pageant

last night, reading Mrs. Dalloway by the streetlights (for the Book Club I am chaperoning with the 11th & 12th graders), I rode in a taxi out to quartier Californie, the upscale neighborhood that houses my school. my co-passengers were a woman covered by a headscarf, a chatty man and his adorable toddler who played with the fringe on my pashmina (alas, our only other exchange was "salaam"), and our bespectacled driver who wore a khaki Gilligan hat and was uncharacteristically even-keeled. the easiest way to travel around Casa is via the dusty red petit taxis, who are quite cheap and ubiquitous, albeit borderline reckless at times (a 20-minute ride from the centre ville out to Californie was 20dirhams or $2.25). their plucky and speedy manoeuvering of the city's supersatured streets is exactly their art and their pride, danger and all.

safely deposited at school, I watched a severely abridged production of The Taming of the Shrew, starring most of the truly international students at our school and the handful of Moroccan kids who were willful enough to perform Shakespeare's words with their third language skills. it became almost alien to hear the comedy's playful banter in the voice of our one British ninth-grader. because they were too busy/lazy to really learn their lines, their director reduced the play to its basic plot. surrounded by wealthy and entitled Moroccan families, I wasn't sure quite how to feel about Kate's too-simplified championing of submissive wifedom at the play's end. but the audience had been amused, had clapped and congratulated our actors on their sport, and went home with our evening playfully passed.

the sweetness of evening

'the cries of the newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before night engulfs the port'
-camus's algiers