I was ten years old the first time I understood what art does. Not what it says it does. Not what we teach that it does. What it actually does.
The production was Hello, Dolly! at a community playhouse in a town where amateur theatre was both social ritual and minor act of civic pride. I was a child in the ensemble, old enough to have memorized my blocking and young enough to believe that what we were doing mattered in some way I could not yet name. The show went fine. The audience clapped politely. Nobody stood.
Then the orchestra played the curtain call.
An experienced actor standing next to me leaned toward another veteran and whispered five words that I have carried for more than half a century: "They can't help but stand."
