I‘m no stranger to reporting here what my family and I do on weekends from time to time. Whether it’s taking a bit of a brewery tour, going to a private museum, vacationing out in the hills, tooling around the state capital, doing service and meeting family, vacationing out in the hills again, or some other thing I find myself unable to link conveniently at the moment, such exploits as I and mine have are not exactly strange to this webspace. (I don’t think they’re terribly strange in the world outside, either, but I’m hardly a reliable judge of any of that.)

In any event, this past weekend offered another such small excursion. On Saturday, after Ms. 8 had done her rehearsal (she remains active in a nearby theatre program, among many other things), she, her mother, and I met my in-laws for a bit of a birthday celebration. That much was nice to do, and I was pleased to leave with a belly full of food I didn’t have to cook. After that, though, we had the excursion of note. (We eat with my in-laws pretty commonly, as it happens.)

Said excursion took us back to a place where I’d once spent a lot of time: the downtown campus of what is now UT San Antonio. When I became an English major (more than twenty years ago, now), I spent one or two semesters more or less exclusively on that campus, surrounded by what was then not one of the more developed parts of town (that has changed) and studying in buildings markedly different from the prevailingly brutalist architecture of the Main Campus. (That’s also changed; the older buildings are still as they were, but the newer construction has moved away from that model; it is lighter, generally, than the Downtown Campus, but more like it than like the brutalist basis of the John Peace Library.) It took longer for me to get to it, admittedly–I was commuting in from Kerrville, then–but it also gave me space away from where I felt I had embarrassed myself, space in which I could get re-grounded and from which I could move ahead into what I thought would be better things.

The event that attracted us downtown was a production of The Tempest being put on at the Buena Vista Theatre, one of the larger indoor spaces at the Downtown Campus. Actors from the London stage put on the show, something that has happened annually (save the height of the coronavirus pandemic) for decades and in which I had participated in my time as an English major. (Traditionally, the English honor society provides ushers for the event, and I was very much a member of that society in my undergraduate days.) It was something I remembered fondly from my own time–I got to see Much Ado about Nothing because of it–and so when I found out it was on again, I thought my wife, our daughter, and I should go and attend.

The production, as could be expected and as I had hoped, was excellent. The actors’ physicality as they moved among the parts–there were five on stage playing all of the roles, so they swapped in and out among characters throughout, specific costume pieces helping to indicate who was where and when–impressed, and the ease with which the lines were delivered brought the three of us, at least, into the performance. It was pretty much what watching live theatre should be, what watching Shakespeare staged should be, and I’m glad both to have gotten to see it and to have taken my daughter to see it.

I’ll hope I hear about when it happens again.

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