Last night, Rob and I drove a long way to see a musical play written and composed by a moderately famous person. If I typed this person’s name, you would know it, but I won’t because it's not important.

The play was terrible. Not only was it terrible, but it ranks among the least worthwhile attempts at professionally produced artistic expression I have ever experienced—because it was supernaturally tedious, and also because one got the distinct impression that the writer scraped the shallow depths of his or her soul and this clichéd, pointless disaster was the most profound thing he or she was capable of. Rob’s mother’s boyfriend, who came with us, said that it was the musical equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting, an apt description to which I would only add that it was the musical equivalent of being clamped to a chair for three hours, with your eyes superglued open, before a Thomas Kinkade painting the size of a barn.

And the Thomas Kinkade painting would scream at you at regular intervals.

And, through your disgust, you would begin to feel sorry for it because it knows not what it does. But you would also be furious because this mediocre nonsense has stolen vital resources from something much more deserving of attention.

Wait, am I talking about the Painter of Light™ or the musical now? The whole thing seems to have gotten away from me, although I suppose it doesn’t matter. The annoying thing is not that people create these nightmares and call it art, which is fine, but that completely different people will come along and accept it on that level. It doesn’t matter what a person's personal preferences are; what I find frustrating is that someone could look at a Thomas Kinkade and at a Picasso and not understand that the differences between them are more than decorative.

I suspect there were a number of people in the large audience last night who didn’t care for the story of the play, but they accepted it as a story because it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. There were people on stage moving around and talking and singing, so it must have been a musical. They may tell their friends they didn’t like it because a character did this or that thing—without contemplating how that thing affects what the writer was trying to do, or if the writer was successful in doing anything at all.

Everybody doesn’t have to be an expert on everything, but it would be nice if there were some sort of effort to see things beyond the literal level. A lie can be true, and the truth can be a lie. A person can talk and sing for three hours and convey nothing at all or be silent and express a fundamental reality of the universe.