It's all Jimmy Ludwig's fault.
Spread out all over my kitchen table I have Post-It notes, scraps of paper, and pages of legal pads filled with potential ideas or lines for a future edition of “Life in the 906”. One of those that's been on the table for, oh, probably over a year was “Yooper Shakespeare lines”. I never developed it any further because it was just an idea with nothing solid (at least yet) to put in it.
And then I interviewed Jimmy Ludwig.
Ludwig is a Yooper who went to New York to act on Broadway and has come back to his home region as a theater instructor at NMU. He and a bunch of students are currently in the midst of a two-week run of the Shakespeare comedy “Much Ado About Nothing”, but set at a UP deer camp. I interviewed him about it last week (by the way, he gives GREAT interview, as would befit a Broadway vet), and after the interview rolled around in my head for a few days it triggered something.
Namely, the bones for a “906” bit about Yooper Shakespeare lines.
Like many of the segments I've done, once that trigger was pulled the ideas just came flowing out of my brain. But unlike some of the segments I've done the ideas kept getting weirder and weirder, especially as I recalled more and more of Shakespeare's most famous lines. As I was typing them into my laptop at home I alternated between laughing and shaking my head at the sheer stupidity of some of the lines I was writing, causing Loraine to look at me like she often does.
You know, like I'm a little puppy who runs into a wall, thinks it's cute, and keeps doing it over and over again.
So—was it a good “906” or one of those that seems to amuse only me? Check it out for yourself. If you think it's a good one, then thank you. And if you don't?
Well, then its all Jimmy Ludwig's fault.
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