Myriad-Minded

When I was small, my parents, in their (I have come to increasingly realize) great wisdom enrolled me in a wide variety of extracurricular activities ranging from clarinet to karate, from riding horses to rowing canoes. One of these activities was acting, and I remember spending one summer taking classes from the fine thespians at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre.

The only problem with taking acting lessons from actual actors is that you're taking acting lessons from actual actors. I assume anyone who has ever met an actual actor will take my point. One day in improv class (the sort of painful activity in which a room full of 12-year-olds pretend to be donkeys and CEO's) our instructor burst into an utterly unsolicited monologue (or was it some sort of schizophrenic soliloquy?) in which he bemoaned the lack of soul, soul, in our performances and decried the shallow, materialistic culture that was clearly responsible for superficial and desultory acting.

Midway through what was probably the first nervous breakdown I'd witnessed, our poor instructor cried out "Have any of you even read any Shakespeare?!?!" Painfully geeky, painfully honest, it never occurred to me to do anything other than pathetically raise my hand and assure the poor man that I'd read Julius Caesar out of curiosity when I was 10. Tears literally sprang to the man's eyes, at which point he spun himself into some sort of fit involving shouts of "Children in Africa are starving to death and only one of you has ever read Shakespeare! Oh the HUMANITY!" Predictably, the 20 other children in the room stared at me as though I'd suddenly spouted an extra head (the contents of which they perhaps would have required to successfully crack a tome of the bard, but that's neither here nor there).

The lesson I took from all of this is that unashamed intelligence, while occasionally appealing to the acutely insane, or the insanely acute, to the well-socialized it is off-putting at best. And that I didn't want to be an actor.

Actually, the classes were pretty great once I got a Romulan cloaking device for the second head (and if American electoral politics teach us nothing else, Americans have very short memories). But some days I think I'd recommend canoeing.