Upcoming talks about Mary Sidney

I have several talks about Mary Sidney as author coming up.

One is at the Newberry Library in Chicago, at their Wednesday Club. This will be Wednesday, May 7, 2008. The reception begins at 5:30 and my talk at 6:15. My dear friends Jim Price and Don Newcomb, founders of the ChicaGourmet Club (the premier gourmet source in Chicago) will also be creating a dinner event while I'm there. Stay tuned for more info.

Also in May, I'll be speaking at the UCLA Affiliates Luncheon in Los Angeles. That's May 15, 11:30 to 2 p.m.

If you're in town, please drop in and say hello!

New group open for discussion

I get email regularly from people who have questions or comments about Mary Sidney as the author of the shakespearean works. So I started a Google Group to facilitate an open discussion between interested people. Please visit and add your thoughts!

The address is http://groups.google.com/group/MarySidney.

The only rule about posting questions or comments is that you have to be nice! Even though other authorship groups, including shakespeareans, say really mean things to each other, we're not going to do that. We're the nice ones. :-)

Shakespeare at Sea 2008

Wow—I just got word that I was invited back by the Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival to speak on the next Shakespeare at Sea cruise, November 2008. Judging from the line-up of speakers, I am the only one from the previous cruise who was asked to return. In fact, they asked me to do six presentations, but golly, it takes me a week to prepare each one! So I asked to do only five. At the moment, I'll be doing presentations on two of the plays that will be in the 2009 season at OSF, one on death in Shakespeare, one on the humours (which includes a self-test to see what kind of humour you are most abundant in, and which characters you are thus most like), and "Why Read Shakespeare?"

While I was at Macworld in San Francisco attending to the working-for-a-living part of my life, I was approached by the book buyer for the gift shop at OSF (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). She ordered 25 copies of Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? because four people from the cruise (where I was not allowed to even talk about Mary Sidney) have come in requesting the book. Aha! A breach in the wall.