Steal This Life!

In What’s In A Name, which closes tonight at the Bococa Arts Festival, Susan Price is able to establish her new life through a stolen birth certificate.

Getting one of these is easier than you might think, as anyone who’s read Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book can attest. Apparently it’s as easy as asking your dear friend for unreasonable favors in the name of the revolution and cash-free living.

It makes one think about a time when such requests were not outside the lines of reasonableness.

When you’re young, you think about what the future will look like, whether it’s a reachable and comfortable as a loving marriage, good job, house, children; or as ambitious and outrageous as the overthrow of the capitalist system by means of magic realism and culture-jamming performance art. Either way, you make your choices based on what you think the next few years will look like.  And then, as the years go by, you find you’re stuck with them.

I know more than one person who’s had to live down a shoplifting rap, or a drug bust, or a hospital stay because they thought their futures would look different than they turned out.  But their choices are what they are.

Susan’s choices, like a lot of folks at that time, were more extreme, but no less reasonable at the moment they were made.  It’s the unforeseen consequences that always do you in.

What’s In A Name, tonight at 7, part of the Bococa Arts Festival, at the Ceol Pub on Smith St in Brooklyn.