Winter's Tale

On Saturday, Bianca and I went to Cedar City for the Utah Shakespeare Festival. We've tried to make it a tradition to go each year, didn't end up going last year, and just barely made it for this year. But I really wanted to go this year because they were performing The Winter's Tale. (I forgot to bring my camera so have no pictures from this weekend.)

We stayed at the Big Yellow Inn Bed & Breakfast and got a free upgrade to the Master's Suite (gotta love a pretty much dead weekend). Bianca even had her own little room with TV. She loved that. We did each other's nails and relaxed in the afternoon.

We were disappointed to find out they don't do a Green Show for the fall season, but fortunately the college students had a comedy juggling act going on that night. The play was great. The Winter's Tale is dear to me because it's the story my current YA novel is based upon. I'm about 1/3 of the way through and dearly lacking inspiration so I wanted to see the original play performed to help me move over my hump. This is one of the hardest of Shakespeare's plays to put into genre because if it were finished at the intermission mark (halfway through), it would be categorized as a tragedy, but after the second half (and the fact that everything works out just swell at the end), it is categorized as a comedy. In my novel, I'm choosing to focus on Perdita and Philomel's story rather than the parents. I did realize as Hermoine is pretending to be a statue at the end that I still need to fill in some holes in my own plotline--how does one fake dead/fake a statue in a real-life modern-day setting? I've got some things to think about.

Bianca ended up falling asleep midway through the second act and I had to keep shaking her because she was snoring. Silly tired girl!

We slept hard that night and woke up to a delicious B&B breakfast (this is really the reason why I prefer staying in B&Bs; well, that and the antiques!) and then headed the three hours home. We stopped in Santaquin for a scone the size of my thigh (not kidding) smeared with honey-butter. So worth the calories!

It was a short weekend, but a lot of fun! I hope Bianca remembers these special weekends we spent together when she's older. Hopefully she'll form a life-long love for Shakespeare too!