In an hour or so, I'll be taking to the stage of the Kodak Center in Rochester with Dennis Miller. Tarheel Girl, a Mark Steyn Club member from the Tarheel State, enjoyed our opening night a week ago:
My cousin and I trekked through the snowstorm from the great state of NC to see these two in Reading. Wow! The guy in front of us coughed up part of a lung laughing so hard....
Also, did not realize that "twinkle toes" Steyn was so daggone GROOVY. Would strap on the snowshoes if need be. Miller & Steyn ROCKED!
Merci Messieurs de la Comedie!
Merci à vous, Fille de Tarheel! Tomorrow night, Dennis and I will be in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, for those who can't join us live, welcome to the twenty-second Mark Steyn Tale for Our Time, our series of monthly audio adventures - which in this instance is, in fact, for the first time a video adventure.
There's a reason for that, in that, due to an intensification in student-loan billionaire Cary's Katz litigation-without-end against me (we have a lot of hearings in the federal case in Nevada and a looming trial at the American Arbitration Association), I've been rather tied up with the tedium of depositions, testimony, exhibits and whatnot. And so our scheduled Tale for Our Time is a wee bit delayed. I very much regret that, but, while we're finishing post-production, I hope you'll accept this special video one-off.
On the inaugural Mark Steyn Cruise we did a lot of what we do here each week at SteynOnline, but live and on water. So at anchor off Prince Edward Island it seemed an appropriate stop for Tales for Our Time. Canada's smallest province has many charms but is known around the world for one thing: Anne of Green Gables, first published in 1908 and a global bestseller across the century. Its author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, was a PEI native and she brought not just her irrepressible redheaded heroine but also her beautiful island vividly to life for readers from Toronto to Tokyo. In my introduction, I discuss the enduring appeal of Anne Shirley before a live audience of Mark Steyn Club members and with a special guest - former presidential candidate and Anne of Green Gables fan Michele Bachmann.
Michele and I mull the romance in the book and the decline of courtship rituals in our own time. And so, because of that, I picked a favorite and appropriately aquatic episode for our visit to Charlottetown - Anne's ill-fated attempt to recreate Tennyson's account of poor doomed Elaine of Astolet, the tragic lily maid who died of unrequited love for Sir Lancelot:
It was Anne's idea that they dramatize Elaine. They had studied Tennyson's poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island schools. They had analyzed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them, and Anne was devoured by secret regret that she had not been born in Camelot. Those days, she said, were so much more romantic than the present.
Anne's plan was hailed with enthusiasm. The girls had discovered that if the flat were pushed off from the landing place it would drift down with the current under the bridge and finally strand itself on another headland lower down which ran out at a curve in the pond. They had often gone down like this and nothing could be more convenient for playing Elaine.
"Well, I'll be Elaine," said Anne, yielding reluctantly, for, although she would have been delighted to play the principal character, yet her artistic sense demanded fitness for it and this, she felt, her limitations made impossible. "Ruby, you must be King Arthur and Jane will be Guinevere and Diana must be Lancelot... We must pall the barge all its length in blackest samite. That old black shawl of your mother's will be just the thing, Diana."
The black shawl having been procured, Anne spread it over the flat and then lay down on the bottom, with closed eyes and hands folded over her breast.
"Oh, she does look really dead," whispered Ruby Gillis nervously, watching the still, white little face under the flickering shadows of the birches. "It makes me feel frightened, girls. Do you suppose it's really right to act like this? Mrs. Lynde says that all play-acting is abominably wicked."
"Ruby, you shouldn't talk about Mrs. Lynde," said Anne severely. "It spoils the effect because this is hundreds of years before Mrs. Lynde was born. Jane, you arrange this. It's silly for Elaine to be talking when she's dead."
Alas, like so many of Anne's plans, this one goes awry. To hear (and see me read) the tale of an unfortunate lily maid, prefaced by Michele Bachmann's and my introduction, please click here and log-in. Alternatively, if you prefer our Tales in their traditional audio format, please click here.
As I've emphasized since we launched The Mark Steyn Club last year, our regular content - all my daily commentary, cultural and geopolitical essays, our weekend movie and music features, The Mark Steyn Show and On the Town and all the rest - will always be free to everyone around the planet. In fact, every week we now offer more free content than at any point in our sixteen-year history. But we have spent the last eighteen months or so letting Club members in on a few experimental features which we might eventually make more widely available. Tales for Our Time is one such experiment: If you're not a Club member (or you are but you've never partaken of this series) you can hear what you're missing in our first-birthday Tales for Our Times sampler, a 75-minute audio special hosted by me and including excerpts from some of our ripping yarns of the last year - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, John Buchan, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson. And, if it whets your appetite, you can find the above authors and many more collected here.
I'm truly thrilled to see that our nightly radio serials have proved one of the most popular of our Club extras this last year-and-a-half. I did do a little professional story-reading a zillion years ago, so, if these fancies tickle you, we may release them as audio books on CD or Audible a ways down the road. But for the moment it's an exclusive bonus for members. If you've enjoyed our monthly Steyn Club radio adventures and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, SteynPosts, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Priority booking for the second Mark Steyn Club Cruise (following last year's sell-out inaugural cruise);
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, including this month's tour with Dennis Miller;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to Anne of Green Gables but to all the audio adventures listed below.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, whether you like my reading of this twenty-second Tale for Our Time or think it's as mismatched as Anne is to Tennyson's Elaine, then feel free to comment away below.
And do come and see us in Wilkes-Barre if you're in the neighborhood. Dennis Miller and I will be at the Kirby Center tomorrow night, Saturday March 2nd. Tickets are available in person at the box office, and by telephone at 1-800-745-3000 - or by clicking here and entering promo code ZEOLI to get ten dollars off:
For previous Tales for Our Time, click below:
#1: The Tragedy of the Korosko
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#2: The Time Machine
by H G Wells
#3: The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
#4: The Prisoner of Zenda
by Anthony Hope
#5: The Cat That Walked By Himself
by Rudyard Kipling
#6: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#7: The Rubber Check
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#8: A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
#9: Plum Duff
by Mark Steyn
#10: To Build a Fire
by Jack London
#11: The Overcoat
by Nikolai Gogol
#12: The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
#13: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
#14: The Man Who Would Be King
by Rudyard Kipling
#15: His Last Bow
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#16: Greenmantle
by John Buchan
#17: Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
#18: The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
#19: Little Women at Christmas
by Louisa May Alcott
#20: The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#21: The Gift of the Magi
by O Henry
