Talk about weird, how about reading about the person anonymously referenced in your weblog and recognizing yourself? I noticed your friend noticing me noticing you (sounds like an Abba song) and wondered if he was somehow connected since his attention was only directed our way at the mention of your name. The other oddity was that I had not looked at your weblog for several weeks (no slight intended) and to find Lawrence referenced the day I happened to look at your blog was a strange coincidence. That Friday also found Lawrence mentioned in the NYTimes travel section as an interesting destination. You were quite right about Lawrence being an oasis of blue in a desert of red, we're lefty and quite smug about it. The rest of the state is suspicious of Lawrence, and periodically determines to do something about it. See last years' dustup between a state legislator and a KU professor regarding his class on human sexuality, which ended up a big enough item for O'Reilly to stink up the airwaves in his usual manner. Soon to come, a board of education 'trial' to determine whether intelligent design should have equal billing with evolution in science classes.

Keith Fellenstein

P.S. While I did indeed call the production 'A dancing Shakespeare show' I knew a little more about it than that, and was merely trying to get the idea across to the rest of our table in the shortest time possible. I just wanted to set the record slightly straighter in the hope of not coming across as another cultural philistine in the heartland.

[Links added. -- Ed]

My thanks to Keith for filling out the rest of the story. I wondered if the participant would respond if I put up that post, and I was gratified that he did, and also that he didn't take offense, since none was intended.

Incidentally, what I liked best about Lawrence, which went unmentioned in the Times piece, was the sound of the freight trains passing through town on the other side of the Kansas (Kaw) River from my hotel. They blow their horns as they approach a grade crossing near the old Union Pacific Depot (now converted into a visitor's center), and while some in our company found them annoying, especially at night, I found them to be quite comforting, and kept my window open to hear them better.

My usual criteria for judging a city I'm passing through is the quality of the book and cd stores, and downtown Lawrence (within walking distance of my hotel) did quite well, with several used book stores (one well maintained -- the Dusty Bookshelf -- and one quite unruly), a good small independent book store (the Raven) and a Borders; also a very good used CD store (Love Garden) and a nice smaller one as well (Kief's Downtown Music).