By Steve Woodward
Some people doodle during boring meetings.
Jimmie Moglia muttered lines from "Richard III." During his
long-ago days as a corporate manager, Moglia listened as colleagues
hijacked meetings with presentations that droned on endlessly.
"What need’st thou run so many miles
about," he would think to himself, "when thou mayst tell thy
tale the nearest way?"
Shakespeare, he knew, would have put their
PowerPointy rears in gear.
Years passed. Moglia left corporate life
behind. He founded a small computer printer-support business.
But he never forgot Shakespeare’s lessons
for business people – or for the regular Nick Bottom in the street.
"One of my purposes", says Moglia,
"is to extract Shakespeare from the rigors of academia for use in
everyday’s life".
The desire to bring Shakespeare’s wisdom to
the masses became an obsession. For 10 years Moglia has worked to
compile more than 10,000 situations from business and everyday life
that could benefit from a lyrical line or two penned by the Bard.
Moglia’s labor of love was not lost. Quote
by quote he constructed "Your Daily Shakespeare. An Arsenal of
Verbal Weapons to Drive Your Friends into Action and your Enemies into
Despair." Now he has written "Finis" to the tome, and
is selling the book on line and at Twenty-Third Avenue Books in
Northwest Portland.
"It’s not just another book of
quotations," Moglia insists. "It’s a book of daily
situations backed up with Shakespeare."
Consider, for example, Shakespeare and traffic
tickets. Moglia once was cited for turning from the wrong lane. But
being normally a "very sedate" driver, he told the judge, he
was far more used to having other endanger him with their bad driving.
"I am a man more sinned against than
sinning" he testified, citing "King Lear".
Another time, after he got a ticket for
driving with expired licence plates, the judge said, "What have
you got to say for yourself?
"When the age is in," Moglia replied quoting from "Much
Ado About Nothing", "the wit is out".
Both judges dropped the charges.
Moglia’s son William also has been known to
turn to the greatest dramatist in the English language for a good
line.
In high school, when William was given a curt
command by a teacher, the boy found a safe harbor in this appropriate
rejoinder from "Julius Caesar": "If Caesar says ‘do
this’, it is performed."
Caught by surprise, the teacher treated the
boy "with noticeable consideration" from that time onward,
Moglia wrote in the preface to his book.
The use of Shakespeare in social situations,
Moglia says, confers upon the speaker the mantle of education, wisdom,
reliability and wide-ranging interests. It also makes a person
memorable.
He says a young clerk at a checkout stand
recently asked him whether his purchase was cash or credit.
"I’ll pay cash as far as my coin would
stretch," he replied, quoting from Henry IV," "and
where it would not, I will use my credit."
"First she says, ‘What?’" Moglia
says. "Then I explained it’s a Shakespeare quote."
Moglia discovered Shakespeare while reading
during long business trips as an executive for Beaverton-based
Tektronix. As he traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East,
setting up sales offices, he became increasingly frustrated by
meetings dominated by people who couldn’t express their thoughts
clearly or concisely.
"Many of the people who spoke had no
respect for what they were saying," he says.
He searched for a book of Shakespeare quotes
that could be applied to business situations. But the only book he
found – the 1832 edition of Thomas Dolby’s "Dictionary of
Shakespearean Quotations: Exhibiting the Most Forcible Passages
Illustrative of the Various Passions, Affections and Emotions of the
Human Mind" – wasn’t organized the way Moglia envisioned.
So he decided to write the book himself.
Moglia says he isn’t a Shakespeare buff. He
doesn’t concern himself with controversy about Shakespeare’s true
identity or the deeper meaning of certain lines or the finer
historical points of the plays.
But he does know that people need to
communicate their desires and emotions clearly through the elegance of
spoken language, - and that Shakespeare is the perfect consultant for
the task.
"Shakespeare," Moglia is fond of
saying, "is the university of the soul."
Moglia’s advice for all of us is to select
up to 50 Shakespearean quotes that apply most to our daily lives, then
memorize and use them, emphasizing their rhythm and musicality.
He also invites people to watch his monthly
half-hour cable TV show, "Shakespeare’s Views on the
News," available on Tualatin Valley Community TV. Think of the 3
½ year-old program as Moglia’s channeling Shakespeare while
Falstaff shakes his head about current events ("There’s
villanous news abroad").
Lest you dismiss Moglia with the words of
Hippolyta in "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" – "This is
the silliest stuff that ever I heard" – rest assured that
Moglia, like Hamlet, is constant to his purpose.
"To business that we like," he says,
quoting from Antony and Cleopatra, "we rise betimes and go to it
with delight."
The quotes in the headline are from
"Henry V," act III.
Jimmie Moglia
Resume: Founder, Computer Friends, Inc. (
