crazy with lust or anything. But it wasn't that kind of startled, anyway.
When he kissed my hand (he did, how cool is that?), he held it for a long time, and he looked at me as if he was trying to remember where he'd seen me before or something. It was almost creepy.
And he said, "Another protegee, Mistress Quickly?"
And she said, "Indeed, sir," and then she said something about "Having told you about this one," and he said, "Is that so?" And then he stared at me again, and I swear to God it looked as if he was going to cry.
The other interesting news is that at this rehearsal there was also going to be some reading of Wm.'s newest, which wasn't complete yet, but he was busy working on it. Or... Henry DeVere was!
May 4, 1610
James was at the rehearsal!!! OMG!!! Can I tell you I thought I was going to faint? I mean, it's hard enough not to faint with these crazy corsets women wear - and all the jackets and layers and stuff - but he's so cute I literally lost my breath!
What can I tell you about him? Dark hair, kind of long (sort of like from the 1960s, almost, which period I really love, and I considered going back to meet a Beatle, but eventually settled on Wm.), with these huge dark brown eyes and lashes out to there. Very perfect features: straight nose, just slightly large (just the way I like it!) and he's tall. That's one thing I've got to tell you: men in this time period are not very tall. Well, neither are women. Everybody is small all over compared to us - even these people, many of whom are Danes or Angles or Saxons, so they tend to be on the larger side for the times. But still, a six foot tall man is like a man 6'4" would be now. Most of them are more like 5'8" or so (the men), and about 5'2" for women. At 5'6" I'm very tall, but not a freak.
Anyway, he's clearly handsome, and even more clearly, he's interested in me. Why, I don't know. I can't seem to get out of the way of my own tongue around these people, so I don't say much for fear of saying something stupid. And if one thing is true in this period, it's that people love to show off their wits. They have a very flowery way of talking, and they love puns and word play. Men and women. The wealthier people are reasonably well-educated, and often speak more than one language, frequently including Latin (even though the Protestant Reformation was long since over, and Henry VIII's establishment of the Church of England well-entrenched, the erudite - yeah, I know a few big words! - actually still learned Latin). Of course, Elizabeth I was on the throne right now, which did a lot for women's rights. Haha. No, I'm actually serious. Women in this period were actually expected to be able to talk, read, play music - do something besides make babies. Granted, it's not like they were running businesses or having babies on their own (well, that's not entirely true, either!), but still, if I'd had to do it, I could have lived in this time frame without too much pain (other than the smells, the bugs, and the latrines).
So actually, meeting James again this time, and it being very clear that we were interested in one another, I started to worry about two things: getting caught, and wondering if kissing would be a smelly, disgusting proposition, given the oral hygiene of 1610.
On that subject, I decided not to worry about it, and if I got the chance, I was going to kiss the boy. On the other subject, I didn't know what to think.
Fraternization was absolutely forbidden to high schools students. It was frowned upon for everybody - grad students, historians, and vacationers - but we were told that on no uncertain terms we were forbidden to go beyond surface friendships with anyone in this historic time period. We were told to avoid situations in which we were might be alone with anyone - even someone of our own age and sex. The notion was that we were too unsophisticated and not well-trained enough to avoid possible mistakes. So we were to keep a handler with us at all times, who could cover for us if we screwed up.
Every time we left our house, Mrs. Quickly did a complete search of me, to be sure that I had nothing incriminating on my person. She even checked to be sure I wasn't doing something like shaving my armpits, for God's sake! (Though if I wanted to shave my entire self, that would have been acceptable - which, needless to say, few of my age group ever decided to do!) She made sure I had no lip gloss or electronic devices, aspirin, even tampons! (I was allowed to use these in the house, but if we were out, just in case of some accident or something, I had to resort to the "clouts" that women used in those days. Yuk and double-yuck!! This is the one thing that made me happy I only had a month in-period, so I could have max two periods.)
James was actually waiting for me when we arrived at the theater. Just pacing back and forth, watching the door, and trying to look nonchalant.
Mrs. Quickly, Mike (I have to remember to call him Reginald) and I arrived in a flurry of greetings and gloves (gloves were very big in those days among the gentry). Wm., busy watching a silly scene from Merry Wives in which his Mistress Quickly is sitting on a laundry basket with Falstaff hiding inside while she distracts her husband, spotted us and came over and greeted us - greeted Mrs. Quickly - warmly, and led us to a bench in the pit.
So anyway, as I told you, the company is doing another old play tomorrow, Merry Wives, so they just did a quick run through. Actors are expected to have amazing memories - and then they have these guys who give cues. It's actually kind of funny. You can hear them, even see them sometimes, but nobody seems to mind. From what Mrs. Quickly has told me, they don't even finish writing the play sometimes til it's up on stage - so the actors don't even know how it's going to end. Bizarre.
My heart did a little drop and spin when I saw James standing by the bench. He was talking to an older man - who was introduced to me as his uncle, Henry DeVere. He's as handsome as his brother - I guess good looks run in the DeVere family. But he's more, what? Self-consciously good looking?Polished looking?
A little aside about Henry DeVere. There has been so much argument over the years about who wrote Shakespeare's plays and poems. The old argument used to be that an ordinary guy like Wm., an actor, couldn't possibly have the inside knowledge of court, the Latin, the intimate scoop on making war and weaponry, all the stuff that anyone who wrote all those poems and plays would have had to have had.
So scholars started to compare texts and try to see if all the material attributed to Shakespeare sounded like it came from the same guy. A lot of people thought it was at least partly Sir Francis Bacon, and then along came one man who said it was Edward DeVere. It was sort of like all the arguing that went on about who was really Jack the Ripper, or who was the real Franklin Rimbaud, that rock guy from the late 2030s who never showed his face.
Anyway, once we started stepping we found out once and for all that it was Henry, a sort of by-blow cousin of the main branch of the DeVere family (that would be Edward) who worked with Wm., and was in fact Wm.'s part-time boyfriend. They wrote some of the romances, and almost all of the comedies together.
You know, it's funny, but there's something sad about being able to actually go back and find out the truth about a lot of historic mysteries. Leaves you with that much less to talk about!
Speaking of talking - that was awkwardly put, huh? But just a "point of order" as Professor Cantor would say, when I try to repeat conversations I had with people, I'm not going to write them in ye olde Englishe! It's just too much of a pain. For one thing, they use way too many words to say something. For another, there is no one spelling (or, spelyng) or anything. People just sort of made it up as they went along. So trying to report the conversations the way they happened is almost like trying to translate French. So from now on, you're just going to get the jist of what everyone said, and not the poetry. It's kind of a shame, too, cuz they really do speak "prettily." That's what they'd say in this era, "prettily." But a pox on it (haha), I'm just gonna try to remember the basic flow of the conversation.
We had to spend about a year in class learning to speak and understand what's called "early modern English," or Renaissance English.This is another limitation in stepping. Historians can go just about anywhere they're prepared to go, and even they have to have covers - like, being deaf, or whatever, til they can get the accent of, say, 1000 in Spain. Vacationers and High School students and that sort of thing have to limit themselves to periods of time and places where we've got a reasonable sense of the language.
Of course, linguists have the job of recording speech throughout history, so we're getting a bigger and bigger library of languages through time. It's pretty amazing how languages tend to move forward in the mouth over time. You know, like from the grunts and snarls of the protos to us kids, who are sort of back to grunts and snarls, but it's more just very rapid talking without a lot of moving our lips and teeth and stuff. Our parents and teachers are all over us about it, but, hey, language e-f-ing-volves, right?
Speaking of fuck - well, the word, not the action! It's a pretty popular word in 1610, too! In fact, these people are pretty crude in their speech in general. Piss and shit and fuck are all pretty common words. I guess that's part of the reason my own speaking and writing - which were always kinda full of what my mom would call "vulgarities" - is even more so now!
So, ok. There we were at the theater, and Wm. and Henry had just finished fixing up the scene from Merry Wives, and then another bunch of actors who had been swirling around, they got up on the stage, and Wm. started to tell them about this new one - The Tempest.
Huh? There's no Shakespeare play called The Tempest! It has something to do with a magician and a monster and a shipwreck, but he sounds a little vague about the whole thing. But I'm guessing it never gets written, because I had to study all of Wm.'s plays before I came here, and that's not one of them!
May 5, 1610
So, something is going on between Mrs. Quickly and Wm. I woke up late last night and heard them whispering loudly, like your parents do when they think they're hiding an argument. Right. I held very still and tried hard to listen, but I was only making out every fourth word or so. But here's the really weird thing: it sounded like my English, not Wm.'s.
So what's the game? They're lovers and Mrs. Q is jealous of Henry? I know, I know, no fraternization. As if the older steppers actually paid attention to that! After all, if you're going to be stuck in the past for years and years, you're going to want a little... entertainment, right? As long as you're cool about it, and don't get into any serious trouble, so what?
