As your friendly neighborhood Shakespeare Nerd, it is my duty to wish you a Happy St. Crispin’s Day! Ironically, we have the day off, and won’t be doing Henry the Fifth until Saturday. Nevertheless, this is the closest I’ve yet come to my lifelong dream of being in a production of Henry on October 25th. In the Ellen’s-Head-Cam, that amusing part of my brain that makes hypothetical situations into miniature movies, the whole cast, and possibly the angels in heaven, chime in at key moments, to emphasise the timeliness:

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

 And what about:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d!

And then everyone would shudder with the apprehension of the truth in the text, that we are remembering it 600 years later, the way I get chills whenever I see Julius Caesar and Cassius says, “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” Oh man. It gets me every time.

As it is, I’ll be stripping my sleeve and showing my scars whilst I watch the Red Sox.