However, when I see a report from senior reporter Johnny Paradise land in my in-box, I get excited. I know that something special is right around the corner for my eyes and my head.
And kids, in my honest opinion, this is his best report yet (and each one of his is an instant classic). There is no one I publish who captures all five senses in the adult theater scene like Johnny Paradise.
Get ready to be enveloped.
Take it away, sir.
***
NOTES FROM A THEATRE, SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA
"I was born in the Midwest..."
So sayeth scholars and sinners, heroes and fools, Presidents, paupers, poets and prophets, profiteers and populists, barons of industry, the working men who built America, so sayeth Don Draper in a terse declaration of identification - defensive, defiant, delivered with the curious blend of modesty and arrogance that is as Midwestern as the Midwesterner himself.
I was born in the Midwest, too... and at the risk of letting bias blur the ink of journalistic impartiality, on a crisp beautiful October afternoon it surpasses one's ability to not think, to not believe that this land is different, special, blessed and beatified by the unique geography that makes Autumn here so indescribably nice. Autumn in Michigan is exquisite - and brief - a short cool sunlit trip through an orchard that starts under summer's unforgiving heat and delivers us, finally, to the cold in-escapability of winter's long embrace; in the middle ground there is bittersweet perfection.
Bittersweet, because Autumn reminds us of loss and the brevity of all things, accomplished and undone... "Sic transit gloria mundi" - so sayeth the Midwesterner, so sayeth the observer of things, so sayeth the baseball fan.