My brother Nick, who was hosting, decided we had to eat outdoors the same way the Pilgrims did–rather global-warming weather, so that didn’t prove onerous–and we would have a mock-trial, presided over by my cousin Merle, about whether Michael Dukakis’ pardon of Anne Hutchinson should stand or be struck down.
Hutchinson was a Puritan expelled, together with her followers, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her free-thinking. In 1987, then-Massachusetts governor Dukakis issued his pardon, 350 years after her expulsion.
Watching Merle adjudicate I kept thinking of Portia in the trial scene of Merchant of Venice!
She laid down the law: the pardon should stick.