The Play’s The Thing Wherein I’ll Catch The Conscience Of The King

SOMETIMES I AM MY OWN SANTA CLAUS! I hadn’t planned on it. It just happened as a byproduct of finally doing something I should have done ages ago.

My desk usually looks like Dresden after World War Two. Calling it a pile of rubble is generous. It had reached the point where I didn’t know what was stacked up there. Anyway – the other day I was looking for a small pocket knife that I know had been on my desk at some time in the past. I was rooting around when I saw something that was held together with a rubber band. It looked like a bundle of plastic cards. I gave up on the knife. It will work its way to the surface at some point, but the plastic cards had my attention for the moment.

When I took off the rotting rubber band the cards showed themselves to be a small stack of Gift Cards. There were four Amazon cards, a Barnes & Noble card and three from Ebay. I had no idea how old they were or if they still had any value. There was only one way to find out.

I turned on my ancient computer and logged into Amazon.

My newly found old Gift Cards were still good. The Amazon cards were worth a few cents over $75.00. My eyes glazed over and I began to salivate. This was like finding a wad of bills on the street. The B&N was a solid $50.00. The Ebay cards tipped the scales at a hefty $113.

I was going shopping!

At Barnes & Noble I bought a few books that I wouldn’t have if I had to spend money I already had, but this was “Found Money.” It was like eating a whole chocolate cake that you knew was calorie free.

I did the same at Amazon plus a couple of DVDs. I didn’t spend it all. There is still money left in case I see something that I just have to buy. You know, something totally useless, frivolous, and irresistible. I don’t know what that might be, but I’ll know it when I see it.

When I got around to checking in at Ebay I was sweating from the exertion of all that shopping. I was panting like an out of shape Basset Hound. It was a good feeling.

I hadn’t been shopping on Ebay in years. I checked my account balance and learned that I still had $0.31 credit available. Well, add another $113.00 to that and I was ready to go, but what should I look for? It had to be something that strictly fell under the banner of “Want” and not “Need.” I stopped and got myself a cool drink, walked around the room a few times, and got a few more eye drops in my post-operative eyeballs. Then the perfect random thought leapt from my medulla oblongata. I rushed back to the keyboard.

I knew it was a long shot, but that is what shopping on Ebay is all about. Right? Ebay is where you go when you are searching for that something that became extinct about the same time as the Pterodactyl. Someone always has one stashed away in their attic that they are looking to peddle. So it was with my own dinosaur search.

I was stunned when I hit the Enter key and about a dozen entries materialized on my screen. There it was, the one thing that I wished existed and was for sale.

In the early 1960s Richard Burton, the excellent when sober, scenery chewing when not, Welsh Actor had a run on Broadway playing the title role in a famous production of “Hamlet.” The show also had Hume Cronyn playing Polonius. It was an all-star cast. I had never seen it. I did at one time have the entire vinyl cast album of the show, but that vanished decades ago. What I was hoping for was a DVD of the show. I knew that it had been filmed and had a short run in a few theaters back when I was in high school. I was looking for that apocryphal DVD and I FOUND IT!

I am expecting it to appear in our mailbox next week. I will then make myself a warm drink and lose myself for almost four hours in a Denmark filled with endless British accents.

“Yet here, Laertes? Aboard! Aboard, for shame! The wind sits in the shoulder of your sails and you are stayed for!”

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