Somehow, I managed to get through more than 33 years of my life without ever seeing the play, Our Town. I haven't seen a lot of plays, so it's probably not too surprising. Except that, Our Town seems to be part of pop culture. In TV shows or movies, if the high school is putting on a play, it's almost certainly going to be Our Town or Romeo and Juliet. So, I sort of already knew the play without ever having seen it.

Showtime was showing a filmed version, so I finally had a chance to see it. Man, that play is recursive as hell. Recursion is something that seems to be really popular with computer geeks. For instance GNU is a computer operating system, and it stands for GNU's Not Unix. Do you see how that "G" would keep looping back onto itself into infinity? That's recursion.

I have to say, I'm geeky enough that I feel I should find that fascinating, but I'm not geeky enough to understand why it's fascinating. I think maybe it's a programming thing. Never the programmer I.

Our Town keeps looping back on itself, and the Stage Manager (narrator) is operating on several meta-levels. Now, I do understand the appeal of all things meta. For instance, the show Sports Night -- loved it. I also loved The Larry Sanders show. All those shows that are showing you stuff behind the scenes or abstracting themselves back to another level really speak to me. Our Town does that a bunch. It also deals with a lot of themes that I've been thinking about lately. So, all in all I'd say it was certainly worth seeing. I had the impression that it was a very simple play about life and death. And, I guess it is that, but it's a lot more interesting as well. Although I doubt that the play would concede that there could be anything more interesting than life or death. And, maybe it's right.