Queen of Infinite Space

Fandoms: Twelfth Night, Hamlet
Characters: Viola, Hamlet, Claudius (mentioned), Gertrude (mentioned
Warnings: Horror, Surreal, Doppelgangers
Word Count: 1260
Summary: Viola holds, as 'twere, a mirror up to nature, and enters a castle sealed tight as a tomb

From a prompt generated by thisbluespirit : "Viola + Hamlet - doppelganger & stranded/survival scenario"

First of all, I've finally decided that I'm going to prom. I've been going back and forth about this for weeks, if not months, weighing the amount of fun I'm likely to  have there against how much I would regret not going.

So my mom and I went dress shopping and had an incredible amount of luck. First store we went into was Forever Twenty-One, and the second dress I tried on was just perfect, and less than forty dollars. It has black flowers on a white background, with a modest amount of tulle and frilly stuff, and most importantly, it's strapless! This is a really big deal for me, because I'd normally never ever wear a dress like this, but hey, it's prom.

Another bit of luck. A friend of mine at church gets season tickets to shows at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and this month was going to be The Taming of the Shrew, but her husband got tickets to the Blackhawks game, so of course they had to go to that. So she immediately thought of me and called the box office so they could change the tickets to my name, and I went with my mom to that today. I was a bit worried about how they'd handle sixteenth century misogyny in this play, but it was just incredible. It was one of those productions that has a frame story of the actors at rehearsal. So in this play the actress who played Kate and the director (the character, not the real director) are a couple, but "Kate" keeps flirting with the girl who plays Bianca. They try to tackle what it means that Katherine just ends up giving in to Petrucio, but can't really come to any conclusions. And then at the end, after Kate makes her big speech about "Hey ladies, you're doing yourselves and your husband a huge disservice if you don't do everything he says" and Petrucio goes "Kiss me, Kate," there's a moment where she just looks at him and you can tell she's wondering if she should go with the stage directions or not, and then she finally goes "OH FUCK THIS" and rips her skirt off and storms off. Now obviously this was staged, but it was so well done. And then the director comes up and calls after her and finally calls her by her real name, which was an issue earlier in the frame story. (Sorry if this whole explanation of the plot is confusing, by  the way, but it really was this intense and jumbled when I was watching it.)

Speaking of Shakespeare! For Lit class, we need to write and perform a monologue for a character from any of the books we've read in Junior or Senior year. I'm going to be Iago, but I'm also a puppetmaster, working behind the scenes to control the marionettes of Othello, Desdemona and Cassio. You have no idea how excited I am by this opportunity! It's also really scary that I've been able to get into Iago's mind well enough to write this.

So I graduate in three weeks, and then mere hours after that, I'm going to that summer seminary program I was talking about earlier and I'll be gone for three weeks for that. And it's three months from today that I'm actually going to be at college. It just seems like everything's going too fast, and I need to find some kind of center point that I can hold onto, or I'll go crazy one of these days.