Measure for Measure

We moved to Milwaukee from England in 1981. There wasn't any underground engineering work [involving big lumps of rock] of any scope in the UK at that time and the U.S. seemed preferable to Libya, the only other work alternative for my husband. While the Libyan pay was great, the fact that one had to sign a contract stating that you understood that they would not be responsible for returning your body to its country of origin in case you met an untimely death while on Libyan soil was enough to put us off. Our U.S. options were Los Angeles, somewhere on the eastern border of Washington State and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee won.

One of the first friends I made in Milwaukee was my daughter's English teacher and it just so happened that she was also from England. We had Easter dinner with her that first year we were in America and I remember meeting her son, Mark, who had moved back to England to study theatre. I hadn't really thought of these people for years until this past week when I discovered that the Mark Rylance, Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre in London, was the Mark that I'd met those many years ago.

This afernoon we went to see him in Measure for Measure at the Freud Theatre, UCLA and he was nothing short of brilliant. Spot on perfect.

It's L.A. so no theatre performance is without a number of big screen actors in the audience. This performance was no different. First my friend Betsy spotted Rita Wilson. Well, she thought she'd spotted her, but then thought it couldn't be Rita because she was dressed so carelessly. But then she saw Tom Hanks, so knew the Rita sighting was a solid one. She also saw them leaving...in their Prius. Yea! Helen Hunt was also spotted, but we don't know what car she was driving.