Excerpts from the Blog Entries for Open Mike at King’s Books

Yesterday Evening I read at the Open Mike at King's Books - Their reader was Laura LeHew.  It was a nice evening.  It begins to be a little cool.

Excerpts from the Blog Entries for Open Mike at King’s Books -

Blog Entry:   A Ticket from 1964   Starting high school in 1964 was not a clean break from friends in junior high school.  So I thought the ticket I had for the September 1964 Electronovision production of Hamlet, with Richard Burton,  was time spent with friends who always  focused on drama.  I retained a remembrance of seeing Richard Burton perform in a simple dark costume.

A thousand copies of Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud with Richard Burton as Hamlet, were released simultaneously at a thousand leading cities in the United States for four performances only.  It was presented at The Temple Theater, (seen to the left of the door of King’s Books).  The copies were then destroyed.  A copy remained with Richard Burton, which appears on the internet in sequences and is available as a restored movie.

From the door of King's Books,
 the Temple Theater

  
Blog Entry:  Ophelia .  Shocked and unable to communicate, Ophelia struggled, and as time went by, her father's death became an event to discuss with songs.  Hamlet's Ophelia must have been a strong reason John Gielgud, the director, wanted the play performed in rehearsal clothes.  Ophelia was a favorite theme of the wonderful Pre-Raphaelite painters who think her insanity made her radiant.  Gielgud preferred an Ophelia whose liveliness is dull and chill with shock. 

Blog Entry:  From The News Tribune, September 1964, Emily Walker’s Column:  "...three hours of watching Richard Burton's superb performance had left me in pieces...when the curtain fell...tears were rolling down my face, out of my nose, I couldn't see what I was doing, and I couldn't stop...I stumbled out, with the others...You who didn't see Burton's Hamlet at the Temple missed something wonderful...Here is a man who may be long remembered as the greatest Hamlet of them all."  These are quotes from Emily Walker's review in the News Tribune, printed the Sunday after the "Electron-o-vision" show on Wednesday and Thursday, September 23 and 24th 1964.

Landmark Convention Center
Old Mason Temple
Temple Theater

Blog Entry:  A Clue Emerges  A postcard from Elsinore Castle.  A friend sent the card from a summer trip to Scandinavia in 1966.  Part of the message…”The Castle from Hamlet!!  Remember Mrs. Hunt!”  It could be an English teacher had to do with students having tickets to the Electronovision Hamlet.  

Blog Entry:  Remember Ophelia.  Water Adjustment in the 1950s was at the YWCA pool in Tacoma. I did some microfilm research at the U. of Washington in Seattle.  A reference was in the stacks at the Drama Library.  The Drama Library was beyond the quad, at Hutchinson.  Hutchinson, the women's physical education building where I participated in The 1968 Swim Marathon of the dormitories, in a small pool, a pool like the YWCA in Tacoma.  

So at Hutchinson at the Drama Library stacks, I asked if the pool was still there.  Then if they could show me to an exit where the pool used to be.  This was nearby, and as the library worker showed me through the hallways, he explained which part had been the pool, which part had been the locker room.  However, as he explained his voice sounded into the ceiling with resonance, it was as though the pool were still there. 

That sound to me, in those spaces, always had meant there was a pool there.  Can I have to accept that, instead, the sound had something to do with the ceiling?

The fiftieth anniversary of John Gielgud’s direction of Richard Burton in Hamlet, 1964, and the Electronovision distribution of the taped movie, four performances only in two days, at around a thousand movie theaters.