Image Description: The Contessa’s best stretch, captured by my friend Becky. Monty and Bruce monopolize my chair.

This month we had the pleasure of a little jaunt to Halifax, where we saw a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, starring everyone’s favourite hobbits, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd. If you’re not familiar, it’s a retelling of Hamlet from the point of view of two secondary characters who end up dead (along with almost everyone else) and are trying to remember exactly what befell them. Monaghan and Boyd were pretty much perfect in the lead roles, since the sense of friendship between them is the key to the whole thing. I also loved the costumes, which were on the fantastical side of historical. The Halifax run is now over, but you might be able to catch it in Toronto for the next little while. While we were in Halifax, we also took a stroll by the Old Burying Ground, which is a cemetery that L.M. Montgomery reimagined in my favourite of the Anne books, Anne of the Island.
“Every citizen of Kingsport feels a thrill of possessive pride in Old St. John’s, for, if he be of any pretensions at all, he has an ancestor buried there, with a queer, crooked slab at his head, or else sprawling protectively over the grave, on which all the main facts of his history are recorded.”