Rockabye Hamlet is a musical adapted from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. It lasted for seven performances on Broadway in 1976. I saw one of them. Tickets were cheap, the attendance was sparse, and we moved up near the front. It was a lavish production directed by Gower Champion who had directed Hello Dolly among other shows. Meat Loaf was one of the cast members.

Making a musical of Hamlet is a terrible idea. All of the main characters die. This doesn’t happen in musicals which are usually upbeat. There had been successful Shakespeare musicals in the 1970s but they were based on the comedies, not the tragedies. This was like something out of The Producers.

Rockabye Hamlet (Broadway, Minskoff Theatre, 1976) | Playbill

I graduated college with a degree in English. I had 30 credits in literature and 12 in writing. A friend said I majored in reading for pleasure and she wasn’t wrong.

I almost had a double major – the other one would have been history. I wound up with 27 credits in history and needed 30. By my first term of my senior year, I was cutting a lot of classes. I hadn’t been to my history class for a while so I decided to check them out in late November or early December. I walked in and they were taking the final! The professor would have let me make up the work with a paper but I never did that. For that semester, I had four A’s in English classes and an incomplete in my history class.

My favorite period to study was the American Civil War In the early 1960s, there was a lot of attention paid to it because of the 100th anniversary of the war. In the summer of 1963, right before I turned 10, my family went to Virginia and toured Civil War battlefields. When we got back, I started reading adult Civil War books such as those by Bruce Catton. I never had a phase of reading books for teenagers. I went from kids books to adult books.

We had a hamster when I was young. I was probably about 12 when I decided to put Fang on a turntable. When I played it at 16, he was running like he did on the wheel and he was ahead of the pace of the turntable. At 33, he was even. At 45, he was losing ground. At 78, he was airborne.

I never played him at 78 again.

He lived for 3 years.

I love neon. I have five neon signs. Here’s information on the Neon Museum of Philadelphia. I have added pictures I took at an old exhibit of theirs in November 2010. The museum is now closed.

The Symantec Game Pack was a group of games that came on a 5 1/4″ floppy disc. It was released in 1991. At work, about 10 of us shared a computer. I took the disk to work and loaded the games on the computer. One game, Memory Blocks, was similar to the card game concentration. You had to find two hearts, two stars, etc.

It was a Windows game but the high score table was a text file which could be edited. The high score was the fastest time you could finish the game. We edited it and put in an impossibly fast score, then showed it to a guy who really liked the game. He was irate and said we couldn’t do it that quickly. He was right.

See the link in the first sentence for screen prints.

Great article