That Scottish Play Curse of Date Night

This past saturday was Da-da's first date night away from the monkeys in 10 million years, and wifo takes us to see a cheery community college production of HAMLET -- conveniently forgetting that Da-da suffers from a rare and mysterious Shakespearean Tourette's, a kind of unpredictable and torpolexiconographical inner verbal Bardic volcano. So, it should come as no surprise that within the first 15 minutes of the production, when the ghost and Hamlet started gamboling about in the Elsinorean mist, that Da-da suddenly sat bolt upright in his seat and shouted, "MACBETH!!" at the top of his lungs -- freezing and horrifying actors and audience alike. (Sure, we were watching HAMLET, but Da-da's Shakespearean psychoneuroasthenic MANIA doesn't know that.)

House lights came up.

20YO boy-Hamlet and boy-Horatio, elder ghost and teen guards all stepped down off the stage en masse to collect Da-da from his seat and escort him OUT of the theater... where those assembled proceeded to walk Da-da three times around the outside of the building, spitting over their left shoulders repeatedly while uttering obscenities (some more than others), then awaiting invitation back into the theater by outraged proto-hipster drama department geeks. (This is actually the traditional MACBETH cure.) Somewhere along the way, Da-da performed about a thousand mental Shakespearean neurological word-replacement exercises, ensuring that he will make it through the rest of the play.

Alas, during the "Yorick" scene, Da-da's Broca-Wernicke dam broke. He suddenly stood and shouted his replacement word: "FIRE!!" then muttering, "MACBETH" loudly over and over.

House lights came up.

Now, we're forced to employ a more advanced Scottish play cure: the entire cast and Da-da stand onstage, each spinning around three times, as fast as possible on the spot, spitting over our shoulders while uttering obscenities. Needless to say, they were going to BAN ME FOR LIFE from the Jacob Canescence Community Theater for the Extremely Disturbed... that is, until we received a standing ovation for our onstage performance. (Evidently, some people had never seen HAMLET and thought it was part of a Brechtian revival). Ah, the sound and fury.

(Note: for those not in the know, you're supposed to refer to "Macbeth" as "that Scottish play" while inside (or outside) any theater -- unless you have a Shakespearean neurological disorder, of course. Be sure to bring a camera to catch those priceless shocked faces.)