Used to, when my wife was driving and we’d pull up to a drive-through, she’d give her order, ask me what I wanted, repeat it to the order-taker, and when the order-taker said, “Will that be all?”, I’d say, “Oh – to go.”
And my wife would tell the order-taker at the drive-through we’d like our food to go.
Occasionally I act goofy at the grocery store to make kids smile and my wife will exclaim quietly “you’re a retard” to which I reply loudly “ha! You married a retard!”
I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.
I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
if you’re not from the us american south, there’s some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can’t really describe all of them, because i’ve lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.
but y’all. the way he said “brutus is an honourable man” – each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end…it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise.
christ, he’s good.
the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.
Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.
This man is fantastic. 💕
The thing that just destroys me about this, though – we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which…let’s be fair, most are, but not the way it’s said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I’m not really sure how to explain it except… like… “Thrice” is not a word you hear in common speech…unless you’re in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.
Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.
One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.
In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.
One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.
I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.
This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:
First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.
Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.
TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.
definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?
Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all – all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.
Someone sent this to me a while ago and I dropped it in my drafts because I wanted to comment on how RIGHT this sounded but I couldn’t express why it sounded right, so I’m glad other people have picked it up
There’s a theory that Appalachian English in particular retains a lot of the qualities present in Shakespearean english that are now gone elsewhere. Thinking of my Mamaw, who says “twice’t” instead of twice and other things like that…
I would like to add that recently on a livestream, Red and Indigo of Overly Sarcastic Productions did a live read through of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they gave one of the girls a southern belle accent (can’t remember if it was Helena or Hermia) and it was perfect. Absolutely perfect.
What an amazing performance. You feel it. You feel this man talking about a beloved friend to men who betrayed him. The hurt of his loss, and his rising anger at the betrayal.
Ignorant people say America has no culture. I say, “Here it is. You don’t have to like it. But damn sure don’t say it isn’t there.”
It reminds me of paintings around the world portraying Jesus as the dominant local ethnicity, and it’s just as beautiful. For a moment, Marc Antony is a good and loyal friend of the deceased, speaking at the funeral…and if anyone wants to start trouble in the funeral home parking lot after, well, they gonna be a ass-whoopin’. Lookin’ at you, Brutus.
A post dedicated to my mom’s art. I’m more and more convinced she is surrounded by jealous assholes because none of her friends and people in her life are able to say anything nice about her work. Most that visit tend to ignore it, and one even said she didn’t have any talent.
It’s ok not to get someone’s work, or feeling it is not your thing, but it gives you no right to be an asshole.
Also I think my mom is also a great example of someone who can paint realism, but doesn’t find it satisfying to work that way, art for her is an emotional outlet, a meditative process. One style is not better than the other.
