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Anyway, we were poor as they come but one of the first things my parents did when we bought a house here was to designate one of the rooms as a library. We were sleeping two to a room, but there had to be a library.
I think I've talked about this before, but there's a company here called Shakespeare in Detroit, and I went to hang out with the director during their last play of 2019: Twelfth Night. We both shared the idea that Shakespeare was as much for poor kids as it was for anyone else.
That night, we sat by the front door, collected tickets, validated parking, and watched a diversity of people from rich patrons to high school kids with their teachers stream in. The actors in the play were also kids and students from the city. And it was a lovely thing to see.
It reminded me of the same thing that my English did in high school when she introduced Shakespeare, which so many of the students were put off by initially. Which was to remove it from the class context, help us understand it, and show the human problems the stories are about.
That class distinction is the most artificial nonsense. Just crap that doesn't come from a deeper understanding of art, but a reinforcing idea of "this is for rich people, so only rich people get it" when they can hardly explain anything about it without jargon and pretension.
