Okay, I admit I like culture.  But I couldn’t get tickets to see Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet.

Am I in London?

No, so it hardly matters.

So what do we do in the Midwest for fun?

I pretend to shop at the mall like other women, but usually just stop at the bookstore.

And during the long, long, long harrowing winter nights when the wolves are howling at the door, etc,  I read Sophocles in Greek and Plautus in Latin. That’s theater, isn’t it?   If you study classics for seven years and then teach it for seven more (or more), it’s a snap.

But there are so many subjects I know little about.

And so I was laughing my head off over an episode of Ellen, the ’90s  sitcom starring Ellen DeGeneres.  In “Ellen’s Improvement” (Season 2, Episode 13), she decides to improve herself after she and her friends miss all the questions on Jeopardy.  Perturbed that she didn’t know who Kandinsky was,  she reads a book about him.

.Then she drags Adam and Paige to a museum.

Paige:   “I don’t get art.”

Ellen:  “You’ve gotta give it time.”

Paige:  “No, my mom said if it doesn’t go with the drapes it’s not worth having”

Ellen:  “Yes, this $300 million dollar Kandinsky would clash with her ceramic clown collection.”

Okay, that’s funny.  But it’s even funnier when she meets a UCLA professor from England and they have an arty chat.  Then she has to prep for her dates with him, until she introduces him to her world of watching TV on “Melrose Place” night.   Heather Locklear reminds him of Lady Macbeth.

That is my nightmare.  I love art museums but pray I don’t have to talk about art.  I have had many a trite conversation with friends who know the phrase, “Ah, the colors.”  Perhaps I’ll read a few chapters in my Sister Wendy art history book and learn a new phrase before I rush off to that Sargent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I am so bored by opera that I laughed hysterically when Ellen falls asleep and her friend Adam throws a milk dud at the woman singing Madame Butterfly.

I’m sorry, but it’s just so funny!

And so I must, like Ellen, take a crash course in culture.

MY READING LIST

 Hamlet, because Benedict Cumberbatch is stunned that I’m missing his performance.  (My last Hamlet was  Paul Gross at Stratford, Ontario, 2000.)

Julian Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open:  Essays on Art. Actually, I do want to read this.

The Amazon sample of Evan Baker’s From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging.  (Just the sample!)

Crafting with Cat Hair by Kaori Tsutaya. (But it is art?  No, I’m kidding.)

Mindy Kaling’s Why Not Me?   (She’s funny.)

Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life As a Pretender  (She is a stunning rocker; rock is art; ergo, rock, scissors, paper.)

The Penguin Book of Witches, ed. by Katherine Howe.  Halloween is coming!  And I might have to talk about witchery!  And I’ve been to Salem!  Diane Purkiss, author of The Witch in History: Early modern and twentieth century representations, said in the TLS  that Howe’s anthology of witchcraft was  too American.  Good, I’m Howe’s audience!  (Howe is also a very good novelist.)

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (Library of America).  If you read Kael’s brilliant movie reviews in the ’70s and ’80s in The New Yorker, you know how outrageous she was.

So what’s on your list?