Classics

Last night on my way home from work I stopped off at a local lemonade stand for a pull of the yellow stuff. I stopped to chat with the enterprising fourth-grade girls running the joint, who were raising money for their horse camp one quarter at a time. It's weird for men my age to talk to young girls without feeling like parents are sizing us up for pedophilic habits, so it was kind of nice to remember how to talk to kids.

It's been a busy couple of weeks for classics, especially in terms of entertainment. Two weeks ago, I went to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Actor's Theater of San Francisco. I had low expectations, as I've never liked Virginia Woolf (although it's been a decade since I've read her) and I knew the story was about four people in one room drinking. The theater looked like a total dump too: nobody greeted us on the ground floor, and we wound through some rundown, musty furnishings and climbed a flight of decrepit stairs (with no directions) to find the theater. Before the show, the MC made a spirited pitch for fundraising (pretty cool actually, for just $25 you get listed in the program all year). Needless to say, the play has little to do with Virginia Woolf, the actors were phenomenal; it was one of the best plays I've ever seen. The dialogue is the stuff to aspire to, and the constant lying held me rapt. It was voted in as the Pulitzer winner the year it came out (1963 I think), but they refused to hand out the award to such a sacriligeous play and instead nobody won. If you haven't seen it and it's around, it's worth it.

The same week, I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I've learned that this is generally considered The Catcher in the Rye from a female perspective, although somehow I'd managed never to hear of the book until six months ago. I read some Sylvia poems in high school and they were mostly downers, but this book, while dealing with non-uppers like mental illness and suicide, was hilarious and fascinating. It made an unsympathetic character -- a privileged, overachieving, inconsiderate young women -- compelling and interesting. Anyway, I burned through this one in three days, so that's a revealing sign of a good read.