“OK, we need some dogs–specifically, ‘a wolfish troop of watchdogs.’”

“Me! Me! I’ll be a dog!” “Me, too!”

“OK, but the text is clear that you’ll have to fawn on Telemakhos when he arrives at the hut.”

“What’s ‘fawn’?”

That fawning might be a deal-breaker on my assigning roles for our acting out a scene in The Odyssey. But Migs and Chio are tail-waggingly happy to comply, dropping to the floor of the Study Hall, smiling and panting. Two canines, in the bag.

Meanwhile, Val has offered to play Eumaios, the loyal swineherd, unaware that, in her role, she’ll have to  “clap[ ] . . . arms around Telemakhos [her classmate Jahmari] and cover him with kisses.” I figure we’ll cross that doorsill when we get to it.

We’d arrived at that critical moment in Book XVI when Odysseus and Telemakhos finally fall into each other’s arms after an all but interminable 20-year separation and a false start to the reunion. It’s an arrow-to-the-heart scene, really, and one that I like to ask my students to act out because it demonstrates so well several of the epic’s themes and motifs. By this point in our academic year together, I know that I can stop the action at any point and ask for observation or analysis–and be rewarded with comments that shine with acuity.

First, though, Telemakhos has to get past those dogs in the yard. The fawning begins–“Hey, this is the opposite of what the dogs did to Odysseus when he first came!”–then Val, without a bit of help from me, figures out a way to mime the hugs and kisses without mortifying J-Mar or herself. If the dogs made me laugh, her clever sidestepping makes me smile, sort of the way Odysseus does, secretly, when something along his long journey home pleases him in its sheer beauty or its rightness.

I’m already thinking ahead to Death in the Great Hall, which we’ll stage two weeks hence in the Outdoor Theatre. Nasty, clueless, yellow-dog suitors will die in waves, spilling the blood promised earlier by the man skilled in all ways of contending. The gone-wrong, rutting maids will drag their lovers’ corpses out, then slip their necks into nooses to “dance for awhile, but not long.” The tall son will stand with the father. The faithful swineherd and nurse, the true harper and the herald–they’ll do their parts in the restoration of house and throne.

But that’s then and this is now. 

“Good dogs, guys.”