Ok, this is a fun one. Is it a geeklet story if the geeklets aren’t actually in it?
Ever since I’ve had Shakespeare Geek merchandise, I’ve jokingly said that “the goal” is to bump into a stranger wearing my merchandise. That’s when I’ll know I’ve made it. You see where this story is going.
My daughter’s off to college. Perusing Facebook one night I see a group for parents of students at that college, and send a request to join. It gets approved, followed by a message. Which I assume is just an automatic “Your request has been accepted” type of thing. Nope!
It says, “Out of curiosity, are you the maker of the To Yeet or Not To Yeet shirt on Amazon?”
“I am!” I reply, “Though I’m sure by now there are a number of knockoffs, but yes, that is definitely one of my designs.” The nature of Amazon is that brain dead “sellers” with no ideas of their own will just steal the originality of others. We deal with it, and we move on. It’s definitely not winning the game if you bump into somebody wearing a knock off of one of your shirts. That’s negative points.
“Yup it’s you!” she replied, posting an image of the shirt. Turns out her daughter’s in the college’s Shakespeare group. I concede that while I’d love that, I know my daughter’s a math/space geek and wouldn’t want her to feel forced to follow in my footsteps.
But, still! Maybe this doesn’t count as me randomly bumping into somebody with my merch. But my daughter might! Now I’ve got this whole vision in my head where this woman’s daughter has one of my shirts, and all the other people in her club are all, “Oh, whoa, where’d you get that? I must have it!” so there’s really dozens of people wandering around my daughter’s college wearing Shakespeare Geek merchandise, and one day she’s going to stroll out onto the quad and be surrounded :). I can’t wait for that phone call!
One of the cool things about switching to RedBubble as the source for my Shakespeare Geek Merchandise – beyond the fact that face masks have far and away become my best seller and Amazon still doesn’t offer them – is that RedBubble tells me where my products are going, not just what I’ve sold. I always knew it did that, I just never really stopped and paid attention to it until last night. And it’s so cool.
I’ve said before that “the dream” is to bump into someone on the street wearing Shakespeare merchandise that I designed. I’m a big fan of the small universe philosophy, and that we are all potentially connected in a myriad of ways we simply haven’t discovered yet.
But one look at my sales report was a reminder of just how important that philosophy is. It’s a big big world and I’m just a small piece of it, so every connection is a big deal. You’ll see what I mean in a second.
So let’s get to the statistics! I was trying to figure out how to do this without giving away all my good insider secrets about my sales numbers, and I figured that percentages were the way to go.
77% of my sales come from inside the US. That makes total sense. Most from California, which also makes sense given the size and population of that state, but Virginia was a pleasant surprise in the top 3. Lot of Shakespeare lovers in Virginia!
About 13% from the UK. Again, totally makes sense. Where else are you going to find a strong concentration of Shakespeare Geeks but in the land of the man himself?
Little under 5% from Canada. Thanks, Canada! I’m going to bank on this one being related to them simply seeing the RedBubble site come up more often in their Google results :). I am totally ok with that.
Here’s where it gets interesting! Ready? The remaining countries that are now the proud home to Shakespeare Geek merchandise are, in no particular order…
I’m in the United States. New England to be more specific. Get a globe. Put your finger on New England. Now spin it all most all the way around, wave at Australia, keep going…New Zealand! Somebody in New Zealand is wearing one of my t-shirts! Just think, I could find myself in New Zealand one day, turn my head and be staring at a fellow Shakespeare Geek. All the world’s a stage, indeed.
That’s it, that’s the post. Sorry for the giddiness, I’m just all excited at the realization of just how far around the world my ideas have gone. If you are reading and are from one of those countries, do check in and say hello! Or Hola or Guten Morgen or G’Day or whatever else it is you might say where you come from!
This past summer I saw a near lifelong dream fulfilled when I went to Stratford and visited Shakespeare’s birthplace. I saw the church, I saw the tomb, I saw all the houses. I stood where Shakespeare stood.
Here we are a year later and most of those properties are closed because of the pandemic. When you’re a charity that generates 98% of its own income thanks to 850,000 visitors a year and the universe tells you “Guess what! No more visitors!” hard times are ahead for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT). People I met last year may no longer be employed soon.
The SBT has stated that they plan to reopen the Birthplace itself this summer, but the other properties – New Place, Anne’s Cottage, Hall’s Croft and Mary Arden’s Farm – will remain closed until “spring 2021” at least. There’s no mention of the church in this article (the SBT does not run the church, so that makes sense). Does anybody know its status? The whole question of church services here in the US has been a hotly debated question, so I really have no idea what’s going on in Stratford.
I don’t know what we can do to help. If we can’t show up and buy our tickets and browse the gift shops it’s going to be an uphill battle. For a second there I got excited thinking that we can storm the online gift shop! But no – the web page says they’re completely closed, unable to accept new orders. Now I’m really sad.
This past week we managed to get away for a little vacation down Cape Cod. Luckily for me the weather a little cold on our second day (I am *not* a ‘sit on the beach all day’ person!) we got to wander around and shop.
Look what I found! Well, look what my kids found. They’re well trained. I wasn’t even paying attention but one of them came out of a random store and said, “They have Shakespeare in there.” Show me, show me now.
In my many years of doing this I’ve seen and collected all kinds of Shakespeare stuff (the original name of this blog, long-time readers may remember, was called “Such Shakespeare Stuff”). Often as gifts, sometimes from random sources (my boss once bought me Shakespeare band aids because he saw them and thought I’d get a kick out of them), but rarely do I buy stuff for myself. Rarely do I justify spending money on myself, especially for stuff I clearly don’t need.
