As Far As You Know

I have stopped in the City of Brotherly Love for a couple hours to break up the drive home. Always good to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, especially after a week in Thomas Jefferson's stomping grounds.

Since my new iPhone has a GPS chip inside, it's easy to get mesmerized watching the pulsing blue dot move across the Maps app as the train heads south!

I really like traveling by Amtrak or Acela in the Northeast Corridor. So many of the hassles of air travel are avoided and I have time to read or get some work done.

I boarded the train late this morning for the journey to Philadelphia. I am seeing a play here tonight and the theater is just a few blocks from 30th Street Station, so the train was a no-brainer. Good to be back in the City of Brotherly Love.

The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre staged a bare bones production of Henry IV, Part I, meaning the theater was a black box set-up, with no sets to speak of and minimal costumes. The actors were part of the PST's youth company (in their early 20s, I'd say) and did a creditable job with the material. This is, of course, the play in which Falstaff is introduced and the depiction of Sir Jack was pulled off fairly well.

Just a day and a half later, I am back in Philadelphia, but only to make a connection in the airport. I don't remember being in this particular airport before, but it's pretty nice.

Tonight's performance of Love's Labour's Lost was a touring production staged by the company from London's Shakespeare's Globe Theatre--a venue I have enjoyed numerous times in recent years. This play represents the only one of Shakespeare's comedies I hadn't yet seen. I already completed all the tragedies in the canon, so I have only a handful of rarely-performed histories to go, plus a couple of quasi-canonical works (Two Noble Kinsman and Edward III).

After tonight's show, I connected with a Choate alum from the Class of 2009, who gave me a quick tour of the Penn campus and took me to a Halloween party in frat house for a brief visit before I had to catch my middle-of-the-night train back to New Haven.

Comparing my seats on two segments on USAirways today with my situation on Virgin Atlantic yesterday, I can vouch that airline seating is MUCH better on the American carrier than on the British, where I felt squeezed into my seat for some seven hours.

Up well before dawn this morning for a 5:43 flight out of Richmond. Fortunately, I stayed just outside the airport and there were no lines to deal with checking in and clearing security. I am now in Philadelphia for my connection to Bradley. I should be back at school by around 9:30 this morning. I was paranoid I would oversleep and miss my flight, which would have been a disaster, as I am slated to drive my team up to Northfield Mt. Hermon School for a match this afternoon. Or that the weather would wreak havoc with my travel plans by delaying my return. But it's a beautiful day and I am on my way.

I visited the National Constitution Center, within sight of Independence Hall here in Philly, to see the "Rome & America" exhibition. I got interested in this topic when I was a Coe Fellow in the Stanford history department a couple of summers back. And it turns out the professor who ran the workshop that year (and whose book The Culture of Classicism I enjoyed) was one of the curatorial consultants for this exhibition (and she was prominently featured in the short film played in the museum). Here she is in a short video clip.

I realized I forgot to pack one of my notebooks for use tomorrow in the One Day University program in New York. So I walked across Center City to the Barnes & Noble on Rittenhouse Square to find the right Moleskine (5"x8.25", ruled--the orange label!). Just as well I had to get a new one, as the last one is almost filled.