Happy Birthday to a Brilliant Bloom

Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly are an artistic couple, he is always dreaming and scheming to get her onstage, writing sketches, stealing operas, arranging concerts in which she appears. They fell in love over Lord Byron's poetry whose book of poems Bloom gave Molly while they were first courting. Molly mistakenly thought he was a poet because he dressed like one, a deception she's never quite forgiven him for. It is their love for and frustration with each other that keeps this novel stitched together. There is even a book entitled The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom that imagines their relationship in greater detail inspired by textual clues from Ulysses. You know that old Irish saying, in Molly's heart, a flower Blooms. Today is the birthday of my own personal Leopold Bloom in residence, the Obie award winning theatrical impresario, director and actor Aaron Beall. He first played Bloom onstage at Symphony Space in 2004 for the centennial celebration and has appeared in every Radio Bloomsday I have directed since.

In honor of Aaron's birthday, here in an excerpt from last years Radio Bloomsday directed by and starring Aaron Beall as Bloom with the fantastic actresses Nicole Wiesner and Tara Bahna James as the bitchy sopranos Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy from The Sirens episode of Ulysses.