Tuesday All Day

 I'm sitting at the Welcome Table all on my lonely own.  We are now opening from 2 to 5 on Tuesdays and Fridays, but clearly the word has not gotten out there yet.  Or people are out there voting.  Or hiding under their beds.  It will be quite a night, but I will probably retire to bedlam, or at least to a hot bath and a book.  The tension is just too much.

For today I will offer something to celebrate Sean Connery who just died.  He may not have been a prince among men, but he was quite an actor and a singular character.  And he looked good in a kilt.  The obit is worth a read, but I've excerpted the most important bit below.  I love the fact that he credits a mentor who turned him onto books with influencing his development as an actor and that he spent time "in every library in Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales."

From the NY Times obit on November 1st: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/movies/sean-connery-dead.html

During the year Mr. Connery toured in “South Pacific,” he lost much of a Scottish accent so impenetrable that, he later claimed, other actors at first thought he was Polish. His name was shortened to Sean Connery. And he found himself a mentor. An American actor in the cast, Robert Henderson, gave him a reading program that included all the plays of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Henrik Ibsen, along with the novels of Thomas Wolfe, Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” and Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

“I spent my ‘South Pacific’ tour in every library in Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,” Mr. Connery told The Houston Chronicle in 1992. “And on the nights we were dark, I’d see every play I could. But it’s the books, the reading, that can change one’s life. I’m the living evidence.”