Shakespeare's Sisters

                                                                                                           Having just finished Eleanor Brown's marvelous debut novel, The Weird Sisters, I have been thinking a lot about sisters in general, but more particularly, sisters in Shakespeare. Though her story is modern, Brown's trio of sisters, Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia, each carry traits of their Shakespearean namesakes (How could I not love this book?) and themes from the plays echo subtly through the novel. The women in Brown's novel, like so many of Shakespeare's sister characters, are studies in contrasts, yet are bound by their shared histories. In Much Ado about Nothing, for example, Beatrice is elder cousin to the younger Hero. Where Hero is demure, passive, and ripe for marriage, Beatrice is outspoken, sharp-witted, and happily single. While the women aren't biological sisters, their sister-hood is evident in their affectionate banter and fierce loyalty to each other. On the other hand, Twelfth Night presents a pair of women, Olivia and Viola, whose names are near anagrams for the other. They're not related, but are actually sisters under the skin (or breeches, in Viola's case). Both women are without parents, and grieving for lost brothers; they're alone in a man's world, and they're both pining for someone they can't have. Olivia falls in love with Viola-dressed-as-a-boy because in her she finds a sympathetic listener who understands her. At the end of the play, when the two women actually become sisters through marriage, that relationship becomes explicit. My current project features a biological pair of Shakespearean sisters, Kate and Bianca Minola. When my sister asked to read the book, I said, "Okay, but just so you know--the sisters in the story are not us!" My Kate and Bianca, like their originals, resent each other and fight constantly. My sister and I never fight. (And no one ever believes us when we say this.) My fictional sisters have drifted apart, but my real-life sister and I are close. And yet. . . Like my Kate and Bianca, my sister and I couldn't be more different. She was always the risk-taker, I the cautious one. She was social, I was bookish; she's athletic, I'm. . .pathetic.  As a teenager, she drove confidently and fast, while I gripped the wheel, white-knuckled, refusing to move from the right-hand lane. And you could have drawn a chalk line down the middle of our shared bedroom, her half neatly dusted and picked up, mine looking like my closet exploded. When we ended up in the same gym class in high school, I looked to her for protection from the bigger, tougher girls who ate skinny chicks like me for breakfast. Did I mention she was a freshman at the time? Even now, our lives have gone in completely different directions, but she's my touchstone, and I'm hers. We know each other better than we know ourselves. And this truth about sisterhood, like so many other aspects of human nature, is something Shakespeare got completely right.  (P.S. Happy birthday, sis!)

♥ ♥ ♥

Greetings From Asbury Park

Asbury Park holds a place in my heart like no other. Growing up in the 60s in a family of limited means, our "vacation" each summer was a day in Asbury. We started in the morning with a trip to the Monte Carlo pool, with its cheerfully painted Adirondack chairs. We stored our stuff in a locker room that sported a sign with a 40s style bathing beauty in a red swimsuit. After a morning swim, we walked through the cool underground tunnel that led straight to the beach, where we spent the afternoon until it was time for dinner at the Homestead Restaurant. Sometimes we took a ride in the swan boats on Wesley Lake, but we always ended up on the boardwalk, riding the carousel, eating Kohr's custard and taffy from Criterion, always stopping to sit on the reversible benches--where you  could either watch the people or the ocean. I always chose the ocean.

 As you can see from the photo, going to Asbury is a tradition in my family, one that started during World War II. Most of the men in the family were away, so my grandmother, my mom and two uncles, as well as a number of assorted great aunts would spend a week in one of the more modest boarding houses. It was a women and children's vacation during the week, and on the weekends, the men who were either too young or too old to serve would come down and visit. After the war, the tradition continued into the early 50s. On the rides down during our day trips, my mom would tell me stories of Asbury's heyday. My favorite was her description of dances held around the Monte Carlo pool, where a band played out on a floating platform in the middle of the water. It was easy to imagine the ladies in their 40s updos, dancing with their soldier husbands and boyfriends to Big Band music. But the Monte Carlo pool, like many of Asbury's landmarks, is long gone. My heart broke when the carousel was dismantled, when Convention Hall and the Paramount fell into disrepair, and when the Palace Amusement building was demolished. But after years of economic decline, recent revitalization efforts in Asbury are revealing hopeful glimmers of its glory days (to quote its most famous champion, The Boss). And while Asbury is no longer the dream resort of my youth, it's a place I'll always love--even in all its shabby splendor.