🚀The Dark Age: The original middle English

Hello, friends!

One of my favorite scenes in The West Wing is an innocuous little moment with Donna Moss. If you've seen the show, you know Donna: She's eager, sometimes naive, sometimes bumbling, always with her heart in the right place. She works as the assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff, and at one point describes herself as the "Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff". So she's bad at jokes, too.

Anyway, in the 18th episode of Season 3, "Stirred," Donna Moss has learned that her most influential teacher is retiring. She spends the episode advocating for some kind of recognition for her teacher, and her boss keeps brushing her off. Donna just wants to do something to show her teacher how important her work was, to give her a sense of meaning for all the years spent shaping young minds.

The episode winds down with Donna being called into the Oval Office by President Bartlet. Bartlet reads a memo to her, written by her boss, about a teacher—Donna's teacher—who, in the '60s, when Twelfth Night was banned in schools, invited students to her home on weekends to read it together.