Of course, who am I to talk? I'm totally head over heels with Mr. James deVere, and I couldn't do anything about that now if I tried. What I'm gonna do when the time comes to go home... well, that's what they make anti-Venus drugs for, right? I just hope my mom doesn't object to me taking some, cuz I have a feeling I'm gonna need them.
So anyway, they (Mrs. Q and Wm.) argued, er, whispered for about fifteen minutes or so, and then I turned over to try to hear better, and Mrs. Q heard the straw in my bed and said, "Hush!" and that was that. But I've got to figure out what's going on there.
Other than that, my day was routine today. Here's how it goes, just in case you want to know. We wake up relatively early. Actually, people sleep and wake a lot more with the daylight here than we do - since they don't have lights, and since light is expensive (beeswax candles are really expensive, so we can have some, but most people burn tallow, which is made from animal fat and like everything else in this era, stinks!), they do things by daylight as much as they can.
One of the things you notice here is how much more of people's life is spent outdoors. That's at least partly because they want to be able to see what they're doing! A lot of shops are really stalls, and a good part of the reason is for light. I always wondered when I'd see ancient paintings with a woman sitting outside her house sewing - what the heck? Why was she doing that? Well, now I know. She was trying to f-ing see!
They sat by fires, and near windows, but I've already pointed out that the windows are pretty small, and don't let in a lot of light. And then the cities are built with overhanging second floors, often, which makes the downstairs even darker. I guess the upside is you can't make out the bugs crawling over somebody's clothing as easily...
Ok, so, we wake up with the sun, and instead of running to a nice clean, modern bathroom, we trot over to a corner of our room and use a chamber pot. Yeah, gick! I still have a hard time letting one of the maid servants empty it, but then, they typically just toss it out the window anyway. There is a cesspit beneath our house, but the servants don't always go down there - and to be honest, who would? It's revolting. But the street isn't a whole lot better! Henry passed a law about sewers, but from where I'm sitting it can't be too well enforced. The law is basically that every home-owner is responsible for the area right in front of the house, pushing all the crap (haha) into the ditch. But there's so much of it, and there's trash and dead dogs and garbage and animal poo and chamber pot contents and what not - even the occasional dead person! - so it doesn't take more than a couple of heavy rains and this whole bad, bad, bad soup is running all over the street and sometimes even right into houses.
No wonder people don't get to be a lot older than 50, even if they look it.
You'd think I don't have a lot to talk about except disgusting body subjects, but honestly, so much of our day is spent just trying to do things that at home take me fifteen minutes. Imagine just trying to get enough of your clothes adjusted so you can use a chamber pot! Well, not so much when you first get up because we pretty much wear, literally, a night dress to bed. But once you've got on a corset and farthingale...
Well, let me start at the beginning. Mary, my aunt's maid comes in to my room with a warm drink at eight or so. She opens the curtains, sometimes humming a little tune - how she stays so cheerful with all she has to do is beyond me - and once she's sure she's waked me up, she props me up in bed with my tea or coffee - she can't understand why I prefer coffee in the mornings - and then she lays out my clothes.
"Where are you off to today, Mistress?" she'll ask. This will determine what she pulls out of my wardrobe. It's not as if I have the choices I do at home
First, you have this long smock or chemise or whatever. This is just a long linen gown, like a nightgown, with a drawstring top. We've supposedly got some money, so Mrs. Q and I have pretty ones with a little lace trim. You basically don't change this all that often, so they get a little crusty over time. The chemise has big, long, drapey sleeves.
Then you lace up a corset over that, which goes under the boobs and down to the waist. This holds up your chest and cinches in your waist. Well, actually, more like your rib cage, but anyway.
Then the farthingale, which is sort of a hooped underskirt, or maybe a bum roll (literally, a roll - it kind of made the skirt stick out at the back so that it had a shape). Then a busk to hold the corset in place, and then your dress. Get the picture? I've got way too many clothes on already, and I'm not nearly done.
Then a decorative petticoat, then your bodice, overskirt and sleeves, and then a thing called a stomacher, sort of a triangular vest-front that's all decorated - if you can afford it.
Then shoes, which are sort of like open-backed high heels. And of course you have to wear some sort of headgear - and sometimes a collar, though I usually just went with jewelry. There are all kinds of headdresses - hats and hoods and veils and whatnot, depending on what you're going to be doing. And gloves. And capes. Luckily, it's getting warm so we don't have the added problem of being cold, and since it's not summer yet I'm not cooking my ass off, but seriously, I can't imagine trying to wear all this stuff in summer!
So you have to do all this - of course, the maids help because otherwise it would be a month before you ever got dressed, let alone went anywhere. And you have to wash up the best you can, and try to brush your teeth (well, we cheat and bring toothbrushes, but we have to be very careful about using them), and all the rest.
Meanwhile, we haven't even had breakfast yet.
Lots of ladies have breakfast in their rooms, but Mrs. Q and I get together in the morning. She usually meets with Reginald, and they go over anything they have to deal with to keep the house running, and then she tells me what our plan is for the day, which usually includes some sort of educational dealio for me, and maybe some research for her, and then whatever social obligations she's gotta fulfill, like calling on some acquaintance, or going to the market.
Because Mrs. Q's research is in medicine, she spends a lot of time messing around in her stillroom, and cultivating some of the medical "professionals" of this time. Most ladies brewed simples, or things like a tea or tisane, say from willow bark - which is basically aspirin. And if it was a more complicated recipe, she'd go to an apothecary. And there are barber surgeons, who could pull teeth and do simple surgery. And bonesetters, who, yup, set bones. They mainly have to be strong, and fast. Physicians are mainly for the rich, and do things like apply leeches and let blood. All in all, I really hope I don't get sick or have anything more serious than a headache. I mean, I really don't want to be taking anything that has dried toad in it!
And right now I'm dead tired so I'm going to sneak some soap out of Mrs. Q's secret closet and wash my hair and go to bed!
May 6, 1610
I don't even know where to start - and I'm not even sure I can keep this data once I get back home because it might be censored. Although I'm not sure what they'll do to get it out of my head, or why Mrs. Q would have told me about this. I suppose it's possible that I just stumbled on it, and I guess if they make Venus drugs they probably have some kind of general memory drug.
But anyway, Mrs. Q told me today that there are people here who are stuck here, and that there are people in the future who don't belong there! Seriously!
It works like this - and this much I more or less knew: When you step out of time, there is almost like a hole created, like a template. It's more or less how you find your way back to your own time. And while we're here in the past, we're actually extras. So under normal circumstances we can't stay for more than a few weeks without something getting messed up. The first people who stepped would generally try to find someone who died, and then they'd go forward, and then back and fit in the dead person's template before that space had a chance to fill in. One of the things we learned in the future was how to keep somebody's template hole open. It was kind of the last secret of time travel. Early steppers were taking a huge chance, because we didn't really get how to keep the hole open more than a few days, a week or two at best.
Then once we figured out how to keep a person's template open, they could stay for long periods of time and always get back.
At first, we allowed people to come forward, but after a while we realized that it was going to be a problem because let's face it, who's gonna want to go back to a dirty, nasty, bug-infested, short-life-span era once they've seen the future? Give up vids and soft beds and telewalks? So once people got there, a lot of them did everything they could to stay. They'd run or hide or whatever, and then they had to be hunted down and forcibly returned, and unfortunately usually, euthanized once they were back in era. That's because we couldn't risk them messing the whole thing up because they talked, or tried to find some of us in their own period, and outed us. This could be very dangerous!
Anyway, what Mrs. Q explained to me was that every once in a while, someone would go forward by taking the place of one of us - stranding that person in this time. I mean, sure, that person could go forward for a while, and try to find the person who took their place, but the odds are by the time the future person got back, the past person was long gone.
And then there were people who for one reason or another - usually love! - would let a past person take their place in the future.
This really hit me hard, because it was almost like she'd read my mind. The fact is, James and I are in love, and I don't know what to do.
May 7, 1610
I've never been in love before, but one thing I know for certain: you're not supposed to keep major secrets from your lover. And it's for sure that I'm keeping a big, serious secret from James. But if I told him, wouldn't he just think I'm crazy?
I suppose I should back up and explain how it all happened. I mean, I've made it clear that James and I have certainly noticed one another, and James has definitely been making himself available.
But remember when I told you about being invited to the deVere's for a supper "on Wednesday next?" Well, that was a couple of days ago.
I've got to say this about this time period: people take entertaining a lot more seriously than we do! Yeah, we have dinner parties, and people mill around the kitchen with a drink in their hands, help with the cooking, laugh and chat and all that. Or they gather around the vidscreen and yell at whatever sport or realer or quiz show happens to be on. I guess really wealthy people let indentures do all the work, and they just mingle while the indentures cook up interesting little dishes like baby birds in the egg, roasted and served with a confit of endangered salamander.
