Response to challenge "over dinner"
This only really has spoilers through season 1--and for many of Shakespeare's plays, though I'm guessing that doesn't count. Inspired by speculation on what it would have been like to have Irina for a professor.
Professor Laura Bristow sometimes has her graduate students over for dinner. It’s a nice change for them, discussing Macbeth and Hamlet and Othello by candlelight over a home-cooked meal, instead of having a solitary helping of ramen noodles in a cramped and chilly apartment.
Professor Bristow is very popular. She’s an engaging teacher, intelligent and humorous and, of course, beautiful. She has a quiet but good-looking husband and a darling little daughter. Half of her students are secretly attracted to her; the other half want to be just like her when they take up academic careers of their own.
The real reason she’s popular, though, has little to do with her charm or even her intellect. It’s something else about her-a quality of sharpness, of incisiveness, even of danger. It’s something about the way her eyes zero in with dark intensity on a student who says something insightful, the way she seems to be able to read minds and divine when someone is lying or making excuses, the way her presence in the room makes everyone wake up and sit just a little straighter. It’s the darkly amusing comments she sometimes makes: “Juliet was an idiot,” she once said. “She should have married Paris, murdered him and then enjoyed her life as a rich widow, keeping Romeo around as a boy-toy.”
“She’s kind of scary,” someone says, after Professor Bristow reads Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me now” speech to a group of her students. Everyone laughs, but no one really disagrees.
Professor Bristow has an excellent reading voice, and her interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters are always fun to hear. Even though she thinks Juliet is an idiot, she makes the tired old balcony speech sound fresh and new. She does a wonderfully funny Hermia and a compelling Rosalind, but she’s really at her best with characters from the tragedies. She can make Gertrude likeable and Ophelia respectable and she can actually make people sympathize with Iago. (She mounts a spirited defense of Iago when someone accuses him of being “underhanded,” saying that the other characters are often just as underhanded, and it’s not Iago’s fault if he’s better at it than they are).
Best of all is when she reads Lady Macbeth, sounding ruthless and fearsome and yet softening when she reads the letter from her “dearest partner in greatness.” When she reads Lady Macbeth, it becomes quite clear that Professor Bristow could have been a very good actress.
Professor Laura Bristow sometimes has her graduate students over for dinner. It’s a nice change for them, discussing Macbeth and Hamlet and Othello by candlelight over a home-cooked meal, instead of having a solitary helping of ramen noodles in a cramped and chilly apartment.
Professor Bristow is very popular. She’s an engaging teacher, intelligent and humorous and, of course, beautiful. She has a quiet but good-looking husband and a darling little daughter. Half of her students are secretly attracted to her; the other half want to be just like her when they take up academic careers of their own.
The real reason she’s popular, though, has little to do with her charm or even her intellect. It’s something else about her-a quality of sharpness, of incisiveness, even of danger. It’s something about the way her eyes zero in with dark intensity on a student who says something insightful, the way she seems to be able to read minds and divine when someone is lying or making excuses, the way her presence in the room makes everyone wake up and sit just a little straighter. It’s the darkly amusing comments she sometimes makes: “Juliet was an idiot,” she once said. “She should have married Paris, murdered him and then enjoyed her life as a rich widow, keeping Romeo around as a boy-toy.”
“She’s kind of scary,” someone says, after Professor Bristow reads Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me now” speech to a group of her students. Everyone laughs, but no one really disagrees.
Professor Bristow has an excellent reading voice, and her interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters are always fun to hear. Even though she thinks Juliet is an idiot, she makes the tired old balcony speech sound fresh and new. She does a wonderfully funny Hermia and a compelling Rosalind, but she’s really at her best with characters from the tragedies. She can make Gertrude likeable and Ophelia respectable and she can actually make people sympathize with Iago. (She mounts a spirited defense of Iago when someone accuses him of being “underhanded,” saying that the other characters are often just as underhanded, and it’s not Iago’s fault if he’s better at it than they are).
Best of all is when she reads Lady Macbeth, sounding ruthless and fearsome and yet softening when she reads the letter from her “dearest partner in greatness.” When she reads Lady Macbeth, it becomes quite clear that Professor Bristow could have been a very good actress.