Unless it’s a tchotchke I hadn’t seen before. I suppose I must have known that this existed, somebody surely told me about it at one point or another. But it’s first time I saw one up close and personal and I had to have it. My wife asked, “What are you going to do with that?”
“Take pictures of it and put a post up on the blog,” I told her. “And then it goes in the candle drawer with all the other candles.” This one actually has some practical use 🙂
I took him to the register and the woman behind the counter said, “Did you see our other Shakespeare items?” It dawned on me that I was wearing my “Shakespeare’s England” hoodie and my “A plague on neither of your houses” mask standing here buying a Shakespeare candle, so I may have been wearing it on my sleeve a bit. Unfortunately, all she really had were things I’d already seen – finger puppets, refrigerator magnets, and so on. But I didn’t have the candle yet. Now I do! (Turns out he’s available on Amazon if you won’t be in Cape Cod anytime soon and, like me, simply must have him!)
We have Disney+ in the house, and we also have a teenage girl in the house who hasn’t ever outgrown what I call the “Broadway Baby” phase of her development where she doesn’t just know every word to every song, she knows the back story of every ensemble dancer. So when she bounded downstairs this morning (while everyone but me is still asleep) asking, “Can we watch? Or do we have to wait until everybody is awake?” it was like Christmas just for her. So I sat down and let her fire it up, like opening a present on Christmas eve.
Yes I totally stole a “Hamlet” graphic for this, I dont have any Hamilton images.
Within five minutes I decided I didn’t like it. So, always in search of fresh Shakespeare content, I’m not throwing away my shot. I did not expect my world to be turned upside down. (Yeah, I’m probably gonna keep doing that.)
This will actually be the third way we’ve seen Hamilton. I’m not counting buying and memorizing the soundtrack. I mean seeing.
The first came very early, when it was still in its “phenomenon” phase and everybody was going crazy. Knowing that we were never going to see it on Broadway, yeah, we watched the bootleg version. People have mixed feelings about this, I understand. Personally I always want to know what the buzz is all about, and am willing to pay the tradeoff of having at least some information. When you memorize a soundtrack before you see the play your brain often does funny things as it tries to piece together what’s happening. Getting to see it, even in poor quality, gives you some scaffolding on which to hang those songs.
Well, then it came to Boston, so we had to go.
THAT, my friends, is an experience. Shakespeare has generally taught me a habit – I like to know the story before I go in to live theatre. Too much dialogue and plot can be easily missed in an environment where you can’t pause and rewind, or even leave over to ask the person next to you what just happened, because then you’ll miss something else. So I sat down to Hamilton knowing all the rooms in which stuff happens.
The lights go down, the actors come out, the music starts….and it was fucking amazing, pardon my non-PG13 language. I heard I’m allowed one F-bomb. The opening number of this show is a “Holy shit, we’re here, this is happening, this is beautiful” experience. The way the sound echoes around you. The way something is happening on every part of the stage. It is an absolute spectacle. (Not enough people talk about the choreography in this show. I think it’s one of the best parts, to be honest.) It is overwhelming. You could watch again and again, paying attention to a different background dancer every time.
And now this morning, here I am watching that same scene on tv. With closeups and camera work. The whole sensory bombardment is just gone. The scale and grandeur of the huge opening number is replaced with closeups on faces, presumably so the audience that’s never seen it can go, “Oh, ok, that’s Burr…and that’s Washington, and that’s Jefferson….” and file it away for later. Meanwhile there’s fifty people behind them dancing their lives off and all you see is a couple of them crossing through the shot every now and then.
It’s then that I realized, this is exactly what we’ve been talking about with Shakespeare for years. What’s the difference between a live Shakespeare show and seeing it on film? I have always been a big defender of film versions. Now I’m rethinking that whole position.
Shakespeare isn’t a musical, though. And there aren’t background dancers, usually. The focus is generally on the one or two people that are talking, or killing each other. I think that does translate well to film. Unless there’s a spear carrier having a left shark moment, you’re probably not going to miss much if they’re not in the shot.
Big modern stage musicals like this are very different. Everything is happening at once and the audience has to say “What am I going to look at?” and try to take it all in. Now it’s all about direction. Somebody’s made that decision for you. One of the best choreographed scenes in the play – the “rewind” song (my daughter has everything memorized, I do not) – is an obvious example. Live, it takes a number of seconds to realize what’s happening and the magnitude of what they just did on stage (it is quite impressive). On film, Angelica looks in one direction and the camera cuts in that direction to let the audience know, “Here. You need to look here, here is the important bit.”
There are advantages here, of course. I remember once reading a quote from Ian McKellen about the difference between theatre and film. He said, paraphrased, “In theatre it’s all about the voice. On film it’s all about the face.” That makes perfect sense and it’s still true here – I spotted Angelica rolling her eyes and thought, “The people in the background wouldn’t get to see that.” Rarely though does the plot of the story hinge on an eye roll.
I’ve always said that we have to treat Shakespeare on stage and Shakespeare on film as two different things (even when it’s “Shakespeare on stage, filmed” :)). Usually, I mean the expectations of the moviemakers, and how they have to appeal to a different audience (much like turning a book into a movie and how you have to appeal to the people that have read the book while not losing the people who haven’t). Only now do I think I really understand the difference between have been talking about when they behave like seeing it live is really the only way to go, and film is a very distant second.
I wonder how this experience is going to change how I see Shakespeare now? Hamlet, King Lear, and the other great tragedies don’t count – I’ve seen so many of those now that it’s more about seeing each individual interpretation. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. But I haven’t seen most of the histories live (or at all, really) and I’m curious now how different the experience might be.
