A rare opporunity

Okay, all you lovers of Gandalf, here's a chance to broaden your horizons.
Ian McKlellen will be on the PBS program "Great Performances" on March 25. Check your local stations for channel and time.

If you're willing to invest the time (maybe even record it for a more convenient viewing)
I think you will be glad you did. It may be your only opportunity to see one of Great Britain's outstanding actors (after all, he is SIR Ian) in an extremely challenging role. He has been touring with it for several months but, at the age of 70, he feels limited to how often he is up to the challenge, so PBS has made a video of a performance
A bit of personal back story is needed right about now. Back in the 1960's when I was in search of a PhD at the University of Iowa, I had a combination of classes one summer that required me to read 80 plays. (And you don't use Cliff Notes at graduate level.) I can still remember sitting in the only room of our married student housing unit where I could read late at night without disturbing wife or daughters --the bathroom.

So one night I began reading a play I thought I already knew all about, having read it years before. But this night, I sat on the throne (no pun intended) and for something like three or four hours I read straight through it and when I came to the end there were tears in my eyes. Perhaps it was the late hours, perhaps it was PhD battle fatigue, but what I think really brought this play so forcefully to life for me was that I had three daughters. Even though my daughters were young at that time, I could still relate to a tired old king who wants to turn his kingdom over to his daughters, only to be betrayed by two of them, and, in his mind at least, even by the third.

Okay --It's Shakespear's "King Lear".

I'm willing to bet you may have never read it, and I'm even more sure that you have probably never seen a production of it. So now's your chance.

Remember: March 25, PBS - "Great Performances".
Come on, broaden your horizons.
(I'll be interested to see if any of you take me up on this ----and that includes you, too, DS)