This is actually my 4th time to Ashland (and Ash’s 12th we think) but the first time I’ll be blogging about it when we are here to see shows put on by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF). My first time here was in February 2021, when we were still deep in the pandemic (vaccines weren’t even really out yet) and Ash and I had done our first road trip, 4 months into our relationship. Hard to believe if you’ve been following, right? At any rate, obviously we didn’t see any shows then. We returned in both 2022 and 2023, and each time half the shows we were supposed to see were cancelled due to COVID. So, Ashland and COVID are very tied together for me. No sign of any of that this year so I decided I’d actually blog this one.
The last 2 trips we had friends join us, and this year is no exception, although it’s the most we’ve had so far. We rented the same house as last year with 3 bedrooms, but we’ve got 2 more people with us for a total of six. You’ll meet them all at some point over the weekend, I’m sure.
It’s about a 5-hour drive from Sacramento to Ashland, which is just over the Oregon border. We stopped in Redding for lunch. I hadn’t quite decided whether or not I was going to blog so didn’t think to get pictures. But it’s Redding – not too much to see!
I found these photos on my phone from 2023 – the only ones I still have from any of the prior trips. We only saw two shows, one of them being a sort of modernized version of The Three Musketeers which was a lot of fun. It was at the Elizabethan Theater, my favorite of the three. It’s outdoor, and the largest, seating almost 1200 people.
I first heard about OSF around 2003, and the name conjured up images of people walking around in costumes eating turkey legs. Others have gotten that image, too; I can tell by their reaction when I say what we’re doing. No, this isn’t like a Renaissance Faire. Think film festival rather than carnival, only with live shows. And while it started as exclusively Shakespeare in 1935, it hasn’t been that way since the early 1950s. In addition to being sort of an all-year event, OSF also refers to the repertory theater which produces the shows.
Our big news since our last trip, is we began hosting a foreign exchange student through AFS-USA. Meet Vasco, from Lisbon, Portugal, who joined our household on August 7. He will live with us while doing his senior year at McClatchy High School. He’s a great guy and we are thrilled to have him. This is our first trip together and there will be a couple more. While we did take him out of school just for one day for this trip, we are definitely committed to limiting that while making sure he gets to experience as much as he can while he’s here. Left and right were from his first day of school (we had to!), a few days later than his classmates because of some bureaucratic mishaps. But it all got worked out and he’s enjoying his classes.
Vasco gets sleepy riding in a car for a long time, but he stayed awake for the first part of the trip. He crashed after lunch. Zeus was right there with him as we were pulling into Ashland around 3:15pm.
We had two cars to unload. Ash, Vasco, and I got there first, so I was able to get some photos of the house before we emptied the cars.
- Kitchen
- Lindsay’s room off the kitchen
- “The boys room” off the small hallway
- Dining room
- Living room
- Master upstairs for me and Ash
The host was kind enough to leave us some OSF programs. We are seeing 4 of the 8 shows: Macbeth, Born with Teeth, Coriolanus, and Much Ado about Nothing.
We got settled, Ash fixed a simple dinner of salad, Impossible chicken nuggets, green beans, and mac & cheese, and we made our way out to the theater around 7:30pm. One of the reasons we wanted to return to this house is location: we’re like 3 blocks from the theater complex in “downtown” Ashland.
There 3 theaters that serve OSF. Last night, we were in the Angus Bowmer Theater, which seats around 600. There was a gathering around a live band playing outside of the theater as we walked up, which was also about the time they stopped playing. Oh well!
The show tonight was Born with Teeth. It was a 2-man play, one playing William Shakespeare, the other Christopher Marlowe. It was 90 minutes with no intermission. It was a beautifully and cleverly written piece of fiction based on a fair amount of truth which made it pretty believable. Both the guys were great, and it was both laugh-out-loud funny at times and poignant and teary at others. I’m sold on anything that makes me both laugh and cry. Everyone enjoyed it. Given my limited experience here at OSF – just 2 shows each of the last 2 trips – I’d say this was the best thing I’ve seen yet.
We have a little tradition of ice cream after the show so of course we continued that. Zoey’s is just a couple of blocks up Main Street from the theater, and the house is literally around the corner from it. Here’s the gang as we were getting ready to leave: Lindsay, Erick, Michael, Ash, Vasco.
We were home about 10pm and I got started on this. I’m continuing to play with new blogging tools so interested in any feedback or requests you have for formatting, etc. The carousel thing I tried in the NYC/DC blog didn’t work very well, and this time I figured out how to load multiple photos in one place so you can scroll through and spend whatever time you want (or not!) on each. Thanks to avid readers for that little suggestion (and you know who you are!).
It felt weird to not have a photo of the outside of the house but I’d completely forgotten about it while there was sun so this will have to do. It’s cute at night, too.
We have two shows today, at 1:30pm and 8pm, and that’s about all we have planned. Oh, and today is also Ash’s birthday, so there’s that. Happy Birthday love :)
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