Hi Folks,

I see the Ukrainians blew up a bridge that was a major supply line for the Russians. Their Plan B was to work with Chris Christie to stop all traffic in both directions.

Yesterday’s puzzle contained a BEET. The clue was “Folate-rich root.”

I cooked beets once. I bought them with the beet leaves (greens?) on and everything. Once you start slicing the beets, everything around you slowly becomes very red. Very very red. By the time I was finished the kitchen looked like a scene from the Manson murders.

Today’s puzzle was by a couple of newly-wed constructors, Jessie and Ross Trudeau. Mazel Tov! It brilliantly (IMO) featured a “ladder” theme, with the answer for 8-down comprised of 21 straight H’s, forming a ladder up the center of the grid, with the crossbars serving as rungs. Then it had five long, two-word answers “climbing” the ladder by hitting it from the left, climbing up an indicated number of rungs, and then continuing on the right. Pretty nifty.

Ellen Degeneres discusses the different ladders she has in her house, how big or small they are, and what she uses them for. And then she says “I also have a little step-ladder,” indicating with her hand how tall it is, “which I treat just the same, and love just as much, as all the others.”

66 Down — “Play title that superstitious actors avoid saying aloud in theaters.”

Did you know that a superstition among actors is that it is bad luck to say “MACBETH” in a theater (except, of course, if that’s the play that’s being performed)? If it needs to be referred to, they will call it “The Scottish Play” or “MacBee,” and will refer to Macbeth himself as “The Scottish King.” How did it start?

It is rumored that the first performance of the play was a complete disaster. The young boy who was supposed to play Lady Macbeth reportedly died, so Shakespeare himself had to fill in and play the role. Additionally, the stage prop daggers were apparently replaced with real daggers, resulting in the death of the actor playing King Duncan. (Hello Alec Baldwin!)

[For some reason, that reminds me of one of my favorite Buddy Hackett lines. He saw a performance of the play based on The Diary of Anne Frank, and the actress playing Anne Frank was so bad, that when the Nazis came on stage the whole audience shouted: “She’s in the attic!”]

There is a whole series of mishaps, some deadly, associated with other productions of MACBETH. In 1937, an absolute disastrous situation overcame the cast preparing for the play at the Old Vic. The director and one of the actors were in a car accident on the way to the theater. The dog belonging to the founder of the Old Vic, Lilian Baylis, was hit by a car a few days after this car accident. Laurence Olivier, the actor cast to play Macbeth, lost his voice due to a cold just before opening night, resulting in the play being postponed. A 25-pound stage weight fell and narrowly missed Olivier, and Baylis died of a heart attack right before the final rehearsal for the show.

Getting back to Abe Lincoln (see yesterday’s post), it is said he read passages regarding Duncan’s assassination to his friends a week before he, himself, was assassinated. I don’t know — that connection seems a bit tenuous. Get this though:

As recently as 1998, Alec Baldwin (OMG, him again!?) sliced open the hand of another actor during a production of MACBETH. I assume he was performing in it and didn’t just charge the stage from the audience with a knife — we would have heard of that.

Fortunately, if an actor inadvertantly utters “Macbeth” in a theater, there are ways to remedy the curse, which strike me as entirely reasonable:

The most widely accepted one is to leave the theater, spin around 3 times, spit (typically over your shoulder), recite a line from another work of Shakespeare’s, and knock to be let back in. Variations include uttering a bad word instead of a line from Shakespeare (I imagine “f**k!” would do, and would likely come naturally under the circumstances), or not saying anything at all after the movements.

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Sunday is the day I do the Spelling Bee in the Sunday Times Magazine. I did okay this week, missing only algae and algal. Algal? Gimme a break. They did not accept LULAV, despite it being Sukkoth. I was not surprised since they also did not accept HALVAH a while ago. They would definitely accept BAGEL. I need to get a sense of where the line is. I wonder if BIALY would fly. A bialy, btw, is a relative of the bagel — it is not a cross between a beagle and a collie.

Woof woof