But here, it seems like a party is a show: music and dancing and declaiming and joke telling. Often there will be a theme, like masque, where everybody wears some sort of mask or face covering. I guess part of the game is that you're anonymous when you're masked, so people kind of treat it like a license to flirt and carry on.
And people just talk a lot more in general, and sing and play and entertain. I guess that makes sense: there aren't any iBrains, or vidscreens, or other electronic entertainments. Heck, if you want music, you have to play it yourself, or get somebody else to.
So they do the real-life equivalent of all our vidscreen and podmusic and even realers - they tend to really live their lives out loud. I mean seriously, the flirting, and bed-hopping and fights over women. I suppose if you're only going to live 40 or 50 years, you might as well pack as much as you can into that time.
Anyway, a little side note about sounds. I realized that there is plenty of it here, but it's just totally different from what we hear in our time.
Your home tends to be very quiet, relative to our homes with all the hum of HVAC and vidscreens, the click of keyboards, plumbing being used, transports firing up or going by. Well, drones have made things more quiet, that's true - but sometimes nothing but a transport will do. Here, if you go into the kitchen when a meal is being prepared there's plenty of noise, like crockery clattering, and the faint roar of the fire, a cook scolding a scullery maid, that kind of thing. But everywhere else sounds are more discrete than that constant background we hear: a log gets thrown on the fire; a maid walks down an upper hall; a quiet conversation takes place in a corner.
But go out on the street, and it's totally the opposite. Where our street sounds are almost nil - yeah, transports make a quiet sort of hum, basically, the streets are empty of people (I mean, who walks anywhere?), the noise on the streets in this time is just amazing. Yelling, singing, horses and carts, vendors, water being thrown out an upper window, people going by in groups laughing and talking, talking, talking. Dogs barking, a gentleman riding by on his horse. Just life noise, everywhere.
Anyway, we arrived at the dinner party and it turns out it was this whole orchestrated event: dinner alone was course after course of crazy food, most of it on display in the middle of the table - and everybody just grabbing what they want, and eating a lot of it with their fingers! (Three fingers for us, btw, whole hands for the "baser" sorts!) Dogs are running through the hall, and there is a ton of drinking and toasting. People love to toast, and they take any occasion to do it, since it combines two of their favorite activities: talking poetically and drinking! They drink wine, and ale, and sack (sort of a sherry) and cider, hard and regular.
One of the things that bothers me about the food in this era is how much it looks like what it is: I mean, when we eat meat, which isn't all that often since we eat mostly synth, but when we do, you'd never know what animal it came from. For all we know, it comes from a beast that looks like red stuff wrapped in Cling. But here, they serve the critters with their stupid heads on them! I mean... they eat rabbits, for example. Lots of rabbits, which doesn't exactly turn me on to begin with, but then they have their heads on them! They're f'ing looking at you! Fortunately, the ears come off when they skin them, otherwise, there is no way I'm touching them at all, and I'd probably barf.
So dinner is this long, drawn out thing where everybody stuffs themselves and drinks a lot and toasts, and a little band is playing up in what I find out is called a minstrel gallery. Every once in a while someone stands up and sings whatever the minstrels are playing. And some of them are pretty good. James sang a little love song, and he kept looking at me and I know everybody noticed. But he has a beautiful voice.
And then they had a little pageant, sort of a short play, that was kind of dirty and very funny with lots of running around and hiding and mistaken identities.
And finally it was time to dance. And that's when James caught me. I was standing back from the dance floor, largely because I didn't want anyone to ask me to dance, partly because I'm a bit of a klutz, and partly because I hadn't really learned the steps to the dances very well. I had so much else to do to prepare to step, and I guess I never gave credit to how important a little detail like that could be. I finally decided that I could always fake a sore ankle or something. Truth be told, I kind of wanted to join in, it looked like fun.
Needless to say, dancing is totally different from our stand in place and have sex with yourself. Which is not to say it isn't sexy - in an odd sort of way, it's a lot more sexy, because it's graceful and elegant and just hinted at. There's a lot of come together, almost touch, then scoot away - and because all the dances happen in patterns, you switch partners a lot. So you touch hands briefly with a partner who takes your breath away, followed by some fat old dude who smells like four-day-old vomit.
So, I'm standing by the side, and watching, and suddenly a my hand is taken - quickly, decisively, but gently, my palm is kissed, and James whispers in my ear, "You are the most beautiful creature God ever made," or something like that but in Elizabethan English. His breath tickled my ear, and my knees went boneless and my stomach dropped and I couldn't breathe.
I must have looked flustered, at the very least, because he dropped my hand and whispered, "Do I offend?"
"Oh, no!" I said. I held my hand up again, for another kiss. James looked startled, then laughed - such a wonderful, completely abandoned laugh. He took my hand again and commenced kissing it, my wrist, my elbow - my elbow, for God's sake! Can you imagine a boy in Real Time doing that with a straight face?
We were so busy, though, that I didn't realize until we turned to get some wine that Wm. was standing a bit off in the shadows himself, watching us.
May 8
Well, as you've guessed by now, the plot thickeneth. Or whatever. I'm definitely getting some kind of vibe about Wm. Ms. Q has some about me and James. James is calling on us just about every day, or happening on us when we're out running errands. And of course he's always at the parties we're invited to, and boy there are a lot of them. And he's at the theatre a lot, which makes sense because his Uncle is involved.
Speaking of the theater, they're to do Romeo and Juliet at The Globe. And I want to be Juliet. But I can't, because I'm a girl. I mean, I knew that from all our history and literature classes. All the boys roles were played by boys, and all the girls roles were played by boys. I thought that sounded incredibly dumb and completely backwards, but then, there's a lot of things women and girls don't get to do back in this time. Still, I kind of thought it would be obvious that a boy wasn't a girl. So the first time I saw a boy performing a girl's role I was surprised that he wasn't bad.
But the other day James told me he was going to play Romeo in a special performance of the play. It had been written in 1595, so it wasn't new, but it was still a favorite and some rich noble's daughter wanted it for her birthday. So of course she was going to get it. It's sort of like being a rock star or movie star in our time - you get what you want when you want it and nobody thinks there's anything wrong with it. Unless, of course, you piss off somebody more rich or more noble.
But anyway, I had played Juliet in acting camp a couple of summers ago, and I still remembered a lot of the lines, and... if James was going to be Romeo, I wasn't going to have just anybody being Juliet. But the trick was going to be getting the part. In fact, it was going to be kind of a double trick, because first I had to convince everybody I was a boy, and then I'd have to convince them I was a boy being a girl. So, I had an idea - but I'd have to bring James in on it. And I wasn't totally sure he'd go along with me.
But I didn't have much time to get ready if I was going to pull this off, because, well, ok here's how it went down with James. I keep wanting to call him Jim, or Jimmy, but that wasn't really a nickname for a "James" in this timeframe. Jamie is ok, though, and I kind of like the sound of that, so I've started calling him that - just every so often. He looks a little startled when I do, so I only call him that when we're alone.
Anyway, James, Jamie, and I were in the small parlor in Ms. Q's house. She was busy in the kitchen, and she more or less trusted us, so she'd let us sit alone once in a while as long as she could hear our voices. If we got too quiet...
So, we're sitting there - the furniture is really uncomfortable, did I mention that? We were in separate chairs, facing each other, so I leaned over to keep it kind of quiet.
"I want to be Juliet so I have to be a boy and you have to introduce me to everybody at the theater so I can audition," I blurted it out just like that. And a minute later I was giggling into my hand. If you could have seen James' face - it was like all eyeballs and open mouth, sort of staring at me like I'd told him I was a unicorn or something.
"Excuse me?"
"I want to be in the play, as Juliet. And I know you can't be an actor unless you're a man or boy, but I know all the lines and I can do it.
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June 3, 1613
Wow, that was totally different! I mean, we're studying Shakespeare's era, obviously, so I've seen a lot of his plays, and I've seen "the Scottish play" about four times, and this was completely different.
So first, the theater: like I said, it's called The Globe, and it's this big, I don't know, maybe 100 feet? in diameter, more or less circular building the floor space is about 300 feet in circumference. One side is all what looks like box seats, and the other is the stage area - it's got a thrust stage, which is a stage that actually extends out into the audience. The floor of the theater is just this big pit thing where all the poorer people stand. They stand up, the whole time, and this is like four hours or something. OMG. And they eat and talk the whole time, too, which is really bizarre, and a little annoying. Anyway, there's no roof over the pit part. The rich people sit up in the box seat area (where I actually was able to sit, which was quite cool).
