No Fear Shakespeare

Remember a few weeks ago I wrote about reading SparkNotes for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream? If not, click here.

Last night was the fifth anniversary party of Books & Beer Club. I've only been a member for the past two years, but the club has been in existence a few years longer than that.

I've mentioned before that this book club has a genre a month. It makes for slightly easier picking for our monthly books. Our fearless leader, Wendy, suggested A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare for comedy month. Comedy night? I wasn't really sure that Shakespearean comedy would equate to modern comedy. Even after reading the SparkNotes a few weeks ago, I wondered about how funny this play would be. Boy, was I wrong. 

Wendy had another great idea. Instead of reading the play on our own, wouldn't it be fun to act it out at our meeting? Talk about fun. We had a blast! 

Before settling down to drink our first beers, each one of us pulled the name of a character out of a bucket. I grabbed the character, Hermia, one of the larger parts in the play. Ironically enough, the next two people to grab characters out of the bucket picked the character that was my father and the character that was my boyfriend.

We sat down around a table full of tasty treats. We highlighted our parts in the scripts that were distributed. (I know I wasn't alone to be completely relieved to see that we were reading the "No Fear Shakespeare" - another SparkNotes product - version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. No need to get bogged down in Shakespearean English.) We were reminded to read our parts with inflection, to make our characters believable.

Everyone did an awesome job. And I realized that this was really and truly funny. In every sense of the word. Who knew?

Less than half way through our reading, the skies opened up and the canvas roof of the beer garden where we meet started to leak. But did that stop us? Nope. We just read louder so we could be heard over the rain.

There was a rousing round of applause as we finished our reading. What a fun night. If your book club is ever looking to do something a little different, something fun, try reading a play instead of discussing one!

Happy Anniversary, Books & Beer Club!