Let The Play Begin!

     In a few hours we begin our annual trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.  Some years, in order to see all the plays in their ten-month season, we make the journey two or even three times.  It’s a pilgrimage I’ve been making since my college days in the 1950s.
     It all began in my junior year when I took a Shakespeare course from Dr. Margery Bailey who we all called “Miss Margery” – but not to her face.  She was one of the true characters of the Stanford campus.  She wore ankle length, dark colored dresses, high-topped lace-up shoes with tapered one-inch heels, and she was a demanding professor.  She had the reputation of preferring men students to women, and woe be unto any of us who had not done both the required and suggested reading for the day.
     In October of that year, 1955, I had the temerity to get married.  Not only that, I missed three days of classes while I was on my short honeymoon in Carmel.  And I compounded all of that by not making arrangements with Dr. Bailey ahead of time.  Although I conferred with her afterwards, made up all the missed work, and tried my best to be a model student from that time forward, I got a D in her class.  It was the only D I ever received but, under the circumstances, it was not unexpected.
     That should have been the end of my interest in Shakespeare, but it was not.  Dr. Bailey instilled far more than a sense of shame or guilt in this erring student.  She was truly inspired and inspiring.  She spent her summers in Ashland where she began the educational component of  the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and year after year she sent promising students (not I, of course) to work at the Festival taking tickets, manicuring the grounds, acting in bit parts, or working on scenery.  Angus Bowmer, himself, founder of the Festival, worked on his doctorate at Stanford under the tutelage of Margery Bailey.
     The summer after my D grade, my new husband and I headed up to Bainbridge Island for the marriage of his brother to my erstwhile Stanford roommate.  On the way, we stopped in Ashland and saw “Romeo and Juliet” in the Elizabethan Theater.  I’ve been making the pilgrimage ever since.