I guess it costs a penny to stand in the pit, and I'm not sure what Mrs. Quickly paid for my entrance, all I know is I was sitting in a wooden chair in one of the boxes with her, and there was a family there with us who seemed to know her pretty well. They weren't from our time, though, that's for certain.
So, it was like seeing MacBeth for the first time, totally. For one thing, none of it was cut. I mean, nothing. And this sucker is loooong. And I love the play, I really do, but come on! My butt was so sore by the end, and I totally had to pee but there is NO way I'm going to the outhouses where all those pit-people were going, and then they had these screen and a bucket up in the stalls for us, but again, no way in hell I'm doing that, either. So I just bit my lip and crossed my legs.
But I have to say they had quite the special effects going for them. Not exactly like today, but they did have people - the ghosts - flying in from the ceiling (it's called "the heavens, and it's even painted to look that way). And the scene with the three witches on the moors - that was pretty fucking amazing. Fireworks, and whatever they were doing to make thunder. The whole thing was almost as good as Saw 22.
Ok, then the other thing was, of course, all the actors are men. I mean, I knew that, but it still was kind of surprising. One of the more surprising parts was that I think I'd always envisioned the men-playing-women thing as kind of like Late Trans in our day, but they weren't. Some of them if I hadn't known better I would have sworn they really were women. After a while, I forgot all about it and just went with it. Maybe it would bother me more in a play like, say, Romeo and Juliet? I'm not sure. I'll see that, too, before I leave, if I can.
Oh, in case I haven't told you - I'm scheduled to be here for a couple of months. I mean, we go to all the trouble of getting prepped, so they try to give us as much time as they reasonably can. Trained adults can step for years at a time, but then, they're professionals. It does make you wonder what it would be like to take up that profession, and that's partly why Dr. Lloyd recruits people with crystals. Honestly, there are so many other time periods I'd love to visit - the Civil War, I'd love to meet the real Ghengis Khan. But actually, that's not all that possible. See, one of the limitations of stepping is your looks. That is to say, you have to blend. So, here I am a blue-eyed blond girl, so there are places and times I just can't go. Here is ok cause I'm in the middle of a lot of blue-eyed blonds, and I have a woman who acts like my Aunt or cousin or whatever, so I'm safe. But I couldn't go to pre-Columbian Mexico, for example, cuz I'd stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Now, there are a handful of really dedicated steppers who've gotten plastic surgery so they could go and spend time in a particular time period and place - like, they got their eyes done and their skin dyed so they could go live in China in the year 1 or something. But that's pretty radical, and naturally, nobody my age is gonna go there. So, you are limited in your choices of authors to one who lived in a place where you'll not look too odd. Of course, for all the more modern writers, even 19th, 20th, and 21st century writers, it really doesn't matter much cuz people were all mixed up by then, more or less.
And of course, there's the language. If you're really going to step, it's hard enough - even with sleep-learn - to adopt a reasonably good version of English. But if you're talking Egyptian, for God's sake. I can't imagine what it was like for the first people who went there. They were guessing what it sounded like, for sure. Well, actually, there's more to that story: the first few people who went to any of those really remote periods just went with recorders. They had to go grab handfuls of language, costume, any sense input so that they could come back to Real Time and extrapolate. Otherwise, anybody who went to really study the period would be really at risk. There are stories in the dorms about people who got left where they were because somehow they figured out that whatever they did, they had to stay in that time stream. I can't even begin to imagine.
Ok, so back to the theater. The other thing that was really, really different is that they just kept going - there was no mingle/drink/pee break in the middle. And their style of acting was just bizarro. All these postures and I don't know, it seemed so formal somehow.
Nowadays actors try so hard to be natural. To say and do things so that you get no hint that they're acting. Like you're just eavesdropping on their conversations, and like the words are just spilling out of them the way we talk without planning what we're going to say. Back then it was more like, what, like giving a speech. The comedy parts were silly - lots of falling down and farting and rude stuff - but the serious parts were - well, my teacher talked one time about actors "declaiming," and that's really more what they were doing. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it was too long and a little too stagey for me, on the whole.
Anyway, Wm. was there. But man, he doesn't exactly look like I expected. I would maybe have recognized him from his portraits, believe it or not - kinda big nose, balding, longish hair. A little out of shape looking, but then people did all kinds of things to help nature with what they thought they should look like. So they padded their stomachs and shoulders and, yeah... and omg, he really was wearing an earring. Seriously. Cool little hoop in one ear.
Of course, everybody dresses very cool in this time period, even if their clothes are smelly. Well, I should amend that. The rich people wear cool clothes. The poor people wear nasty smelly rags. I mean, rags. Lots of people are barefoot, but some people have their feet wrapped up in rags. And some people just walk around in these sort of sacks of really rough cloth - kind of like a burlap bag - maybe tied in the middle. And that is it. They must f'ing freeze in the winter. (Mrs. Quickly pointed out to me that there actually are a lot of people missing fingers and toes where they got frostbit and rotted off. Gross.)
But the rich people, or richer people wear all these cool fabrics, like lace and brocade. Unless of course you're a Puritan, and then you were very plain, dark clothes with a collar. Lots of collars on everyone, but if you're rich it's more likely to be lace or something. Or ruffs - now, that, I think looks amazingly stupid. These funny starched clown collars. What is that all about? Well, I guess you could say what are our hologram t's all about now? Just fashion, I guess. But like I never got the huge pants from around 2010 - I mean, how uncomfortable to walk around just holding your pants up! - I don't really get the ruff. At least our hologram t's are comfy, even if you do have to charge them now and again.
Anyway. I'm tired, so I'm gonna stop now, even though I haven't gotten to the best part. I'll just give you a hint: his name is James.
May 2, 2010
I saw James again today! (James is related to the deVeres and is an actor)
He was loitering outside Mrs. Quickly's house when we went to the market. He bowed and tipped his hat to us, and then walked with us to the market, but then he had to leave.
Ok, wait, let me back up: James is this truly delicious boy I met at the theater yesterday. I know, I know, no fraternizing is the rule for stepping. But honest to God, he is so cute, and hardly smells at all, and his teeth are even clean and pretty! And he kept looking at me instead of at the play. Now, you gotta understand - in my time I'm only a sort-of good looking girl. I'm not one of the more popular ones. I'm not a loser, but I'm not one of the beautiful set, either.
So, at home I attract the middle-of-the-road boys, too. I mean, they really want the beautiful girls, or the sluts, but they end up dating us "so-sos." What's really funny is that most of the beautiful girls are actually beautiful cuz they've had plastic surgery - nose jobs, boob jobs, chin implants. It's all pretty cheap these days - or, those days! haha, I'm not sure how I should refer to it! - but my mom won't let me or my sister get any until we're legally adults. Jeesh. Every once in a while she goes into this religious rant but, never mind, more about that another time. Doesn't she remember how it felt to be in high school?? And not be one of the cool crowd? I mean, this is my one and only high school experience, and it really, really sux to have to live with small boobs and a just-ordinary face. I think if I got my lips done I'd be more than halfway pretty. My eyes are really blue and big enough, and my nose is pretty ordinary. I've got freckles, but not really ugly big coppery ones like Cheryl's, so that's ok.
My hair is one of my better features, and I wear it very long so I didn't even have to get extensions or anything for coming back here (women pretty much all wore their hair long in this time period, or else totally shaved off and with a wig). Unmarried women (me!) could wear their hair loose unless they were Puritans (who wore it all tied up and hidden under a bonnet). So I get to shake my hair around a lot, just to tease the boys. Haha.
But here, in this time period, I'm one of the pretty ones. Besides my hair - which, due to regular conditioning is in ultra-great shape - I've got excellent teeth (my mom did allow braces, thank God!), very clear skin (other than the freckles), and a very nice shape (other than the smallish boobs, but here in this time period, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Here, you want a small waist, and that I've got!).
But James seemed to like it. My hair, I mean. He was sitting a couple of chairs over, with his family - mom, dad, three kids all somewhere in their teens, I'd guess. Two boys and a girl. The girl, she didn't seem to be all that excited to see me. She kept looking at me too, except she was giving me that "who the fuck are you?" stare. And giving her brother that "don't even think about it" look. She was actually very pretty in an extremely Anglo-Saxon way: red-gold hair, high-bridged, slightly broad nose, full lips, round face. Maybe a little on the big-boned side, but not fat or anything. She was probably used to being the prettiest girl at the prom, so she no-doubt didn't like it that here was another girl right in her territory, and that girl had clear skin, good teeth and really pretty hair. Ha. Well, I'm not used to being one of the prettiest ones, either, so, too bad, chiquita! I was enjoying this!
So, even though I really had to pay attention to the MacBeth, and also keep an eye on Wm. Shakespeare (after all, that's why I was here!) I was stealing glances at James as often as possible, and every single time I did, there he was, looking at me. Cool.
