how old hat my life is, i just realized it rudely, alas, sunday night. some four hundred and five year old hat.
midsummer in new york. that only means, besides the soporific heat, the narcotizing effect on the city's intellectual middlebrows of shakespeare in the park. sunday night, off i went with a straight friend to public theater's fairly straightforward production of as you like it. and there, for some reason (although i've seen other productions of this play before) i've been introduced to myself for the first time.
you've heard this one from me before and, no shame here, i'll say it again. bill shakes invented my type, at least, catalogued it since 1600. what an ego downer for someone like myself who fancied carving out a life original, only to find out such an existence had already been logged in the taxonomy of this supreme social scientist of a poet some four centuries ago.
for i, my fair lieges, am jaques. you all know him from the play, the one whose musings are deathly banal. "all the world's a stage" yada-yada-yada. like jaques, i, too seem to delight in being sad in this my summer of life, in a play that so delights in happiness.
and like jaques, my so-called faculties as a critic, an observer of the goings-on around me, are considerably sub par compared to the incisive rosalinds of the world. while she critiques to transform the world, jaques and i, it seems, are just mighty content to stew in the humidity of our own melancholy.
