“I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.”

I hope you have all had a very festive start to your holidays.  Now that all the Christmas socializing is over, I get can to the real reason we have holidays -- watching old movies, reading, and working on the script I'm writing.  I've got everything set up, I think.  I've got Shakespeare's family introduced and his mother and father's unhappy marriage, and Shakespeare's relationship with the Lucy family, especially Lady Anne Lucy (a bit of romance there) and I've introduced Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare's future wife, not the present day actress) to Will on the bridge late at night, and I've also had the travelling players arrive at town, with a young Christopher Marlowe in tow.  He plays the ladies' characters, which I think is a stroke of genius on my part!  (An old writing teacher once told me that when you think something is written really well, you should consider cutting it, because it's a sign you're showing off, but this bit with Christopher Marlowe is really good, I think.)

I read a little Anne Perry mystery, called A Christmas Homecoming, about a troupe of actors who go to an English country estate to put on a play written by the daughter of the rich guy who owns the house.  The play is a mess, but the actors and director figure out how to save it, because they know how theatre works.  I hope some of you will perform the same magic with "For My Name is Will"!  (Anne Perry is an interesting person herself.  She grew up in Australia and when she was a teenager, she had a very intense friendship with a girl her age.  When the girl's mother announced that she and her daughter were moving to South Africa, Anne Perry and her friend decided to kill the mother.  According to the evidence at the trial, they hit her 20 times with a stone they had placed along a path on which the three were walking, and both girls were convicted of murder, but they were children so I believe Anne Perry only served five years for the crime.  They made a movie of the event with Kate Winslet playing Anne Perry's character.)

Last night, after we got back from our third turkey dinner (!), I put on the movie, "The Thin Man", starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as the detective couple, Nick and Nora Charles.  I have never seen these movies, although they are classics -- based on the novels by Dashiell Hammett (who also wrote The Maltese Falcon).  I really enjoyed it -- Powell and Loy are great, wise-cracking, witty and playful and I loved the style and all the characters.  I think an actress named Ruth Channing plays the character who says the great line I started this thing with, and she says it with great gusto.  I wonder if Dashiell Hammett thought that was a really good line. . .