Tapering down again

Dear family and friends,

This starts the week of 7.5 mg of prednisone and the first real visit to Mt. Sinai as a participant in the trial, starting on Thursday. After this week, then, I will know how much time and trouble the trial will be for me. Then I can plan events around it, especially seeing our granddaughters. So I am full of good anticipations.

Yesterday we had a delightful afternoon visiting Barry Kraft and his bride, Jessica Sage, at her father's home in Mill Neck. How lucky can we be! That Barry, who when he is not traveling around the world is hanging out on the West Coast married Jessica (great happiness in that!) and that they both visit her father, Jack,who lives a couple of miles from Glen Head, in Mill Neck. You may remember a photo I posted of Barry, sitting in the otherwise empty audience at Ashland, Oregon, holding my Three-Text Hamlet. That's how we met.—through the book.

Jessica is beautiful to look at and enlivening to talk to—spirited and bright. Jack is about our age, busy , active, still engaged in his profession, which has something to do with film. I should talk to him more about that. We like all his family that we have met on previous visits by Barry and Jessica. Barry is my Hamlet guru. He knows more about it than anyone: I mean the meat and bones of the play—not necessarily the scholarly stuff which can be peripheral to the play—but the sense of each line and each word in relation to each other and to the development of the characters and the situation. Because he has read it with such fervor and love, because he has acted several of its roles and has been a dramaturg for directors, he has a sense of the play rare in anyone. I took home some of his scribbled notes last night and hope to scan them today, and even record some if they help in the understanding of particulars. Though he didn't write them for posterity but for himself, I am always eager to see what he thinks about the play.

My work of the day was not difficult. I went through some of the paper copies of the TLS I have at home, marking the sections I will note in hamletworks.org. Of course my eye gets caught by many of the interesting articles. I saw a lovely ad for Eric's RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) edition of the plays (now published in separate play volumes as well as in a huge one-volume book), with a laudatory comment about Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, the co-editors, by Peter Holland, another luminary of our field. It's fun seeing how many people I recognize in TLS. Eric spent a year in London with his family working on the edition, and Merwin and I had the great pleasure of spending several days in their lovely historical house there. The edition has gotten him an enormous amount of praise, speaking tours and what not.

Today will be quiet: I will visit the physical therapist, and continue my work—but maybe stop for a few things at North Shore Farms.

Love to all,
Bernice