Cast of Crabs
Unsolicited life lessons and an apt collective noun.
I’m walking through Chinatown to see my friend R- when I come across a restaurant window displaying a remarkable metaphor for my life. A cast of crabs in a tank, en route to the dinner table. They’re spending the last moments of their life engaged in a remarkably pointless competition: fighting to sit atop a rival’s head. I make a video of this, but it’s many years ago now and I’ve since lost it. It looked a bit like this.
I’m here to see R- who’s a very good actor who you will probably know from a number of interesting shows if you have even a passing interest in stage or screen. So I’ll fudge the details of this, so you can’t tell exactly who he is - but believe me, the guts of it are bang on. He’s just back from a theater in not New York, where he had been cast to play a character from a well known 19th century detective series who is not normally associated in the readers’ mind with a man of R-’s, er, race. It seemed a very bold move …