Dear New York Times,
I need to cancel my Sunday subscription. I am sick and tired of opening the pages of your Arts & Leisure pages and finding scintillating, titillating, stimulating offerings. I turn the two dozen or so pages and find myself in a drool over the variety of offerings in your city. Mind you: I am not a New Yorker, a former New Yorker, a former-New-Yorker/part-time-returnee, or a New Yorker-wannabe. It’s just that in browsing your pages, I realized that there are so many artists below the age of 50! This has been a cruel and somewhat bubble-bursting epiphany. It’s not fair. I have begun to feel like I have entered Madame Tussaud’s and someone has locked the doors - like a sad horror flick.
Take, for example, the most recent ad in my local newspaper (It doesn't matter if it really was the most recent or not; it appears there every year anyway) for the performing arts center in my small county in Florida*:
I’ve begun to think it’s a trick. You know, these wax figures actually live underneath the stage and are brought up at least once a year for a dust off with accompanying music suitably filtered to squelch hearing aid feedback. C’mon, Performing Arts Center, even if your audience is touchingly a lot like those wax figures, we can still enjoy fresh fruit and young acts!
* And don't you go saying it's a Florida thing because all these wax figures appear all around the country!