Before we left, Mrs. Quickly (who I am pretty sure picked up on this vibe between me and James) introduced me to the DeVere's. Yes, that DeVere, believe it or not. But a cousin. The dad, Robert, was a cousin of Henry, the bi-guy. Robert, on the other hand, was pure hetero, judging by the way he looked at me and every other woman - Mrs. Quickly, included - who came within 20 feet of him. His eyes went straight to the bust, then to the face, little bit of time on the eyes and then to the mouth, then back to the bust. Talk about obvious! But he was, I gotta admit, a handsome man. It was clear where James got his good looks.
So there was the dad, Robert. I never heard the mom's name because women's names don't get mentioned. Just Mrs. or Mistress or Miss or whatever. Unless you're a girl - like me - in which case your name would be said. So James did get to hear that my name is Miranda.
So, James' brother is Francis, and his sister is Kate.
When you meet someone new in this time period, girls have to curtsy. It's kind of cool in a way. But you have to learn this whole protocol: the depth of the curtsy depends on the significance of the personage you are meeting. Or, that's how my teacher, Professor Cantor, put it. Just by-the-by (that's an old English expression, by-the-by, cute, huh?), we call our teachers Professor now, cuz of the old Harry Potter books series! Even though they're not really Professors, a bunch of kids back in the 2020s started calling their teachers Professor cuz that's what they call them in the Harry Potter books, so some kids though it'd be cool to call their teachers Professor, and it just kind of stuck. So, there you go, a little trivia.
Anyway, back to the curtsy. Now the problem for a stepper is that we don't really know who's who in this era. I mean, we do get schooled quite a bit about the period we're going into, so that we understand the basic manners and all, and we have a "handler, " (that would be Mrs. Quickly for me) who is with us pretty much 24/7 when we're out and about, but there is still quite a bit we don't know - for example, all the ranks of all the nobility. There are so many degrees of importance in this social order that we just don't have in ours. This duke and that duke aren't necessarily the same in terms of importance. So I'd curtsy a little more to this duke than that one, and if it was the king, well, it would be a total drop to the floor curtsy with a head bow.
So, I watched Mrs. Quickly very carefully when she curtsied to get the feel of how far I should go, and then, cuz I'm younger, made it just a teensy bit deeper for Mr. Robert DeVere; about the same as Mrs. Quickly did for Mrs., and even-steven for the kids (who were all within a year or two of my age). James is the younger brother, and Francis is the oldest kid. So it's Francis (about maybe 19?) then his sister, (17 or 18) and then James (who's about 16 or 17). It's a bit hard to tell how old someone is in this time period, too. They seem to grow up a lot faster than we do - and grow old a lot faster, too! I mean, my mom and dad look like kids compared to the DeVere's. Especially her. She looks mad and mean and wrinkled. He has a lot of lines and grey hair, but he's got all his hair and he's not fat - in fact, he's got quite the body. And, as I said, a real handsome face.
The boys, of course, bow, which I have found I really, really like. I'd love to bring that custom home!
Anyway, we all chatted it up a little, and of course it became known that I was visiting Mrs. Quickly from a small town in "the north." And the DeVere's said they wanted us to come and dine with them "on Wednesday next" when they would be having a small gathering, and Mrs. Quickly said that would be "most pleasant," and so we said goodbye (which is, of course, God be with you), and went off, cuz I still hadn't had a chance to listen to Mr. Shakespeare at all.
Now, in those days a lady might go to buy supper in a public house when she was traveling, but she didn't typically go unaccompanied into a "pub" as a matter of course. So fortunately, Mrs. Quickly had a "brother," who was really another operative from the future, Mike (Reginald). They had to be really, really and I do mean really careful about how they behaved in public, because if anybody'd ever heard them talking to one another out of character well, they would have had to step forward in a big hurry.
So, Mike went with us and we went out for a meal.
And that's when I finally got up close to Wm. Shakespeare.
May 3, 1610
So, what can I tell you about a public house? Smelly, noisy, the floor is covered with rushes plus all manner of food and spit and dog shit and other putrid things; there is sometimes music (whether from people singing or sometimes someone playing an instrument); lots of beer and ale drinking (some wine, too, but really that's reserved for the wealthier people). Yes, there are "wenches," which are basically bar-sluts who take a "copper" and go out back with some smelly, toothless guy for a literal roll in the hay (yuck, I hope they change the hay now and then, haha). And there are a lot of drunk people. So, all in all, a lot like your modern bar!
You can buy drinks, you can gamble, you can get a meal (in most of them). So we bought bread, cheese, a "joint" (which is basically a roast something, like beef or pig or mutton), and wine. People drink a lot in this time period, but one of the reasons is nothing more than sanitation. Water isn't really safe - the alcohol kills any bugs in the drinkables, so that's safer to have. People drink cider, too, both sweet and hard.
When you get your cheese, you usually have to cut the mold off the outside. But that's ok, that's just cheese. The meat is usually reasonably fresh, and even though it's not the soft, white Wonder Bread type bread if today, the bread is very tasty and fresh - they bake just about every day in 1610.
In fact, one of the few good smells about this time is the daily bread baking. Mrs. Quickly has a few serving girls - I think among them they have an IQ of 50, but they are big and strong and work hard and don't ask a lot of questions. A couple of them is before we wake up and stokes up the fire and bakes bread and starts breakfast and empties chamber pots and that sort of thing. Another is more of a wash up and clean type, she washes dishes and sweeps. There's a cook, and a girl who dresses us and stands around to run errands. We live in a town house, so there are no real chores other than keeping house. Mrs. Quickly supposedly was left her fortune by a husband who had ships and they lived on one of his estates in the Indies, and then he died and she sold off everything and returned to England. She has a "son" who arrives to visit every so often, and another "brother," who has an estate "on the continent," and he also visits from time to time. B(why mistress Q has chosen to stay)
All of us, Mike (Reginald, Reginald... I have to remember to call him Reginald, even to myself, or I'm going to forget), Mrs. Quickly, and the serving girls, live in the townhouse, and Mike tends to all Mrs. Quickly's business and protection needs, while the girls take care of the maintenance of the home. That leaves Mrs. Quickly to look out for her pupils, and conduct her own study of the period, which is actually focused on the history of medicine. Mike was studying musicology, so when he wasn't busy making contacts and putting on a good show for the town, he was learning all he could for his studies. He stays in this time for six months or a year, goes back to see Dr. Lloyd and check in for a little while, then back he comes.
Nobody in this time period has much "stuff," at least, not the way we think about stuff. As I mentioned before, the average person is lucky to have a single pair of shoes, let alone the 40 or 50 that I have in my closet back home. Most fine ladies have only a handful of dresses (even if they do have pearls and things sewn into them!), and most of the rooms look downright bare by our standards. Glass is precious, so windows and mirrors and things like that are scarce; tables and chests and so on are heavy and dark and sturdy - but there are usually only a few items in any room.
Furniture isn't upholstered - God what I wouldn't give for a nice recliner or sofa sometimes!! You get serious butt-ache in this time period! - and like I said, floors are either plain wood, or strewn with straw and herbs and stuff to minimize the smells and catch hold of the wet spills.
So, anyway, there we were in the pub, and we'd told the serving man what we wanted, and who walks in but Mr. Wm. Shakespeare himself? He had a whole posse of friends with him - men and boys, no women - and they were all laughing and talking and carrying on the way all those "theater" people do. It's the same now: we've got a bunch of aspiring ac-tors in our school, and they all hang out together and act theatrical. Very self-conscious and posy and all. It's obnoxious.
So, here's Wm., looking, as I said, older and more tired than I'd have pictured (I mean, the guy was only 52 or so when he died, making him about 46 now, but he looked a lot older than my friend's dads, who are about the same age). And he's got all these gay guys and probably-not-gay guys (from the way they were checking out the women) with him, most of them extraordinarily good-looking, well-dressed and sexy.
Mrs. Quickly knew her job: she is acquainted with Wm., and part of her job is to be sure her charges get at least one conversation with the great man. Granted, it's easier when this student is a boy, but Wm. is, from what I can gather from my short conversation with him last night, a very affable man. Mrs. Quickly "spotted" the playwright, and had "her brother" go over to extend our compliments. He, Wm., of course, then had to come over the greet her, which he did. (Mrs. Quickly is a patron of the theater, so she always gets special attention.)
I was introduced, and for one in my mouthy life found it hard to make sentences. I mean for fuck's sake, this is Wm. Shakespeare, in the flesh!! I mumbled something about having seen MacBeth and enjoying it, and he thanked me and there was some witty stuff between him and Mrs. Quickly about my visit and then we were headed back to our table. But not before Mrs. Quickly had arranged for me to be present at a rehearsal for Merry Wives. Wm. had written this play in 1602, so it wasn't new, but it was a favorite. And it featured a character named after Mrs. Quickly.
