Stumbling towards humanity

I spent last evening cozied up next to my wife, in the small, black-box theater on my college campus watching a whole bunch of my journalism students perform in our university theater club’s production of Sherlock Holmes.

The show was directed by one of my most talented students, who also re-wrote a whole bunch of it and imbued it with even more life and humor and delightfulness than it had previously. People used to throw around the phrase “triumph of the human spirit” casually, but seeing all of these kids who had worked really hard, go out and have the courage to perform for an audience, I can honestly say without even a shred of hyperbole that it was, indeed, a triumph. My spirits were lifted, and my load was lightened. They gifted me with an amazing evening.

This on the heels of a pretty glum and existential week in the good old ivory towers of academia. I had to confront a student writer for using AI on a story that was I guess technically fine but had the telltale signs of lifelessness and soullessness and not even sounding remotely like him-ness.

I’m not a theater guy. I didn’t do it in high school (though I secretly wanted to) because in the ’90s you weren’t an athlete and also a theater guy. But I would go to see my friends in shows and secretly envy the rapport, the inside jokes, and the fun they appeared to be having on and off stage. And then I would wonder why I put on spandex and plastic to basically go have a three-hour street-fight in front of my friends, while convincing myself that it was fun. They seemed to be having actual fun.

But then I married a theater girl. I have pictures of her in Arsenic and Old Lace in high school, and in college I laid eyes on her for the first time as a student in an oral interpretation class performing a reader’s theater (I had to look up what this was) in a gorgeous red velvet dress. It was, as they say, on.

And generally, I’m not a hand-wringing-and-pearl-clutching about AI guy, either. I don’t find it as world-threatening and generally depressing as most of my peers, inasmuch as I go long stretches of time without even remembering that it exists. I’ve never used to it generate an image or write an email and I just generally find it way less interesting than the natural, non-machine world. And even in the world of machines I’m way more drawn to naturally aspirated engines than I am microchips.

Anyway, perhaps the most delightful thing about the college theater experience was its foundational humanness. Because the theater space is pretty small some of the scenes were unfolding like one yard in front of me and I could see Sherlock struggling to get the handcuffs out of his pocket because they were caught on a seam or whatever, and I could see Sherlock’s hat failing to stay on the coat rack. These were little, subtle reminders that I was watching people I know do a delightfully imperfect thing that they had put in a lot of hours on and that was still, basically, great.

About college theater: Most of these students won’t go on to make a single dollar as actors or producers or directors. Many of them major in journalism or nursing or some other field in which there is a career waiting at the end of all the semi-arbitrary academic hoops we make them jump through. But in a decade, when they’re bored and unfulfilled in a job, they will remember the months they spent cutting boards for the set, and rehearsing their lines together, and they’ll remember that the really delightful thing about it was how human and imperfect it all was. That in spite of their fatigue or their upper-respiratory-infection or their sprained ankle, they pulled it off and even made it look awesome.

Having been in Sherlock Holmes won’t really help them get a job as a pharmacist. On paper it doesn’t make pragmatic sense. But we still need it. We need it because glum people like me occasionally need encouragement, and because we still need moments to be delightfully imperfect, together.