Robert Frost, Re-revisited Again Some More

This year, I attended the Royal Frog Ballet's annual Surrealist Cabaret and Pumpkin Walk. I went for the first time last year, and I thought it was lovely, but I also had a bad attitude that evening and tried to blame the event. Like, I decided it was ableist that attendees had to walk all over the farm from one performance space to the next, and all the performers appeared to be able bodied, young, and attractive, and that gave me some kind of self-righteous angst about the whole thing. Still, it was beautiful, and I appreciated how it ritualized and made meaning out of the season changing, the darkness growing, the earth shutting down.

So, I went again this year because some friends had an extra ticket. Actually, because I had previously ranted about my discomfort with last year's experience, the invitation was, "I think we have an extra ticket for the inaccessible white supremacy performance tomorrow night if you wanna come." Winky face totally implied. Maybe knowing I was in company that could hear and tolerate--if not share--my cynicism allowed me to relax a little, and I had a decent time, even though tall people in audiences need to be more aware of when they're blocking folks, I'm just saying.

Anyway, each year's performance has a theme, and this year's was "crossroads," which felt meaningful to me personally, and they printed Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in the program. This is a poem that has inspired plenty of rants from me, too, since people seem to remember only the last three lines and miss every shred of its irony by a mile. The same friend who sent me the snarky invitation to the Surrealist Cabaret distilled Frost's poem as follows, and I approve 100% of this interpretation and hope to live my life every day according to its wisdom.

two roads diverge in the woods.
wah wah wah. just fucking pick one.
it's gonna keep happening.

(Readers will remember from this instructive post that authentic haiku don't need to have 17 syllables and honestly I have not been writing authentic haiku at all this whole time, so don't worry about counting anything up there.)

Crossroads is also a 1986 film in which Ralph Macchio sells his soul to the devil to learn
blues guitar from an old black man so he can shred better than this other white boy.