Shakespeare on a Budget

Every year our family makes a trip down to the Utah Shakespearean Festival to enjoy the plays, Cedar City, and the festival atmosphere. The festival is quite grand now, and a part of me misses the early days in the late 70's and early 80's when it wasn't quite so big. The greenshow performers interacted more spontaneously with the visitors, and I haven't seen the dancers do the Egg Dance -- with raw eggs placed on a wooden cross on the ground and the dancer jumping and crossing over the top -- or the Sword Dance for years.

Anyway, rather than reminisce about what I miss, I have to say that we have hooked our kids on Shakespeare. This year Justin and I took turns taking kids to a show. I took all of the kids to see the comedy "Much Ado About Nothing" and Justin took the two older boys to see "Macbeth." Owen has been going around quoting the Black Adder episode where the Prince of Wales hires two stage actors to give him elocution lessons and Black Adder keeps repeating the name of The Scottish Play (for one does not name the play aloud to avoid bad luck) just to see the two actors go through this crazy hand-clapping nose-honking sequence that is supposed to ward off the bad luck. This was the first year since we had kids that no one went to the babysitting place. Liam didn't mention missing going there, although he has always loved going in the past.

This year I tried something my sister-in-law does. She counts on having a microwave in her hotel room and then plans and prepares meals ahead to just warm up and thus save on the eating out expenses. So, as recommended by Keli, I made a pasta dish for one night and soft shell tacos for the second night. It was a lot of work, but who can afford to eat out with a teenage boy who consumes half his body weight in food every day? And it worked out great. Nobody complained about being hungry for once. The pasta dish I made came from the Real Mom Kitchen site and it's called "Red and White Pasta." I added a can of chicken chunks to it to make it a bit more hearty, not to mention doubling the cups of pasta because I have hungry big people to feed. The soft-shell tacos were a hit too. My only disappointment food-wise was breakfast. The continental breakfast at our bare-bones motel was toast and presweetened cereals. Oh, and juice. Sigh. Nothing with protein. I was hoping for at least bagels and cream cheese! Well, now we know for next year. And we didn't even get to eat our instant oatmeal packets because, for once, there wasn't a coffee maker in our room. Oh well. Good thing I brought yogurt for all of the breakfast eaters.