My neighborhood is the sort in which gentlemen may be discovered lounging at sidewalk café tables of a sunny evening, languidly perusing the works of Oscar Wilde. Even the straight guys - we're open-minded here.

I was myself an example of this just the other evening. I'd stepped across to the quirky little bookstore also de rigueur in this sort of locale, and had been delighted to discover a copy of a favorite play on a bottom shelf. Thin, mass-printed, cheap; suitable for any collegiate coffee table. As I had a drink cooling at just such a table back down the block, it seemed the thing on which to spend my loose change and my loose hour.

Walking back to the coffee, I smirked down at my shoes, remembering my initial exposure. I'd read it first in times more dramatic, my senior year of high school, in an English class. There was an unusual amount of sports boosterism in my class that year... the senior prank had been rearranging the telephone poles, usually laid out to block the front field from joyriders, so that they spelled "GO BLUE" from the second or third floor windows of the place, and leaving no end of tire marks in the grass around them. School colors were an important theme at the time - before the football game with our greatest rival, some classmates had spray painted ours on the bulldog statue in front of their school, and so the statue in front of our school had gotten their colors come the basketball game. Being as our statue was of the Virgin Mary, the incident was taken quite seriously at many levels by people who had no idea what was going on intermurally.

I had little idea myself, and less interest; I was more for drama than sports. I'd been told I had the voice for it, and it had become clear to me that the sort of girls one met in those circles were far, far more likely than the stated norm to actually appreciate one's looking up their skirts. People from that crowd comprised a working majority in the particular English class I was taking, due to it being taught by the head of the drama department. She had been casting most of us in various roles over our years there, and knew something of our collective dynamic; I think she considered that hour a well-deserved break in all of our days. Time among friends, with something beautiful.

We'd shuffle into the third-floor room overlooking the front field, and sit at those desks peculiarly misdesigned for the American teenage male - the seat-desk combos with a dozen ways to bang an elbow or a knee, but no possible way to conceal an erection. We spent disproportionate time in there with cheery English plays, the sort with wordplay and banter, and it was clear you could improve your grade by knowing to laugh at the right time. Always running an audition, the teacher would fill some of the hours by assigning parts and having us read aloud for our shared amusement. To that class, you came prepared - you never knew who you might be asked to be.

I remembered, sipping the coffee and reading, having been Algernon unexpectedly one day, and reading flirtatious dialogue with a lady chosen for me minutes before. Through good fortune approaching Marian intervention, she had prepped the reading as well, and we warmed to the task nicely, batting phrases back and forth in our best stage voices. All the dynamics of the cold read - eye contact across the rows of those damn desks, leans and smiles and emphasis as we tried to lead each other through. Considering the makeup of the crowd, we had 'em pretty good - ever see two dozen high school seniors actually listening to classics?

I'll never forget the way her eyes went wide at me when she delivered the closing line of our piece - "I like his hair so much." In fact, I tended to wear my hair like a squirrel's nest at that point in life, and there was a quiet but obvious consensus that nobody actually liked it much. (At least it was clear to me in an adolescent way, despite my finding it unexpectedly entwined in some lady's fingers on occasion.) But she was a trouper, and delivered the shallow, abstracted compliment quite genuinely, so well that for a moment I took it personal.

I never knew who I'd be asked to be, but it was good to know that occasionally it would be someone better than I was. I was pleased enough to keep my script in my lap for a few extra moments, as our instructor finished out the hour with points relevant, academic, and utterly forgotten, smiling her best beatific smile. She always liked to find we'd been well cast.

I smiled through my rereading of the play, remembering the lines that had fallen a little flat, and the exchanges that went off well. I felt a twinge of embarrassment to find this incident from my mythology no longer retains all of its detail - I can't for the life of me recall which girl it was that said that line. Someone cute, sharp, and talented who never actually kissed me; I can't even narrow it down.

I tend to buy from the bookshop, and read at the coffeeshop, works I'd like to abandon when I'm done. Things that others might find charming to read I tend to throw on the bookshelf and leave there; I consider it a mission to keep some charm in the place, despite all the forces opposing, all the misbegotten things that have come to pass there.

This once, I made an alteration to the book, thinking on games with roles, who I'd been, and who I was at the time. On the title page one would usually skip past, I struck through Earnest with my pen, and scrawled beside that "Frank". It is a conceit of mine that my frankness still does me credit, and I found myself unable to resist.

Vaguely guilty at the indulgence, despite knowing it was vastly unlikely to be noticed, I set the book in place and walked away.