Crimes of the Heart

The first production I ever reviewed

Was Crimes of the Heart

At the Orpheus Theater

Oh, it was such a good show

They’ve all been such good shows

Over the years

I’ve never given any of them

A bad review

Some people think it’s because

They advertise in the free paper

That I write for—hahahaha

Yeah, that’s pretty much why

But I really do enjoy most of the shows

In my opinion, theater doesn’t benefit

From having a bunch of negative nancy’s

Just yammering away

About how awful it is

You wanna see awful?

Go watch tv

Personally, I can’t understand anybody

Who goes to the theater

And sits in one of those seats

And looks through their program

And has a glass of wine

Or two, two glasses

Three if it’s a three-act play hahaha

I mean, how can you experience all that

And then say—Meh, it was okay?

Or—I didn’t care for it

In my opinion, most of those so-called critics

Aren’t having, what my mother liked to call—

Marital Activities

If you know what I mean

Oh, I see some of you men nodding

My mother also liked to say

If a man nods when you mention marital activities

It means he isn’t having them

But he thinks he is

My husband loved going to the theater with me

And afterwards we’d get ice cream

And talk about our favorite parts

Of what we’d just seen

I always made sure I went to the theater

In a good mood

After all, it’d be very difficult to enjoy a play

If you weren’t in the mood for it

So I always go in smiling

That critic from the local paper

Never smiles, you know

Never

I’ve been at hundreds of press nights with him

And the man does not smile

No wonder he always has such nasty things to say

Most of the time he just summarizes the show

My sister teaches third graders

And she says if a kid spends an entire book report summarizing

It means he didn’t read the book

And she makes him redo it

A theater critic does the same thing

And we give him a yearly salary for it

Probably with benefits

While my column is in a free paper

Right between the horoscopes

And the Missed Connections

Oh well, I don’t complain

Life’s too short

And there’s so much to be thrilled about

I love the theater

I really do

Every September when the theaters start up again

I was so grateful to see all those actors back onstage

Like old friends

That’s really what they felt like

Friends

And who could ever say anything bad

About their friends?