"You may be right."

Good morning.

My husband and I went through considerable marital torment, and luckily--or unluckily--we experienced this in the midst of the greatest surge of "help" for marital woes ever created by a society. We Southern Californians had more counselors than if we'd been queens and kings. There were literally hundreds of groups and individuals, religious, public, private, who were all willing to stick their beaks into our business in order to straighten us out and get us happily on our way.

I remember telling one famous psychiatrist, "I've discovered a magic phrase that quells my husband's wrath..., " and it was: "You may be right."  I remember when I first said it to my husband, and saw its magic effect on the argument at hand. The waves calmed. There was nothing more to say. Magic, indeed.

I am moved to write of this by having recently watched "The Taming of the Shrew" on tape, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I have the tape and have watched it many times for the beauty of clothes, interiors, houses, architecture, etc. Alas, the movie was roundly panned and rightly so. Some of the acting is good, but Elizabeth Taylor was terrible as an actress.  It did not help that Elizabeth and Burton were still in love at this stage, for being in love never helped acting in any performance that I know of.

But Elizabeth was just awful. It was her voice that was so bad, I think. She never took the necessary training to develop it.  It is a shame that she did not, for her beauty was indeed exceptional.

The theme of the play, the changing of a shrewish badly behaved girl into a loving and well-mannered wife, is an eternal plot.  Katherine, the shrew, did a lot better than I did. Without the help of any marriage counselors at all, she managed to figure out how to make the circumstances she found herself in work in favor of her own happiness.

Her famous speech at the end: "....thy Lord, thy governor,...,"--is it said with tongue in cheek? Of course it is, I think.  Nobody could be that subservient, and it is to be noted that her husband did not take it in flat truth either.  He was just glad not to be harangued every day of his life and he was open and generous with his little wife, possession as she was in those days.  

That's what I think about it anyway. If you don't agree, let me say that you may be right. YAZZYBEL