"Most Wonderful - !"

Twelfth Night and a different January 6th

January 6th is the Feast of the Epiphany, and marks the Twelfth Night of Christmas (for all of you keeping score of milkmaids, pipers, and swans at home). Shakespeare uses this as a title for his comedy about excess, misrule, upset identities- and epiphanies. There is some conjecture that the play was first performed at a Twelfth Night celebration, but I’ll always connect it with upset and awakening - that state known to us as “Wonder” - and keep it dear for personal reasons.

Most wonderful- !

This is what Olivia says in the fifth act of Twelfth Night, when she realizes that she’s married to not one Caesario, but two.

The story is… well it’s complicated.

And Wonderful.

And Wonder is just that. Wonder is the state when our logic, our best abilities to manage, our understanding of the world just won’t do. Won’t explain. Cannot keep us safe - but maybe we are not always meant to be safe.

I met Jamie while we were performing Twelfth Night. He was Company Manager and Malvolio. I had a waist, and hair, and was Sebastian. We did a six-week tour of Michigan and the Upper Midwest with The National Shakespeare Company (Don’t be too impressed. Honest.)

Michigan in the summer is – wonderful, and surprising. There is a lake there which is said to be bottomless. I was an avid and ambitious swimmer at that time (Yes: I had a waist. And hair). Treading water in that lake with Jamie, I dived again and again, working to find the bottom. The water was crystal clear, and when I opened my eyes I could see only endless lake, coming up to the surface to see Jamie laughing, his pink skin already starting to burn red, and water beading up on his shoulders. It made no sense. I could not explain it… and it was wonderful.

I am a cynic. I dig my heels in and refuse to accept new ideas, snicker at the concept of change, and often find people pointless. I roll my eyes when I identify something as simplistic, or canned, or just plain dull. To a cynic, reality is always explainable, and it is also (for this very reason), disappointing. So of course I tried to find the bottom of that lake. All I found after dive upon dive was his laugh, those eyes, and that Michigan lake water beading up on his lobster shoulders.

This was a summer out of joint, a time and a trip stolen away from my life in New York, and I was loving it. As a cynic, I of course intended to have a six-week summer fling, then return to New York, lose his phone number, and get on with my life of understanding the world and being deeply disappointed in it.

Still, there was this thing I could not explain, this thing most wonderful. It was why I kept diving, and why, when he laughed, I kept resurfacing, over and over, wishing it would never, never stop.

Senseless. Wonderful. And thirty-five years ago.

This week, I lit our Twelfth Night candles for the thirty fifth time, and looked at that smile, again, gleaming in the light over the thousandth plate of pancakes.

“Most wonderful.”

-Herr Issyvoo