Word: birthdaying
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...last time Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich presided over a press conference, he spouted several lines from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" to underline his refusal to give in to his critics and to march on through the controversies of December. On Tuesday, coincidentally Kipling's 143rd birthday, Blagojevich threw another press conference. But the embattled governor could have taken a few other words from the poet to heart: "Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors...
...destination doesn't have to be extreme to be meaningful - sometimes the company is the main attraction. On Jill Valeri's 40th birthday, her husband told her to pack three days worth of clothes and be ready to go at 3 p.m. Then he whisked her away from their suburban Maryland home to New York City, where they lived when they first met. He had already arranged childcare, asked his wife's boss to give her a couple days off and hatched a plan with her sister, whom his wife hadn't seen in over a year...
...success, the key is to tailor the trip to the person to whom you're giving it (i.e., not yourself). Says Tom Johansmeyer, a New York City-based writer, that was the trickiest part about planning the trip to Southern France he gave his wife for her 30th birthday - making sure it retained all the elements of a gift, while being enjoyable for him too. So, after putting her through an arduous hike up a steep cliff from the Riviera town of Eze-Bord-de-Mer (his idea of fun), he made sure there was a birthday cake waiting...
...such acclaimed plays as The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1966), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1971), Pinter radically altered and energized the traditional dynamic of the stage. It was no longer simply the place where people spoke; it was where not speaking could be far more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness - a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired. In its citation, the Swedish Academy...
...lives onstage, as Pinter's plays so vibrantly and mischievously did. Under all the mysterioso legerdemain, he was the Shakespeare of rhetorical bullying. The bickering men in The Caretaker and Old Times, the quarreling couples in Old Times and Betrayal, the desperate or rancorous family in The Birthday Party and The Homecoming - the rivalries and recriminations of all these mean creatures sparked instant and lasting theatrical pyrotechnics. Who could ask for more of a modern playwright...