the end of art as i knew it

Apparently, somebody chiseled it in stone somewhere that you have to suffer for your art. Especially if your art isn’t quite art yet.

But art isn’t all suffering.

Junior year at Manhattan, I didn’t have classes on Wednesday afternoons.

So I’d ride the subway for forty-five minutes from 242nd Street to the theater district, where half-price tickets—sometimes less than half price—were available for some Broadway matinees (which typically cost $7.50). Other than the monotonous subway trip, I was in heaven, fantasizing that one day—sooner rather than later—I’d write a Broadway play myself. Maybe I’d be the next Sam Shepard or Leonard Melfi.

One snowy winter Wednesday, I went to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Alvin Theatre on West Fifty-Second Street.

I was totally pumped up to see the play. Let it snow, let it snow. The tragicomedy that playwright Tom Stoppard had adapted from Hamlet (the title characters in Stoppard’s play have minor roles in Shakespeare’s) was already famous from its run at London’s National Theatre. The reviews were brilliant, and I shook snow out of my hair and entered the theater, thinking, I’m a young artist. I’m going to be a writer. I can do this.

I loved the first act. And the second. I was lost in Stoppard’s words and the crazy plot to kill Hamlet so that Rosencrantz could marry Ophelia. Meanwhile, seated next to me were two women around my age who I didn’t know from Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

At the start of the third act, one of them reached over and started rubbing my leg.

From the instant of that first gentle rub, I lost all interest in seeing where Stoppard’s play went, how it got there, how it ended. All there was were these two women sitting very close to me, one of them stroking my leg. I couldn’t have cared less about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—even if it did go on to win eight Tonys.

So much for theater; so much for art. Real life wins every time. Hormones win. To this day, I don’t know exactly what happened at the end of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And I don’t particularly care.