Love Is Everything

Love is Everything

We made a little video of children reciting Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 without any practice—as they heard it for the first time. It's the one that scoffs at beauty—"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"—and in doing so gets to the very heart of love. You can see the full movie, here.

For Valentine’s Day that year it resided in our vending machine. We put it on our website. And we crazily ran around New York passing out the sonnet to people who ignored us, smiled politely while we recited, and even one who got down on bended knee to recite it himself to his girlfriend. We also made a one-of-a-kind version of our DiMe bracelet with the entire sonnet, secretly hand-engraved on its interior and visual elements of the sonnet hand-engraved on the exterior—a sun, musical notes, a perfume bottle, a rose. This piece has a good home now has been included in an archive of modern interpretations of Shakespeare.

In Marla's words...

"In 2019 I had an obsession. An obsession with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, an ode to a stripped-down love— the very core of love. It’s funny and a little inappropriate in a 17th-century sort of way. I texted my college roommate @pattimcc22 (who does much crazier things ) the idea of children reciting the sonnet without really understanding it. I said maybe we could just go up to children in the street and have them recite it and we would record it and she said something like, “You can’t do that it’s illegal but I can help you do it the right way.” Our effort is what you see here in the short movie. Cute kids right? They had no practice— just had to say the words on the fly—like how we experience love right? The sonnet makes the point that love has nothing to do with beauty; its essence is much more ephemeral. "