Recitation

While I was demonstrating the drop spindle at the festival, I met a woman who called her boy by name, Cassius.

"Cassius, like in Julius Caesar?"

"Yes!"

I said the only long quote of the bard's I ever memorized: "'Let me have men about me that are fat/Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep at nights:/Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,/He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.'  'Fear him not, Caesar, he's not dangerous;/He's a noble Roman and well given.'  'Yet I fear him not!  But if my name were given to fear/I know not the man I should so soon avoid/as that spare Cassius.'"

"Do you hear that, sweetie?  That's the quote about your name, in Shakespeare!"

Looking at the copy of Shakespeare in front of me, I wasn't word perfect and possibly I learned from a different version too.

The demonstration tent was a very good thing.  Without it at my back and without an official nametag, I know I would have just looked like a strange person spinning yarn in a field, and wouldn't have had delightful conversations like this.

Didn't take much for the demonstrators to interest on-lookers, actually; there was quite a crowd around a weaver winding bobbins.