All the World's a Stage
"O brave new world, that has such people in it"
Ho there, Savages:
I’ve spent a lot of time at the theater this week! Saw Pirates, the Penzance Musical at the Roundabout on the same day as I saw the new Superman (ironically - these two unrelated productions have identical themes). It is always fascinating to go see a show you know well (I was in an off-off Broadway production of Pirates when I was in my 20s). I also saw Operation Mincemeat and got to lounge by a rooftop pool overlooking Times Square but that’s another story.
Being in Broadway theaters is such a comfort and joy that I forget that the very basics can be questioned. A group of tourists needed to leave their row because they’d assumed their seats were all adjacent when they were A2, A3, A4, and A5 - of course 3 & 5 are house left and 2 & 4 are house right. That’s always the way theaters on Broadway are laid out.
But why? Why are the even seats on the right and odd seats on the left of the center section?
Turns out the internet has posed that question as well! Reddit answered it the best:
Sometimes things that seem the most strange are actually there for your convenience - we have simply forgotten the reason… or technology has rendered those reasons obsolete. On that note, I was looking up why asterisks and hash marks got put on phones (to allow better communication with computers) and accidentally discovered that people used to end the recitation of the alphabet, " ... X, Y, Z and per se And" (meaning "by itself, And"). Which is where the name for the & symbol (ampersand) came from. This has nothing to do with things that were there for convenience but everything to do with things being forgotten. (Other things that are forgotten are that the asterisk was first used in the 2nd century BC by a scholar marking which sections of Homer’s work was sourced elsewhere than Homer’s mind.)
Sparks of Artistic Fire
In case you missed it, here’s that link for my essay about my name in the Museum of Names!
Also I wrote a new cross-genre piece that started as a sort of obituary for my friends’ cat and then became something altogether weird. Here it is if you want to read it: “This is the Story that AI Couldn’t Write.”
Anyone know anyone at the American Writers Museum or at Poetry Society of America in Chicago? I’m going to visit Chicago in early August and I’d love to set up meetings to say hello. (also if you’re in town, put August 7 in your book! Magnificent Mile! Details soon!)
Random Final Thought:
