Is Hamlet accusing Ophelia of being a slut? That her beauty transformed honesty into a bawd? Or that her beauty transformed Hamlet into a bawd? Is it basically the idea of someone so beautiful that you can’t help but get busy with them? Isn’t that basically many men’s explanation for rape?
The paradox – not entirely clear to me – the time giving it poof – would seem to implicate Ophelia. It’s not a direct implication, it’s like a passive aggressive way of saying a proverb that you mean for someone to take personally.

I just drew these little stick figures to help me figure out this equation. There’s honesty right, which, when beauty comes around, gets transformed into a bawd. Then there’s beauty and when honesty comes around, what might beauty be transformed into? His likeness? Whose likeness? Honesty’s?
It doesn’t add up. And that’s the point – to a certain extent – that beauty has more power to transform honesty than honesty has to transform beauty. But the analogies aren’t equivalent – his likeness – if it’s honesty or something like honesty – the transforming agent is then absorbing the transformed, which is not what happens with beauty in the previous equation. In all cases, beauty is the loser.

If I had my life to do over again, I’d probably just end up in the same exact spot. But I do fantasize about another path – like one in which I was captivated by some academic writing and became an economist or a scientist or a psychologist or something.
And in that other life, I got deeply entrenched in some curious corner of exploration and ran studies on human behavior or social groups or whatever and then I wrote fun books about it, like Sheena Iyengar, the Heath Brothers, the Freakonomics guys, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir.
And in that mythical other life, I live in a house with furniture and have bookshelves and friends over and go to the theatre for fun and I enjoy it.

I don’t think I ever fully understood this line. It always sort of washed over me with a sense of Hamlet pulling a GOTCHA on Ophelia – a tricky little punchline to his set up with his previous two questions. Looking closely at it now, I’m seeing that this honest question is not so much about her telling the truth but about her sexuality. That is, honesty as chastity, as the sexual police blocking the doors. Your honesty, that is, your purity, your virtue, your ability to put the brakes on desire – shouldn’t give anyone access to your beauty.

In other words, you’re a slut because you let me talk to you.

Which is really a shitty thing to say, Hamlet.

What his motivation might be for saying this shitty thing is not clear to me. If it’s to make Ophelia herself feel bad, that’s one thing. It’s a kind of lashing out at the one you love when they’ve betrayed you.

If it’s to have some sort of effect on her father – well, perhaps it’s designed to have Polonius leap to his daughter’s defense. Or to have Ophelia leap to her own defense, betray her father’s presence somehow or reveal something about what has passed between these lovers here?

In any case, this line of misogyny is pretty familiar where a girl can’t win for losing.

There was a story on the radio this morning about skin lightening creams. There was a fascinating discussion about the value put on fairness – that the fairer one was, the whiter one was (or is?!) the more beautiful one is considered. There’s tremendous scholarship and history behind it all. My favorite moment was when a woman called in, clearly an expert on the subject, and made me wonder why they hadn’t called her to be the guest on this show in the first place. She reminded me that when one isn’t invited to the party, sometimes you just have to show up anyway.

The other great moment in this discussion was a mother who called in to tell a story about her daughter. They saw “fairness cream” somewhere and her daughter asked “Is that what you use if you want to be a judge?”
Obviously, that sort of fairness is so much more important than the other sort.

More than I used to be.
And back then, I would have told you that I didn’t lie, which I didn’t know to be the lie that it was.
I didn’t lie about the facts. My lies were not the kind that get you called a liar. I didn’t deceive anyone or misrepresent myself willfully.
But when you asked me how I was, I usually said I was fine, accompanied by a big believable smile. If you asked me if I wanted to go to the party, I’d say sure and convince both you and myself that it was true.
The thing that was tricky about my lies is that mostly believed them to be true. It was aspirational truth. If I told someone I was doing great it was because I was doing my level best to believe it to be so.

I am a lot more honest now than I’ve ever been – but I find that my honesty is a lot less socially acceptable, especially in the theatre business. Most everyone would rather hear the lie than the truth. The truth being complicated and sometimes painful.

Am I honest? I waiver between trying to be and trying not to be. That is the dance, finding the right moments or honest.

On the episode of WTF I just listened to, Lewis Black discusses how he went from being a theatre maker to a comedian. He’d been a dedicated theatre maker – playwright, director, producer for 20 years and when he turned 40, he made a switch. He became a stand-up comedian.

And it was a successful switch for him. He’s found success in a new form. And he made the switch at the age that I am now. I’ve also spent 20 years in the theatre with only minor breakthroughs.

From the place he’s sitting now, this former theatre maker only wonders how he managed to stay in it so long. And he has a lot of zingers on the business of theatre making. (My favorite was one about the actual business of theatre being to say “no.”) He said he’d always had a sideways interest in comedy though when he turned to it, it was unexpected. He came to it as a writer looking for a stage and he found he could say what he wanted better in comedy than he’d ever could in theatre.

I listen to a LOT of comedy podcasts. I am mildly obsessed with comedic structures and ideas. Is it my turn to switch over at 40, too? I only have a few months of 40 left. I’ll have to do it soon.

It is funny how love goes sour, it is the sweetness you want to deny. You’d like to believe you never wrote those drippy love poems or sent those sentimental letters. You wish that song you’d written had not been for him. You want to believe you never thought you could die happy in a thunderstorm, struck by lightning, as long as you were with your love. All of the extremity, the warmth, the comfort, the passions, they all look different on the other side of heartbreak.

Never give up. Never feel discouraged. Never ponder throwing the towel in. Never wonder what that could mean for me, that throwing the towel in. Like, would it just be giving up art? But if I gave up Art, isn’t that everything? What would it all be for if it wasn’t Art?

Never get caught up in ideas. Never teeter on the brink of despair and contentment. Never wonder about my choices. Never envy anyone else’s. Never question my abilities. Never wish things were different. Never nostalgic. Never wistful. Never cynical. Never jaded. Never bitter. Never lonely. Never wrong. No, no, not I.

Seems to me that you’d need to really do something with these wells. I feel like they’re often elided into a cliché, into the rhythm of “Well well well,” like an arch-villain delighted to find the hero has stumbled into his lair. 

It is, sure, an answer to her question. But it is also a tremendous opportunity to investigate Ophelia’s appearance in this scene or to stall while he tries to work out his tactics, or to appraise what her motivations are, or to check behind stray arrases for fathers hiding.