The truth is, I don't know exactly what their relationship is, but my... whatever she is, guardian?... and Wm. are good friends, and know one another rather better than it's usual to do in this day and age. I'm not suggesting anything funny is going on, Wm. is married, after all but ... he (Wm.) was clearly really happy to see Mrs. Quickly, and she was really happy to see him.
Now here was the really odd thing: when Wm. met me, he acted a little weird. First he acted startled - and let me tell you, I'm not the kind of girl who startles 40-something men because I'm so drop-dead good looking. Like I said, I'm good enough, and a little better than good-enough for this time period, but it's not like I'm driving anyone crazy with lust or anything. But it wasn't that kind of startled, anyway.
When he kissed my hand (he did, how cool is that?), he held it for a long time, and he looked at me as if he was trying to remember where he'd seen me before or something. It was almost creepy.
And he said, "Another protegee, Mistress Quickly?"
And she said, "Indeed, sir," and then she said something about "Having told you about this one," and he said, "Is that so?" And then he stared at me again, and I swear to God it looked as if he was going to cry.
The other interesting news is that at this rehearsal there was also going to be some reading of Wm.'s newest, which wasn't complete yet, but he was busy working on it. Or... Henry DeVere was!
May 4, 1610
James was at the rehearsal!!! OMG!!! Can I tell you I thought I was going to faint? I mean, it's hard enough not to faint with these crazy corsets women wear - and all the jackets and layers and stuff - but he's so cute I literally lost my breath!
What can I tell you about him? Dark hair, kind of long (sort of like from the 1960s, almost, which period I really love, and I considered going back to meet a Beatle, but eventually settled on Wm.), with these huge dark brown eyes and lashes out to there. Very perfect features: straight nose, just slightly large (just the way I like it!) and he's tall. That's one thing I've got to tell you: men in this time period are not very tall. Well, neither are women. Everybody is small all over compared to us - even these people, many of whom are Danes or Angles or Saxons, so they tend to be on the larger side for the times. But still, a six foot tall man is like a man 6'4" would be now. Most of them are more like 5'8" or so (the men), and about 5'2" for women. At 5'6" I'm very tall, but not a freak.
Anyway, he's clearly handsome, and even more clearly, he's interested in me. Why, I don't know. I can't seem to get out of the way of my own tongue around these people, so I don't say much for fear of saying something stupid. And if one thing is true in this period, it's that people love to show off their wits. They have a very flowery way of talking, and they love puns and word play. Men and women. The wealthier people are reasonably well-educated, and often speak more than one language, frequently including Latin (even though the Protestant Reformation was long since over, and Henry VIII's establishment of the Church of England well-entrenched, the erudite - yeah, I know a few big words! - actually still learned Latin). Of course, Elizabeth I was on the throne right now, which did a lot for women's rights. Haha. No, I'm actually serious. Women in this period were actually expected to be able to talk, read, play music - do something besides make babies. Granted, it's not like they were running businesses or having babies on their own (well, that's not entirely true, either!), but still, if I'd had to do it, I could have lived in this time frame without too much pain (other than the smells, the bugs, and the latrines).
So actually, meeting James again this time, and it being very clear that we were interested in one another, I started to worry about two things: getting caught, and wondering if kissing would be a smelly, disgusting proposition, given the oral hygiene of 1610.
On that subject, I decided not to worry about it, and if I got the chance, I was going to kiss the boy. On the other subject, I didn't know what to think.
Fraternization was absolutely forbidden to high schools students. It was frowned upon for everybody - grad students, historians, and vacationers - but we were told that on no uncertain terms we were forbidden to go beyond surface friendships with anyone in this historic time period. We were told to avoid situations in which we were might be alone with anyone - even someone of our own age and sex. The notion was that we were too unsophisticated and not well-trained enough to avoid possible mistakes. So we were to keep a handler with us at all times, who could cover for us if we screwed up.
Every time we left our house, Mrs. Quickly did a complete search of me, to be sure that I had nothing incriminating on my person. She even checked to be sure I wasn't doing something like shaving my armpits, for God's sake! (Though if I wanted to shave my entire self, that would have been acceptable - which, needless to say, few of my age group ever decided to do!) She made sure I had no lip gloss or electronic devices, aspirin, even tampons! (I was allowed to use these in the house, but if we were out, just in case of some accident or something, I had to resort to the "clouts" that women used in those days. Yuk and double-yuck!! This is the one thing that made me happy I only had a month in-period, so I could have max two periods.)
James was actually waiting for me when we arrived at the theater. Just pacing back and forth, watching the door, and trying to look nonchalant.
Mrs. Quickly, Mike (I have to remember to call him Reginald) and I arrived in a flurry of greetings and gloves (gloves were very big in those days among the gentry). Wm., busy watching a silly scene from Merry Wives in which his Mistress Quickly is sitting on a laundry basket with Falstaff hiding inside while she distracts her husband, spotted us and came over and greeted us - greeted Mrs. Quickly - warmly, and led us to a bench in the pit.
So anyway, as I told you, the company is doing another old play tomorrow, Merry Wives, so they just did a quick run through. Actors are expected to have amazing memories - and then they have these guys who give cues. It's actually kind of funny. You can hear them, even see them sometimes, but nobody seems to mind. From what Mrs. Quickly has told me, they don't even finish writing the play sometimes til it's up on stage - so the actors don't even know how it's going to end. Bizarre.
My heart did a little drop and spin when I saw James standing by the bench. He was talking to an older man - who was introduced to me as his uncle, Henry DeVere. He's as handsome as his brother - I guess good looks run in the DeVere family. But he's more, what? Self-consciously good looking?Polished looking?
A little aside about Henry DeVere. There has been so much argument over the years about who wrote Shakespeare's plays and poems. The old argument used to be that an ordinary guy like Wm., an actor, couldn't possibly have the inside knowledge of court, the Latin, the intimate scoop on making war and weaponry, all the stuff that anyone who wrote all those poems and plays would have had to have had.
So scholars started to compare texts and try to see if all the material attributed to Shakespeare sounded like it came from the same guy. A lot of people thought it was at least partly Sir Francis Bacon, and then along came one man who said it was Edward DeVere. It was sort of like all the arguing that went on about who was really Jack the Ripper, or who was the real Franklin Rimbaud, that rock guy from the late 2030s who never showed his face.
Anyway, once we started stepping we found out once and for all that it was Henry, a sort of by-blow cousin of the main branch of the DeVere family (that would be Edward) who worked with Wm., and was in fact Wm.'s part-time boyfriend. They wrote some of the romances, and almost all of the comedies together.
You know, it's funny, but there's something sad about being able to actually go back and find out the truth about a lot of historic mysteries. Leaves you with that much less to talk about!
Speaking of talking - that was awkwardly put, huh? But just a "point of order" as Professor Cantor would say, when I try to repeat conversations I had with people, I'm not going to write them in ye olde Englishe! It's just too much of a pain. For one thing, they use way too many words to say something. For another, there is no one spelling (or, spelyng) or anything. People just sort of made it up as they went along. So trying to report the conversations the way they happened is almost like trying to translate French. So from now on, you're just going to get the jist of what everyone said, and not the poetry. It's kind of a shame, too, cuz they really do speak "prettily." That's what they'd say in this era, "prettily." But a pox on it (haha), I'm just gonna try to remember the basic flow of the conversation.
We had to spend about a year in class learning to speak and understand what's called "early modern English," or Renaissance English.This is another limitation in stepping. Historians can go just about anywhere they're prepared to go, and even they have to have covers - like, being deaf, or whatever, til they can get the accent of, say, 1000 in Spain. Vacationers and High School students and that sort of thing have to limit themselves to periods of time and places where we've got a reasonable sense of the language.
Of course, linguists have the job of recording speech throughout history, so we're getting a bigger and bigger library of languages through time. It's pretty amazing how languages tend to move forward in the mouth over time. You know, like from the grunts and snarls of the protos to us kids, who are sort of back to grunts and snarls, but it's more just very rapid talking without a lot of moving our lips and teeth and stuff. Our parents and teachers are all over us about it, but, hey, language e-f-ing-volves, right?
Speaking of fuck - well, the word, not the action! It's a pretty popular word in 1610, too! In fact, these people are pretty crude in their speech in general. Piss and shit and fuck are all pretty common words. I guess that's part of the reason my own speaking and writing - which were always kinda full of what my mom would call "vulgarities" - is even more so now!
So, ok. There we were at the theater, and Wm. and Henry had just finished fixing up the scene from Merry Wives, and then another bunch of actors who had been swirling around, they got up on the stage, and Wm. started to tell them about this new one - The Tempest.
