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ACT_ONE

                                             January 15, 2009


  Quoting from
  "Greenwich Village" (1917)
  by Anna Alice Chapin                        [Added para breaks]
  [ref]

     "'But such an amount of play-acting and pose!' I hear
     someone complain, referring to the Village with
     contemptuous irritation. 'They pretend to be seeking
     after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of
     thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality.'"
                                    
     "... the play-acting instinct is one of the most
     universal of all instincts ... "
                                    
     "From the moment when we try to play ball
     with sunbeams through those intermediate years
     wherein we imagine ourselves everything on earth
     that we are not, down to those last days of all,
     when we live, all furtive and unsuspected, a secret
     life of the spirit--either a life of remembrance or
     a life of imagination visualising what we have
     wanted and have missed,--what do we do but
     pretend,--make believe,--pose, if you will?"
                                    
     "When we are little we pretend to be knights and
     ladies, pirates and fairy princesses ... "
                                    
     "A bit later, our pretending is done more
     cautiously. We do not confess our shy flights of
     imagination: we take a prosaic outward pose, and try
     not to advertise the fact that our geese wear (to
     our eyes) swans' plumage, and that our individual
     roles are (to our own view) always those of heroes
     and heroines. ...  All make-believe, you see, only
     we hate to admit it!"          
                                    
     "The different thing about Greenwich is that there
     they do admit it, quite a number of them. They
     accept the pretending, play-acting spirit as a
     perfectly natural--no, as an inevitable--part of
     life, and, with a certain whimsical seriousness,
     not unlike that of real children, they provide
     for it. You know children can make believe,            IMPROPER_BOHEMIANS
     _know_ that it is make believe, yet enjoy it all
     the more for that. So can the Villagers.  Hence,            Allen
     places like--let us say, as an example--'The                Churchill
     Pirate's Den.'"                                             calls this
                                                                 the first
     "It is a very real pirate's den, lighted only by            night club 
     candles. A coffin casts a shadow, and there is a            in the     
     regulation 'Jolly Roger,' a black flag ornamented           Village.  
     with skull and crossbones. Grim? Surely, but even                     
     a healthy-minded child will play at gruesome and                      
     ghoulish games once in a while."


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