The disaster in Huntsville

La Querida and I set out Friday afternoon for Huntsville, to see a performance by the touring American Shakespeare Center players. They were staging Beaumont’s comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). It’s not every day that you get to see a Jacobean comedy in Alabama that wasn’t written by The Bard™.

The unusual snowstorm had passed and the roads were clear. As we headed north on I-65, the radio reported a shooting in Huntsville, on the university campus. Two people were dead and four injured, and the “shooter” — a word that seems to have sprung from the lingo of video games — was in custody. The 4 p.m. shooting was the lead national news story for the next 24 hours.