12 months in the trenches...

This weekend was my first wedding anniversary. That inexplicable twinge of guilt you all felt late Sunday evening was from not contacting me. Unless you're Catholic. That's a different twinge. But it's all right. Next time you'll know.
We celebrated by going to the Shakespeare Tavern, where of all things, we didn't see any Shakespeare. We did see The Rivals, however, and got a chance to hear the only Irish accent in the world that's worse than my wife's. The funny thing was, the actor was doing a perfectly good Irish accent. It's one of those dialects that sounds worse the more accurate it is. Not the lilty Southern kind, but that jarring, billyclub swinging, Paddy O'Riley gibberish. Good stuff.
Actually, the only Shakespeare in the tavern that night was my Rogue Shakespeare Stout, which I must say, earned equal billing with the sperherd's pie as "the most pleasant thing I've put in my stomach in quite some time".
The atmosphere was quaint enough, though remarkably inauthentic. Not once did I spy a toothless wench. There were no underage children being tossed about by dirtyfingered members of local office. No gaunt and patchhaired dog lay itself upon my shoe in wait for a bit of crust to fall from the plate. No rats in the wine vats. No lost teeth in the beef. Bathrooms free of Elizabethan STD's. And I paid with plastic. No suspension of disbelief here.
I did enjoy the play, though. It didn't occur to me before, but this is where the oft imitated but never truly emancipated Mrs. Malaprop came from. The actress did a remarkable job in perturbing Mrs. Malaprop. It was a full-bodied and hilarious catheterization. Although the other actors held their own, when she was on stage, she owned the stage, and did so with knish.
Well, that about wraps up our Tavern adventure. Tune in next week when Eric describes his day at the petting zoo.