Six Burner and Shakespeare

A simple plan: Six Burner and Shakespeare, meaning good food, and half-priced wine, followed by intense wordplay and a bittersweet ending.

What more could I want on a Tuesday evening (there's an obvious answer to that, but we'll leave it unwritten)?

Off I went.

I was greeted at Six Burner's bar by local wine god Bob Talcott, enjoying a glass of half-priced wine himself.

I'm no fool (well, not entirely anyway), so after our hellos I asked him what he was drinking, figuring I might as well take the master's lead.

I can be an apt pupil, I've been told.

It was the featured white, the Kuentz-Bas Alscace, a blend of sylvaner, muscat, auxerrois and chasselas.

He described it as a bunch of unusual grapes, dry and delicious but not particularly aromatic.

Furthering justifying his choice, he said, "I could be analytical about it, but sometimes you just have to accept it for what it is."

"You could say that about women, don't you think?" I asked.

He got all pink in the face and stopped just short of spitting out his wine, he laughed so hard; but he also admitted that there's little analysis that goes into his dealings with my fair sex.

I didn't probe further, but it was a good start to the evening.

Minutes later a friend came in with his wife and son and insisted I join them at their table.

He's the nearest thing I know to being a chef without actually being a chef; I met him through his work in a local restaurant.

Surprise, surprise, there was a lot of talk of restaurants and food as we ate.

An amuse bouche arrived, in the form of a calamari and mushroom ensalata and it was mouth-wateringly good.

I had the sunchoke soup with pig and kumquats followed by the Manakintowne greens with beets, goat cheese, blood oranges and pistachios.

I had to dash in order to make my curtain, causing our sever to ask, "Since when are you in a hurry, Karen? You don't even have time for chocolate?"

Nothing like being called out.

I arrived at Center Stage with two minutes to spare, paid my $15 (which includes a glass of wine) and grabbed a front row seat.

The cast was larger than the last few staged readings I'd been to there, with about fifteen people.

The last time I saw Love's Labours Lost performed was at Dogwood Dell at the turn of the 21st century and it wasn't by Richmond Shakespeare.

All I remembered was a short play full of repartee and men vowing to stay away from women, resulting in hilarity.

"Oh, I am stabbed by laughter," the servant Boyet says and it's a perfect description of a word nerd's reaction to the play.

It's considered one of Shakespeare's most intellectual, full of wordplay, alliteration, metaphors, puns and other literary devices we language geeks love.

Why, that contempt will kill the speaker's heart
And quite divorce his memory from his part.

Ahem.

It's not a play that's often performed for that very reason, as well as its bittersweet ending.

The guys don't get the girls; they're told they have to wait a year and a day to claim their loves and prove it's not just infatuation.

This is not the typical Shakespearean comedy happy ending, you know, love, chase, marriage.

Or maybe it's just a delayed happy ending, as in true love must be tested over time. I hear such things are possible.

Then, at the expiration of the year,
Come, challenge, challenge me by these deserts,
And, by this virgin palm now kissing thine,
I will be thine.

Perhaps it's the challenge that leads to happily ever after...not that I would know.