Weekend Update

Human Nature 101. When you’re born, the landlord shows you the apartment you’ll be living in for the rest of your life. “You get to design the room yourself,” he says, “you get to furnish it, paint it, add whatever you want to it, but there has to be a hole. You can put it anywhere, and you can’t cover it with anything, but there has to be a hole.” So you say okay and you sign the lease and when you build the room, you put the hole off in a corner somewhere, maybe against the wall –- some place you know you won’t fall into it accidentally. But it doesn’t matter where you put it –- you’re always falling into it. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes by mistake, but it never fails: the one place in the room you’re supposed to avoid is the one place in the room you can’t stop visiting.

June Means Parades, and the second Sunday in June means . . . That’s right; next Sunday is the parade everybody avoids but nobody talks about out loud. Especially if you’re this Upper East Side Coffee Shop.

Blood and Thunder. If you’re going to see Hamlet in the Park, there’s no better way than to go with a friend who has (a) never seen a production of Hamlet before and (b) never been to the Delacorte Theatre before after (c) getting a couple of tickets on the Public Theatre’s new virtual line. Thumbnail review: Michael Stuhlbarg as Hamlet, Lauren Ambrose as Ophelia, Sam Waterston as Polonius: wonderful. Andre Braugher as Claudius, Margaret Colin as Gertrude: meh. And give Jay O Sanders a special prize for making the audience go “Wait -- you mean the Ghost, the Player King and the Gravedigger were all played by the same actor?”