I sent my old friend Wilson this postcard from a Crackpot Crones show, as a Valentine's Day card. (Fabulous design by Melissa Walker). Wilson and I have been friends since we taught at Collegiate School in Manhattan in 1972. He taught English and I taught theater. It was THE ritzy day school for the male progeny of the rich and powerful. John Kennedy Jr., was a student. I loved teaching at Collegiate, thought I would stay there for the rest of my life. But they soon fired me for opening my big mouth once too often. Or was it three times too often? Let me just say: If the son of Seagrams's Liquor wants you to do a certain play and you want to keep your job -- DO THAT PLAY!
But that's another blog.
ANYHOW, Wilson responded with this rather stunning meditation on this cursed day, which has caused so much pain to so many:
Valentine?
I’ve never really understood St. Valentine’s Day. A confusing notion from the beginning. Introduced to it in 3rd grade, we (boys and girls) were set by Mrs. Hritz to the task of cutting out heart-shapes from colored paper and paper lace doilies and pasting them together into greeting cards. Then we wrote (copied from the blackboard) messages on the cards -- Be My Valentine or Please Be My Valentine or I Want You to Be My Valentine. The next step was to look around at the other kids and decide who to send this message to (boys to choose girls, girls to choose boys). On Valentine’s Day it would be a surprise – this was how we’d know who wanted us to be their Valentine. And we were supposed to want to be a Valentine ourselves, chosen as the object of someone’s desire.
But what were these Valentines? Not religious, we were told, but there were overtones because this notion of hearts and “love” was some kind of celebration of a guy called Saint Valentine. The Day was to be a pleasurable event, but what if nobody picked me to be their Valentine? Or what if somebody I thought was awful did?
The whole project and the uncomfortable exchange day in class were for many of us our introduction to the confusing notion of romantic love, since this (1953) was before TV sets were in every home, and the relatively few depictions of romance we had seen were at the movies. Thereafter (in the next years) came a slippery slope: cards turned into little and then bigger gifts, and the task became how to get someone to want us, and then … what if someone did? How would this work?
What have the sainted Valentine and his enablers gotten us into? Don’t they care about the ache of inevitable disappointments? Starting in third grade, it’s been a sort of continuing cultural indoctrination that we should hope for and expect, as our due, romantic fulfillment.
I do now sing along with the lyrics and enjoy the seduction of (the Right Reverend!) Al Green’s “Love and Happiness.” Although Mrs. Hritz (quite unintentionally, I’m sure) did set us up for bruises to come, I forgive because without it I might not have come to hear the truth of the blues, the reality that so often follows the Valentines. I might have missed the experience of Ella Fitzgerald’s “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” and how about the short film of Bessie Smith delivering “Saint Louis Blues”?
So about all that early indoctrination I have no hard feelings … though we should mind the pitfalls when Valentine’s Day is near. | 
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