"Thou poisonous slave!"

First of all, we were easily the worst group. As I recall, there was a team of at least a dozen people that spliced together all of the death scenes from the tragedies (as opposed to all of those death scenes from the comedies) and did a really slick and funny performance. My favorite was a group of guys who did a drinking scene from something--Henry IV seems right, but I really don't remember exactly--complete with those steins that you walk around with at the Renaissance Festival. One of the guys--a wildly talented artist--even created special T-shirts for the event that really stole the show.

These types of things weren't so unusual around the office, taking an hour out of the work day to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday. As one colleague put it, she knew exactly how dorky an office we worked at when there were competing Pi Day festivities. I didn't even know what Pi Day was until I started working there. (What is it, you ask?  Why, it's March 14th, of course.)

In any case, we were going to do a Beatrice and Benedict scene from Much Ado, but they were a couple so that felt wrong. When we landed on The Tempest and she saw just how mean Prospero was to Caliban, she got a little too excited, if you ask me. I reminded her that Prospero was the *king* and that there was no queen. She didn't care. All of those "props" were gathered from various desks right before we started.

I remember huddling by the copy machine and going over my lines. I was actually nervous.

Somehow we won the prize for "Best Duo," probably because we were the only duo. We were presented with paper certificates signifying our honor. It was one of the only things I kept when I left.

She's saying, "To-night thou shalt have craps, side-stitches that shall pen they breath up, [and] be pinched as thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging than the bees that made 'em." And she's loving it.

We're almost certainly arguing about capitalization.