Huh? There's no Shakespeare play called The Tempest! It has something to do with a magician and a monster and a shipwreck, but he sounds a little vague about the whole thing. But I'm guessing it never gets written, because I had to study all of Wm.'s plays before I came here, and that's not one of them!
May 5, 1610
So, something is going on between Mrs. Quickly and Wm. I woke up late last night and heard them whispering loudly, like your parents do when they think they're hiding an argument. Right. I held very still and tried hard to listen, but I was only making out every fourth word or so. But here's the really weird thing: it sounded like my English, not Wm.'s.
So what's the game? They're lovers and Mrs. Q is jealous of Henry? I know, I know, no fraternization. As if the older steppers actually paid attention to that! After all, if you're going to be stuck in the past for years and years, you're going to want a little... entertainment, right? As long as you're cool about it, and don't get into any serious trouble, so what?
Of course, who am I to talk? I'm totally head over heels with Mr. James deVere, and I couldn't do anything about that now if I tried. What I'm gonna do when the time comes to go home... well, that's what they make anti-Venus drugs for, right? I just hope my mom doesn't object to me taking some, cuz I have a feeling I'm gonna need them.
So anyway, they (Mrs. Q and Wm.) argued, er, whispered for about fifteen minutes or so, and then I turned over to try to hear better, and Mrs. Q heard the straw in my bed and said, "Hush!" and that was that. But I've got to figure out what's going on there.
Other than that, my day was routine today. Here's how it goes, just in case you want to know. We wake up relatively early. Actually, people sleep and wake a lot more with the daylight here than we do - since they don't have lights, and since light is expensive (beeswax candles are really expensive, so we can have some, but most people burn tallow, which is made from animal fat and like everything else in this era, stinks!), they do things by daylight as much as they can.
One of the things you notice here is how much more of people's life is spent outdoors. That's at least partly because they want to be able to see what they're doing! A lot of shops are really stalls, and a good part of the reason is for light. I always wondered when I'd see ancient paintings with a woman sitting outside her house sewing - what the heck? Why was she doing that? Well, now I know. She was trying to f-ing see!
They sat by fires, and near windows, but I've already pointed out that the windows are pretty small, and don't let in a lot of light. And then the cities are built with overhanging second floors, often, which makes the downstairs even darker. I guess the upside is you can't make out the bugs crawling over somebody's clothing as easily...
Ok, so, we wake up with the sun, and instead of running to a nice clean, modern bathroom, we trot over to a corner of our room and use a chamber pot. Yeah, gick! I still have a hard time letting one of the maid servants empty it, but then, they typically just toss it out the window anyway. There is a cesspit beneath our house, but the servants don't always go down there - and to be honest, who would? It's revolting. But the street isn't a whole lot better! Henry passed a law about sewers, but from where I'm sitting it can't be too well enforced. The law is basically that every home-owner is responsible for the area right in front of the house, pushing all the crap (haha) into the ditch. But there's so much of it, and there's trash and dead dogs and garbage and animal poo and chamber pot contents and what not - even the occasional dead person! - so it doesn't take more than a couple of heavy rains and this whole bad, bad, bad soup is running all over the street and sometimes even right into houses.
No wonder people don't get to be a lot older than 50, even if they look it.
You'd think I don't have a lot to talk about except disgusting body subjects, but honestly, so much of our day is spent just trying to do things that at home take me fifteen minutes. Imagine just trying to get enough of your clothes adjusted so you can use a chamber pot! Well, not so much when you first get up because we pretty much wear, literally, a night dress to bed. But once you've got on a corset and farthingale...
Well, let me start at the beginning. Mary, my aunt's maid comes in to my room with a warm drink at eight or so. She opens the curtains, sometimes humming a little tune - how she stays so cheerful with all she has to do is beyond me - and once she's sure she's waked me up, she props me up in bed with my tea or coffee - she can't understand why I prefer coffee in the mornings - and then she lays out my clothes.
"Where are you off to today, Mistress?" she'll ask. This will determine what she pulls out of my wardrobe. It's not as if I have the choices I do at home
First, you have this long smock or chemise or whatever. This is just a long linen gown, like a nightgown, with a drawstring top. We've supposedly got some money, so Mrs. Q and I have pretty ones with a little lace trim. You basically don't change this all that often, so they get a little crusty over time. The chemise has big, long, drapey sleeves.
Then you lace up a corset over that, which goes under the boobs and down to the waist. This holds up your chest and cinches in your waist. Well, actually, more like your rib cage, but anyway.
Then the farthingale, which is sort of a hooped underskirt, or maybe a bum roll (literally, a roll - it kind of made the skirt stick out at the back so that it had a shape). Then a busk to hold the corset in place, and then your dress. Get the picture? I've got way too many clothes on already, and I'm not nearly done.
Then a decorative petticoat, then your bodice, overskirt and sleeves, and then a thing called a stomacher, sort of a triangular vest-front that's all decorated - if you can afford it.
Then shoes, which are sort of like open-backed high heels. And of course you have to wear some sort of headgear - and sometimes a collar, though I usually just went with jewelry. There are all kinds of headdresses - hats and hoods and veils and whatnot, depending on what you're going to be doing. And gloves. And capes. Luckily, it's getting warm so we don't have the added problem of being cold, and since it's not summer yet I'm not cooking my ass off, but seriously, I can't imagine trying to wear all this stuff in summer!
So you have to do all this - of course, the maids help because otherwise it would be a month before you ever got dressed, let alone went anywhere. And you have to wash up the best you can, and try to brush your teeth (well, we cheat and bring toothbrushes, but we have to be very careful about using them), and all the rest.
Meanwhile, we haven't even had breakfast yet.
Lots of ladies have breakfast in their rooms, but Mrs. Q and I get together in the morning. She usually meets with Reginald, and they go over anything they have to deal with to keep the house running, and then she tells me what our plan is for the day, which usually includes some sort of educational dealio for me, and maybe some research for her, and then whatever social obligations she's gotta fulfill, like calling on some acquaintance, or going to the market.
Because Mrs. Q's research is in medicine, she spends a lot of time messing around in her stillroom, and cultivating some of the medical "professionals" of this time. Most ladies brewed simples, or things like a tea or tisane, say from willow bark - which is basically aspirin. And if it was a more complicated recipe, she'd go to an apothecary. And there are barber surgeons, who could pull teeth and do simple surgery. And bonesetters, who, yup, set bones. They mainly have to be strong, and fast. Physicians are mainly for the rich, and do things like apply leeches and let blood. All in all, I really hope I don't get sick or have anything more serious than a headache. I mean, I really don't want to be taking anything that has dried toad in it!
And right now I'm dead tired so I'm going to sneak some soap out of Mrs. Q's secret closet and wash my hair and go to bed!
May 6, 1610
I don't even know where to start - and I'm not even sure I can keep this data once I get back home because it might be censored. Although I'm not sure what they'll do to get it out of my head, or why Mrs. Q would have told me about this. I suppose it's possible that I just stumbled on it, and I guess if they make Venus drugs they probably have some kind of general memory drug.
But anyway, Mrs. Q told me today that there are people here who are stuck here, and that there are people in the future who don't belong there! Seriously!
It works like this - and this much I more or less knew: When you step out of time, there is almost like a hole created, like a template. It's more or less how you find your way back to your own time. And while we're here in the past, we're actually extras. So under normal circumstances we can't stay for more than a few weeks without something getting messed up. The first people who stepped would generally try to find someone who died, and then they'd go forward, and then back and fit in the dead person's template before that space had a chance to fill in. One of the things we learned in the future was how to keep somebody's template hole open. It was kind of the last secret of time travel. Early steppers were taking a huge chance, because we didn't really get how to keep the hole open more than a few days, a week or two at best.
Then once we figured out how to keep a person's template open, they could stay for long periods of time and always get back.
At first, we allowed people to come forward, but after a while we realized that it was going to be a problem because let's face it, who's gonna want to go back to a dirty, nasty, bug-infested, short-life-span era once they've seen the future? Give up vids and soft beds and telewalks? So once people got there, a lot of them did everything they could to stay. They'd run or hide or whatever, and then they had to be hunted down and forcibly returned, and unfortunately usually, euthanized once they were back in era. That's because we couldn't risk them messing the whole thing up because they talked, or tried to find some of us in their own period, and outed us. This could be very dangerous!
Anyway, what Mrs. Q explained to me was that every once in a while, someone would go forward by taking the place of one of us - stranding that person in this time. I mean, sure, that person could go forward for a while, and try to find the person who took their place, but the odds are by the time the future person got back, the past person was long gone.
And then there were people who for one reason or another - usually love! - would let a past person take their place in the future.
