Almost worst of all: at the supper table, Sally can now see Don doing to Megan what he certainly must have been doing to her mother throughout the marriage.  Whether or not she makes that connection explicitly, it's there to dawn upon her at any time.

At the time, people of the Rosens' and the Drapers' class certainly thought it was a death sentence.  In truth, I don't think it was more life-threatening than service in many another war, but a) the antiwar side had a vested interest in playing up its dangers, and b) these are highly privileged folks who've subtly,…

A lot of it amounts to anecdotal theatre gossip, a generation after the fact.  From that we can infer a little about Burbage's outsize personality … though not necessarily any more than we can about Shakespeare's own.  There was a vague consensus that a little of R.B. went a long way—miles upon miles, in fact.

I dunno … we might want to be thankful they didn't have Twitter in Burbage's day.

Hey, so was Richard Burbage—that didn't stop the Bard.

"Honest, Mom—it even left ectoplasm on my sock!"

Why, WHY, must directors eternally miscast Claudio as some sort of weepy loverboy?  As even a cursory reading shows, the character's a huge lummox who's the last sort of person anyone expected Cupid's arrow to hit.  All his high-flown speech is comic precisely because it's not native to his temperament.  He's out of…

Back in '93, I never did follow my dream of quitting my job, stalking Tanya Donnelly across this great nation of ours, and finally self-immolating just outside her house's restraining-order radius.  The road not taken…

I can't hate "Torn Between Two Lovers"; it's too good for cheese-mongering laughs.

God, I loved that video.

So many are poorly guarded.

Both reality shows and pro wrestling ought to get at least an occasional review by a sane outsider.  It's useful for a) helping non-fans decide whether they'd enjoy wallowing in occasional examples of the genre, and b) reminds overly hermetic fans exactly how this stuff looks to people of ordinary tastes.

Apparently the North African coast remained a fertile breadbasket up to a century or so after the Arab conquests.  Unfortunately, though, the new, historically nomadic Muslim overlords were seldom inclined to concern themselves with agriculture. Comtemporary chronicles suggest that the newcomers made gradual, steady…

Emma Thompson was the first choice that occurred to me—the Doctor as I'll-cut-you Beatrice, with a dash of Prof. Trelawney.

Marcia Strassman—Julie, a.k.a. Mrs. Gabriel Kotter.  (She beat Kate Jackson by a year.)

Would MORRISSEY fight for your honor?  I put the question to you, sir!

If my sievelike memories of '80s guitar magazines hold any water at all, the man has been a rap fan since long, LONG before it became a fashionable taste.

The complex bouquet of Morrissey's farts.

As it should be, for once.  Especially for heavy music, a good rhythm guitarist is harder to find and makes more of a musical difference than the guy playing solos.  It's kind of like Abbott & Costello's famous 60/40 split.

During the ambulance scene, my wife & I started yelling at the screen, totally independently of each other: