I Give This Performance Two Stringbeans.

All the world's a stage, and we are merely players.

Please forgive the pomposity of beginning this post by quoting the band 'Rush', but just last night I saw that very same phrase scrawled in lipstick on the ladies' room wall at Le Yeah. And though, at the time, those crimson words bobbed rhythmically up and down in my alcohol-smudged vision between two ankles, they still managed to burn and burrow their way into my brain like some sort of hedgehog made of fire.

Yes, indeed, we are all players on this stage of life. The difference is, some of us seek out other stages within this stage of life. TV. Film. An actual stage. My first stage upon the stage of life was the dinner table. As a young child of three, I would do impromptu animal impressions using a pair of stringbeans. Elephant (two stringbeans in the corners of my mouth curving up). Walrus (the same, but curving down). That was pretty much it, really. I had a limited repertoire. My first reviews were dismal. I could not yet read, but my parents would pretend to read aloud from the Arts section of the New York Times. Somehow, they told me, the theater critic from the most prestigious newspaper in the world had witnessed my latest stringbean performance, and invariably, without fail, they had hated it. My father would make a grand display of thwapping open the paper. THWAP. And he would read “Oh no. Tsk Tsk tsk. Listen to this, Andres -- ‘Insufferably self-indulgent! A complete waste of stringbeans! Du Bouchet insists on endlessly cycling between his tired old elephant and walrus impressions. Has he not heard of a unicorn? A triceratops? A narwhal?” My mother would sigh, shake her head, and place the review in a scrapbook which she referred to as the Crapbook. Years later, when I could read, I would find said book in an attic. The articles were completely random. A sports article here. A political scandal there. I guess my parents were just trying to toughen me up. Prepare me for the inevitable critical drubbings I would receive later in life. They knew I was destined to loom large in the public eye, like the giant E at the top of the optometrist’s chart.