April 2011

By the time junior year pulled to a close, we had stopped moving around in packs. We stopped pretending to be sad when returning home for the short winter breaks, and went to dinner without finding out whether every extended friend wanted to come along.

The summer before my last year of college commenced, I made the English major’s requisite collegiate haj. A group of fellow students and I arrived at Heathrow for a summer study-abroad programme and piled into a bus bound for Stratford-upon-Avon.

Let me be clear. I like Shakespeare. I like his characters. I like the weight in some of his words and the cleverness in all of them. I enjoy being a groundling amidst the buzzing tourists inside The Globe, a fruity Pimm’s in hand and As You Like It playing out on stage.

But do I like him or his work enough to sit through a week-long retrospective of various interpretations of The Winter’s Tale by the (admittedly very talented) crew of the Royal Shakespeare Company? No. I don’t. And apparently, neither did David or Ark. As I was sliding into sleep in the darkened theatre, an androgynous voice whispered in my ear, ‘Hey, do you want to sneak out and drink at the pub down the road?’

God, yes.

I beamed a hell yeah at David. I’d vaguely recognized his face on the first day, when we’d all landed and met at Heathrow. In a minute, it clicked: he was the crazy guy everyone had seen taking a naked victory lap around campus the night that Obama won the 2008 elections. He completed the dash by jumping into Glass Lake in the throes of a Midwestern November. It said something about the magnitude of that moment in our time, I think, that he became a sort of mini-hero around campus for a while thereafter. If there was ever a day for our generation to streak into an icy lake in beholden thanks, that was it.

The three of us left the theatre in identical second-short slivers of light through an exit in the back. Outside, I learned that Ark, who bore a comical resemblance to Bill Cosby, was just taking the trip to fulfil a Humanities requirement for his physics major and couldn’t take another minute of Shakespeare without a fortifying haze.