My wife and daughter don’t get much time to bond. With two younger siblings in the house it’s hard for them to sit around and watch a movie that might have more “adult themes” than the two younger ones are ready for.  As we’ve worked our way through various 1980’s classics my wife has asked about Pretty Woman, a favorite of hers. I remind her of exactly what that movie is about, and how ugly Jason Alexander gets at the end, and maybe it’s not something our 11yr old boy is interested in or ready for.

But, the other night the boys were out at a karate event and the middle daughter was having friends over (hanging out in the basement), so  I came home discover them watching Pretty Woman together.  Thus began the remainder of the night’s entertainment, listening for random feet in the kitchen and diving for the remote control to make sure nothing questionable is on screen when younger eyes might see it.

There’s a scene toward the end when Julia Roberts’ character convinces Richard Gere to take a day off and relax. She makes him take his shoes off and feel the grass with his toes. Before you know it they’re relaxing as he reads to her.

“Wait,” I say. “What did that book just say?”

My daughter knows this game and is already looking for the remote control.

“Are you serious?” my wife asks.  She knows that the sooner we finish this movie the better the odds we don’t get permanently interrupted.

“I could have been seeing things, but I could swear the book he’s reading from has a big word with a capital S on it. Which would be weird because you’d expect Complete Works or something and his name wouldn’t be the first word.”

My daughter has skipped a good minute or so before the scene, so we wait it out.  I get up and stand near the screen with my camera ready.

“Ha!” said I.  “Not my first rodeo.” If you can’t read it from the picture, it’s “Shakespeare Quotations.”

I actually went back just now as I’m writing this to rewind the movie (on the computer) and try to figure out what he’s reading.  You hear, “deaf heaven” and “my bootless cries.”  Son of a gun, they’ve got him reading Sonnet 29. Awesome. Better than something totally cliche out of Romeo and Juliet. I’m a little annoyed that they’ve got him reading from a quotations reference book rather than a Complete Works. It’s like neither of the characters knows anything about Shakespeare and thought, “Oo, that sounds romantic, we should read that” but wanted to get just the highlights or something.

Not only have I never noticed this, I’ve never seen a reference to it. Not that I was looking all that hard.  Googling “pretty woman Shakespeare” does indeed show some of those “25 Facts You Never Knew” type lists about the movie, and at least a couple of them do drop what Richard Gere is reading.

Is there a larger Shakespearean comparison or parallel we can make? You’ve got all the obvious Galatea / My Fair Lady stuff.  But is there anything else in this movie that connects to Shakespeare? In other words is this scene entirely coincidence, or is it a hint to a larger connection?

Here’s an interesting twist. How about a modern day murder mystery series set in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford on Avon?  Jo Joyner and Mark Benton (the names mean nothing to me) star in the new BBC (ah, that explains it) show.

The female lead will be named Lu Shakespeare of course, and I’m hoping that means that each episode will have the opportunity for some Shakespeare references, jokes, plotlines, or just general what have you.

I don’t know that I’ll ever get to see the show, being in the US and all with limited BBC access, but I like to look out for my people.  Who knows, maybe it will be a smashing success and spawn a US version based in Stratford, Connecticut.

You may recall that the moons of Uranus are named (for the most part) after Shakespeare characters.  Looks like 27 of them at last count with 3 (by my count) not being from Shakespeare.  Ariel doesn’t technically count because Ariel and Umbriel were intended to be a reference to Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (the idea being that those two, along with Titania and Oberon, were the fairies attending Uranus, the god of the sky).

Well, apparently there might be fewer of them very soon.  Popular Mechanics reports that Desdemona and Cressida are going to crash into each other in about a million years.  That’s totally “soon” on an astronomical level 😉

I guess it has to do with the irregular orbits, particular Cressida’s.  It’s bringing her closer to Desdemona, and the great thing about space is that without anything to get in the way, it’s easy to plot the math and physics out over a few million years and predict with pretty good accuracy what’s going to happen.

Something I discovered in writing this up, though, is that nothing is ever new under the sun (ha!) in the astronomical community.  This new article cites a new paper uploaded to arVix.  But the Wikipedia page also references the “Cressida and Desdemona will crash into each other” note. “Wow,” I thought, “Those Wikipedia editors are really up on their links.”  Not really – they’re referencing a 1997 paper.

Given that Cressida and Desdemona were discovered in 1986 (along with 8 others) as part of the Voyager 2 flyby, I can totally imagine the scientists looking at the Voyager 2 data and saying, “Oh cool, Uranus has like 10 more moons than we thought it did.” <pause>  “Those two are totally going to crash into each other eventually.”