Amaryllis Night and Day

Happy Birthday, Russ, in this second year of our COVID, 2022. I wonder what you would have made of this. 

There is an actual stage door, here in White Rock, BC to which I could have taped this stage-door-related quote. It's an unmarked brown door, surrounded by a broad expanse of unremarkable brown wall. A proper picture of The White Rock Players Club, taken from across the street, would show only a pinpoint of yellow, over near the left corner. 

This year on Russ’s naming day, a morning snowstorm transformed my SA4QE plans. My yellow paper was left at a local mall - very busy today with White Rockers (my neighbors here in White Rock, BC) hastily doing their shopping before the snow gets any deeper. I did the same - and taped Russ’s words to a semi-sheltered mail box. Best regards to my fellow SA4QE conspirators from the west coast of Canada!

Since work obliged me to be in South Kensington on Russmass, I used a South Ken snippet from Amaryllis Night and Day; the plan had been to affix copies close to Hobanoid exhibits in three museums, but I was frustrated by huge crowds (V&A closed to walk-up customers) and by the fact that the Klein Bottles are no longer on display in the Science Museum's Mathematics Gallery. So it was a bit of a fizzle ... but still very enjoyable, as always, seeing the public peering at the yellow A4 sheets and ... let us hope ... deciding there and then to become lifelong Russ readers.

I've contributed to SA4QE over the last few years, but usually by the skin of my teeth, for various reasons. This year an archetypal 'bad day at work' left me in no frame of mind to consider choosing quotes or find inventive places to distribute them. As a result, my yellow paper quotes went out into the world the day after Russ' birthday, in the morning on my way to my necessary, but hated job. The quotations themselves were chosen not as firm favourites, but by a quite random method.