This really hit me hard, because it was almost like she'd read my mind. The fact is, James and I are in love, and I don't know what to do.
May 7, 1610
I've never been in love before, but one thing I know for certain: you're not supposed to keep major secrets from your lover. And it's for sure that I'm keeping a big, serious secret from James. But if I told him, wouldn't he just think I'm crazy?
I suppose I should back up and explain how it all happened. I mean, I've made it clear that James and I have certainly noticed one another, and James has definitely been making himself available.
But remember when I told you about being invited to the deVere's for a supper "on Wednesday next?" Well, that was a couple of days ago.
I've got to say this about this time period: people take entertaining a lot more seriously than we do! Yeah, we have dinner parties, and people mill around the kitchen with a drink in their hands, help with the cooking, laugh and chat and all that. Or they gather around the vidscreen and yell at whatever sport or realer or quiz show happens to be on. I guess really wealthy people let indentures do all the work, and they just mingle while the indentures cook up interesting little dishes like baby birds in the egg, roasted and served with a confit of endangered salamander.
But here, it seems like a party is a show: music and dancing and declaiming and joke telling. Often there will be a theme, like masque, where everybody wears some sort of mask or face covering. I guess part of the game is that you're anonymous when you're masked, so people kind of treat it like a license to flirt and carry on.
And people just talk a lot more in general, and sing and play and entertain. I guess that makes sense: there aren't any iBrains, or vidscreens, or other electronic entertainments. Heck, if you want music, you have to play it yourself, or get somebody else to.
So they do the real-life equivalent of all our vidscreen and podmusic and even realers - they tend to really live their lives out loud. I mean seriously, the flirting, and bed-hopping and fights over women. I suppose if you're only going to live 40 or 50 years, you might as well pack as much as you can into that time.
Anyway, a little side note about sounds. I realized that there is plenty of it here, but it's just totally different from what we hear in our time.
Your home tends to be very quiet, relative to our homes with all the hum of HVAC and vidscreens, the click of keyboards, plumbing being used, transports firing up or going by. Well, drones have made things more quiet, that's true - but sometimes nothing but a transport will do. Here, if you go into the kitchen when a meal is being prepared there's plenty of noise, like crockery clattering, and the faint roar of the fire, a cook scolding a scullery maid, that kind of thing. But everywhere else sounds are more discrete than that constant background we hear: a log gets thrown on the fire; a maid walks down an upper hall; a quiet conversation takes place in a corner.
But go out on the street, and it's totally the opposite. Where our street sounds are almost nil - yeah, transports make a quiet sort of hum, basically, the streets are empty of people (I mean, who walks anywhere?), the noise on the streets in this time is just amazing. Yelling, singing, horses and carts, vendors, water being thrown out an upper window, people going by in groups laughing and talking, talking, talking. Dogs barking, a gentleman riding by on his horse. Just life noise, everywhere.
Anyway, we arrived at the dinner party and it turns out it was this whole orchestrated event: dinner alone was course after course of crazy food, most of it on display in the middle of the table - and everybody just grabbing what they want, and eating a lot of it with their fingers! (Three fingers for us, btw, whole hands for the "baser" sorts!) Dogs are running through the hall, and there is a ton of drinking and toasting. People love to toast, and they take any occasion to do it, since it combines two of their favorite activities: talking poetically and drinking! They drink wine, and ale, and sack (sort of a sherry) and cider, hard and regular.
One of the things that bothers me about the food in this era is how much it looks like what it is: I mean, when we eat meat, which isn't all that often since we eat mostly synth, but when we do, you'd never know what animal it came from. For all we know, it comes from a beast that looks like red stuff wrapped in Cling. But here, they serve the critters with their stupid heads on them! I mean... they eat rabbits, for example. Lots of rabbits, which doesn't exactly turn me on to begin with, but then they have their heads on them! They're f'ing looking at you! Fortunately, the ears come off when they skin them, otherwise, there is no way I'm touching them at all, and I'd probably barf.
So dinner is this long, drawn out thing where everybody stuffs themselves and drinks a lot and toasts, and a little band is playing up in what I find out is called a minstrel gallery. Every once in a while someone stands up and sings whatever the minstrels are playing. And some of them are pretty good. James sang a little love song, and he kept looking at me and I know everybody noticed. But he has a beautiful voice.
And then they had a little pageant, sort of a short play, that was kind of dirty and very funny with lots of running around and hiding and mistaken identities.
And finally it was time to dance. And that's when James caught me. I was standing back from the dance floor, largely because I didn't want anyone to ask me to dance, partly because I'm a bit of a klutz, and partly because I hadn't really learned the steps to the dances very well. I had so much else to do to prepare to step, and I guess I never gave credit to how important a little detail like that could be. I finally decided that I could always fake a sore ankle or something. Truth be told, I kind of wanted to join in, it looked like fun.
Needless to say, dancing is totally different from our stand in place and have sex with yourself. Which is not to say it isn't sexy - in an odd sort of way, it's a lot more sexy, because it's graceful and elegant and just hinted at. There's a lot of come together, almost touch, then scoot away - and because all the dances happen in patterns, you switch partners a lot. So you touch hands briefly with a partner who takes your breath away, followed by some fat old dude who smells like four-day-old vomit.
So, I'm standing by the side, and watching, and suddenly a my hand is taken - quickly, decisively, but gently, my palm is kissed, and James whispers in my ear, "You are the most beautiful creature God ever made," or something like that but in Elizabethan English. His breath tickled my ear, and my knees went boneless and my stomach dropped and I couldn't breathe.
I must have looked flustered, at the very least, because he dropped my hand and whispered, "Do I offend?"
"Oh, no!" I said. I held my hand up again, for another kiss. James looked startled, then laughed - such a wonderful, completely abandoned laugh. He took my hand again and commenced kissing it, my wrist, my elbow - my elbow, for God's sake! Can you imagine a boy in Real Time doing that with a straight face?
We were so busy, though, that I didn't realize until we turned to get some wine that Wm. was standing a bit off in the shadows himself, watching us.
May 8
Well, as you've guessed by now, the plot thickeneth. Or whatever. I'm definitely getting some kind of vibe about Wm. Ms. Q has some about me and James. James is calling on us just about every day, or happening on us when we're out running errands. And of course he's always at the parties we're invited to, and boy there are a lot of them. And he's at the theatre a lot, which makes sense because his Uncle is involved.
Speaking of the theater, they're to do Romeo and Juliet at The Globe. And I want to be Juliet. But I can't, because I'm a girl. I mean, I knew that from all our history and literature classes. All the boys roles were played by boys, and all the girls roles were played by boys. I thought that sounded incredibly dumb and completely backwards, but then, there's a lot of things women and girls don't get to do back in this time. Still, I kind of thought it would be obvious that a boy wasn't a girl. So the first time I saw a boy performing a girl's role I was surprised that he wasn't bad.
But the other day James told me he was going to play Romeo in a special performance of the play. It had been written in 1595, so it wasn't new, but it was still a favorite and some rich noble's daughter wanted it for her birthday. So of course she was going to get it. It's sort of like being a rock star or movie star in our time - you get what you want when you want it and nobody thinks there's anything wrong with it. Unless, of course, you piss off somebody more rich or more noble.
But anyway, I had played Juliet in acting camp a couple of summers ago, and I still remembered a lot of the lines, and... if James was going to be Romeo, I wasn't going to have just anybody being Juliet. But the trick was going to be getting the part. In fact, it was going to be kind of a double trick, because first I had to convince everybody I was a boy, and then I'd have to convince them I was a boy being a girl. So, I had an idea - but I'd have to bring James in on it. And I wasn't totally sure he'd go along with me.
But I didn't have much time to get ready if I was going to pull this off, because, well, ok here's how it went down with James. I keep wanting to call him Jim, or Jimmy, but that wasn't really a nickname for a "James" in this timeframe. Jamie is ok, though, and I kind of like the sound of that, so I've started calling him that - just every so often. He looks a little startled when I do, so I only call him that when we're alone.
Anyway, James, Jamie, and I were in the small parlor in Ms. Q's house. She was busy in the kitchen, and she more or less trusted us, so she'd let us sit alone once in a while as long as she could hear our voices. If we got too quiet...
So, we're sitting there - the furniture is really uncomfortable, did I mention that? We were in separate chairs, facing each other, so I leaned over to keep it kind of quiet.
"I want to be Juliet so I have to be a boy and you have to introduce me to everybody at the theater so I can audition," I blurted it out just like that. And a minute later I was giggling into my hand. If you could have seen James' face - it was like all eyeballs and open mouth, sort of staring at me like I'd told him I was a unicorn or something.
"Excuse me?"
"I want to be in the play, as Juliet. And I know you can't be an actor unless you're a man or boy, but I know all the lines and I can do it.
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