“There were some who wanted to Zoom, but many of us couldn’t,” she said. In an interview after the meeting, McGee said this factor also accounted for the group’s extended interlude. Many of the group’s members, whose ages range from 70s to 90s, were themselves - or lived with family members who were - at high risk for contracting early strains of COVID. The meetings had long been held at Friends Care Community, but even after many meeting spaces began reopening, Friends Care, whose population is at high risk when it comes to COVID, remained off-limits. That rich discussion halted suddenly in March of 2020 when doors across Ohio closed in response to the arrival of COVID-19 in the state.
“So you can see, when we meet, we have lots of different backgrounds that come into the richness of our discussion,” Deborah McGee added, indicating her fellow group members at the table. “We loved musical theater and just plain theater,” she said. “I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to Shakespeare, but my field of study has been linguistics, so I’m particularly interested in the language and how it has changed, so I do enjoy hearing it and reading it,” she said.įlo Lorenz, on the other hand, said her avenue into Shakespeare was through a general interest in the stage - she and her husband, the late Leon Holster, are well-known for having been part of the village’s long-running community theater troupe, Center Stage. Nancy Lewkowicz, however, said she found inroads into her interest in another way. I would … have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this’ - she couldn’t read that,” Hyde said.Įnglish classes were a common touch-point for the group when discussing how each member came to appreciate Shakespeare’s writing, with a few members, like Heston, Claire Perks and Deborah McGee, having dug into the works while studying English in college. “We got to the point where a girl was confronted with reading, ‘I know how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me. The group’s purpose du jour was to read “Romeo and Juliet,” but after such a long hiatus, the members present wanted to get reacquainted - not just with The Bard’s text, but with one another.Ĭarl Hyde recalled his first exposure to Shakespeare’s works in 11th grade, when his class read “Macbeth.” His memory lingered, he said, on a line spoken by Lady Macbeth, and not only on how arresting the passage was, but on how it affected a classmate tasked with reading it aloud. “She was from England, and she taught us all about Shakespeare and how the plays were performed - and we called her ‘Little Shakespeare!’” Heston said.
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