Theater: Art Is Messy

ROMANCE LANGUAGE by Peter Parnell

Last night Walt Whitman had the strangest dream. There he was, staring out his bedroom window, when who should hop in but Huck Finn, itching to travel. "Dress warmly," Walt's dead mom told him. And we're off to see Louisa May Alcott, who's having an affair with a Tahitian prince. Over there's Charlotte Cushman, the noted actress, playing Hamlet to Emily Dickinson's Ophelia; they become co-stars and lovers. Old Ralph Waldo Emerson is having a chat with the dead Henry David Thoreau: "Sex can be messy; art can't. That's...

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