a couple of random thoughts

 For the past several years (except for a break for the COVID-19 debacle), The Princeton Public Library and the McCarter Theater have co-sponsored an event where readers join to read the entire text of Dickens' A Christmas Carol aloud (link to the 2022 event). The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I have done it several times. I was honored to be chosen as the first reader this year; I got to declaim, "Marley was dead, to begin with," and to drive home the 19th-century jokes with which Dickens peppered his manuscript. (The entire event is a time commitment of about three hours, but the story really is a great one to have read to you. While we could not this year due to other commitments, TEW and I have stayed for the whole thing in the past, and the variety in quality of the readers is part of the experience - yes, there are some halting and inexperienced readers, but there are great ones, and wonderful accents from many of the voices that make up Central Jersey. But you're also welcome to drop in and leave whenever you'd like.)

And one of my own personal traditions is to read the whole of A Christmas Carol for myself every December, and it reminds me that it's time to start.

The person who read after me was TEW, and the woman after her had this wonderful Indian accent (Hindu? Gujarati?). I have not heard Dickens played on that orchestra before, and it was novel and delightful... but THAT reminded me of one of my pet peeves: actors being credited with the lines they deliver. Judy Garland delivered the line, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore*," but it was said by character Dorothy Gale, and it was written by the screenwriters (Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf**, or at least one of them).

Some actors are marvellously smart and verbal, and able to improvise (Devid Ogden Stiers apparently came up with the "...promises you don't intend to keep" line in the Disney Beauty and the Beast), and many others are clearly not. Those great quotes that you've been taking from movies are mostly written by uncredited writers, not the glamorous actors to whom you've been accrediting them.

I'll go back to Christmas Carol now. Cratchit, after all, needs to slide on the ice a few dozen times, and then run off to Camden Town to play Blind Man's Buff.

*NOT "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." Sheesh.

**How could a person with a name like that be anything OTHER than a writer?