My Shtick

Friday was Marla's birthday and we went to a nice Bucktown restaurant to celebrate. Marla's travelled extensively in Europe, and we talked about the Sistine Chapel. I pointed that Michelangelo was extremely uncomfortable with the female form and that his women tended to have very masculine bodies, and how his homosexuality affected his work and the influence of Savonarola in 15th century Florence and I realized after a moment that Marla was hanging on my every word. The "culture thing" is my shtick.

I'm not brilliant. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy but I also know the difference between reasonably intelligent and brilliant. In college, I was fortunate enough to be accepted into a crowd comprised of highly intelligent individuals---one is now a film producer, another a top scientist, there's a very successful businessman, a few are highly placed political operatives at the national level and one was recently nominated by our beleaguered commander-in-chief to be the U.S. ambassador to a European country. Many of my friends in school were brilliant. My inclusion in this group contributed to making me humble about what I knew and what I didn't know---bull sessions could get rough and you would be publicly humiliated if you took a position on a subject about which you were poorly informed. Sometimes it's better to keep your mouth shut and listen to those who know more than you about the topic in question. Of course, alcohol is a whole nother story....

What I do have going for me, however, is a curiosity about the world---I read extensively, I like art and history, I'm a film buff and I have a decent knowledge of and appreciation for classical music and jazz. The city offers so much for the curious---I joke sometimes that I'm uniquely qualified to appreciate the zombie genre because I grew up in rural Iowa and lived alongside many of the Living Dead. When I was a teenager my interests were seen as pretty geeky. The nice thing about being an adult, however, is that no one at a dinner party cares how far you can throw the football. Come up with a classical reference or two, or an apt quote from a poem, and eyebrows rise. Just don't overdo it.

This has been pretty useful in the dating world. My competition in a lot of cases are guys who spend their weekends watching football and their weekdays talking about it and most women find such devotion to football and other sports booooriiiing. I tend to do very well with museum dates or outdoor symphony concerts in Millennium Park. It's all part of playing to my strengths, just as a wealthy businessman will take a love interest to ostentatiously expensive restaurants and vacations, a musician will rely on his music and his fan base and a comedian on his jokes.

The risk of the culture shtick, however, is that you can come across as a pompous ass if you're not careful. As Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) says in Real Genius:

".....I didn't want you to think I was stuffy. You know, all brains, no penis."