Perhaps it’s the spring weather that has sprouted the Shakespeare phenomenon at my house, or perhaps it is mere coincidence, but Shakespeare is everywhere I turn lately. First a friend of mine invited me to see a Shakespeare play at the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta. Then, my sixth grade son began spouting lines from the oft-quoted balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet (apparently he had to learn them for drama class). The next thing I know my old Shakespeare text has disappeared off the shelf and I’m renting Romeo and Juliet from the video store. “How did you know I was studying Shakespeare?” asks my ninth-grade daughter. Wow! Apparently it’s spreading. Thus inspired, I began reading the juvenile book Romeo and Juliet–Together (And Alive!) at Last by Avi (Sequel to S.O.R. Losers). This is perhaps the funniest book I have read in a long time. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong in this amateur eighth-grade production. For starters, the set is borrowed from the previous year’s production of George Washington Crossing the Delaware. It’s not easy pulling off a hot Verona summer with a backdrop of snow-capped mountains and log cabins. As for the costumes, they range from bathrobes to the Tin-Man costume from The Wizard of OZ. And it just gets funnier as the production goes downhill from there…