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Mr. Tolverson. Mind if I use it all in the article?”
    “Not one bit,” he said, smiling at me. “Peanut M&M?”
    On my way out, I was contemplating how many years older than me Shirly Tolverson was. At twenty-nine, I was becoming more open to dating outside my generation. I feared I was close to, if not immersed in, the relationship-atrophy phase of my life. It was a stage I’d seen coming for a while, a place in my personal evolution where if a guy hadn’t gotten here with me, he’d be reluctant to leave the comfort of his train to jump on mine. Call it the “What do you mean you don’t like peas in your macaroni and cheese?” point that we all reach, where we are too set in our ways to realistically expect a healthy relationship with another human being.
    The threat of this specter was forcing me to consider new dating realms, though so soon after Jeff’s death, I was officially gun-shy about men from now until the end of the time. The male of the species had a lot to offer in theory, but in my experience, they had a tendency to die too soon. Not to mention that my last official date was with a professor from a local college who turned out to be a post-operative transsexual. My “friend” Gina had found him for me online, and in her defense, his online thumbnail had been cute. After our first lunch date, I knew something was a little off, but I thought it was me. Turns out it was him.
    My dad was another example of what could go wrong with men. He had been an interesting man, a career alcoholic too smart for his own good. My childhood was a tapestry of forced normalcy punctuated by raucous fights between my parents. By the time I was seven, I knew I couldn’t have friends over because if my dad wasn’t drunk, my mom would be yelling at him for being drunk the day before. I spent a lot of time in my room with my imaginary friends. It wasn’t all bad—my family traveled a lot in the summer in the car, and when dad was in public, he would usually stay sober. And even drunk, he wasn’t mean, just crazy. He believed he could control the wind and speak French. Apparently, both wind-talk and French share a lot of root words with pig Latin.
    By my teen years, I’d learned how to shut down my emotions so I wasn’t a forced passenger on his roller coaster. I got even better at that after he died the summer before my senior year. He was driving drunk and slammed head-on into another car when he swerved over the center line. He killed himself and a passenger and her baby in the other car. I finished growing up that day. I still wasn’t sure if that meant I became an adult or a permanently stunted child. Actually, I wasn’t so sure there was a big difference.
    I was so lost in thought on my way out of the Sunset that I was on the other side of the security doors and all the way to the lobby before I noticed the crowd. I stood on my tippytoes to see what was going on. In the center of an elderly mob was what appeared to be a Harlequin clown and a lion tamer accompanied by a small person dressed as a lion.
    “How about you, young lady?” boomed the lion tamer, beckoning to me dramatically. “Wouldn’t you like to see a local production of the honorable William S. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew , starring esteemed members of your community and played out in a Gothic carnival setting?”
    I stepped back as he stepped forward, shoving a piece of paper into my hand. I looked at him, confused. Had any of my English profs ever mentioned Shakespeare’s middle name? I decided they hadn’t and made a mental note to check out whether or not it was really an S . And what was going on?
    I glanced at the second leaflet of the day to be shoved into my hand. It was card stock with gilded letters in a flowing serif font proclaiming, “The Famed Romanov Traveling Theater Troupe Is Coming to YOUR Town!” Underneath were pictures of the selfsame lion tamer, the Harlequin clown, comedy and tragedy, and various scantily