You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

it. It wouldn’t frighten me. I would teach them, I would choose all sorts of wonderful pieces of literature and they would listen to me and we would read these texts together and discuss them, and I would explain why I loved them.
    I pushed my trowel deep into the earth.
    UCLA looked over his thesis, asked a few questions, and then offered him a little freshman requirement backwater called Introduction to Shakespeare. He began the fall semester three days after he started at the studio, where everyone considered his “teaching thing” a harmless eccentricity. He had a few students in a small basement room.
    Today his classes are held in a huge lecture hall and invariably oversubscribed, which makes for a perennially hectic second week of September, desperate lines outside his door, and all manner of add/drop subterfuge. He moans about it every fall. “These nubile eighteen-year-olds panting for me,” he sighs at dinner, “their pert nipples, limpid blue eyes, the blond hair that kisses the napes of their tanned necks.” He pops an olive in his mouth. “And that’s just the football players.”
    He genuinely loved them, and they responded in kind. He disliked “Doctor” (“Only my mother calls me doctor,” he told them; this was in fact true) but got a kick out of “Professor.” Then a colleague saw him coming out of Rolfe Hall after class and shouted at him, “How are you, Howard?” and he shouted back, “I’m great box office,” and he was afterward known by all of UCLA and eventually everyone at the studio as GBO.
    In class, Howard was not overly prudent. It was just discovered, he told his second freshmen seminar, that Shakespeare actually wrote three plays about penises, one four-inch penis, another eight inches, the last one ten. They got the first one immediately— Much Ado About Nothing —and the second, Midsummer Night’s Dream . But the third?
    â€œ Othello ,” said Howard.
    The dean looked very grim as he listened to the single complaint by an intense young woman from Walnut Creek who lectured him on Professor Rosenbaum’s racism, patriarchalism, and sexism. He ushered her out with solemn tones, and then called his wife, an Elizabethan scholar, and repeated the joke to her, laughing hysterically.
    Howard paces the dais of the amphitheater enthusiastically. He is not bothered by doing the elementary stuff. Contrary to what all of you weaned on Warner cartoons think, he tells them, star-crossed lovers does not mean that Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl three years younger than you are now, are so in love they have Chuck Jones animated stars circling their heads. No. What does it mean?
    An expectant glance at them over his reading glasses, his favoriteprop. I bought them for him at the Rexall drugstore near the Beverly Center. Time’s up! Yes, possums, it refers to astrology, which used to be the state religion in Elizabethan hangouts. “What’s thy sign?” It means that this boy’s and girl’s respective astrological houses are at odds. Also, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” does not mean “Where the hell are you?” but “Oh, Christ, why do you have to be Romeo Montague, and I Juliet Capulet, two families at war, what a pain !”
    The first year, GBO rewarded their curiosity with a few juicy industry tidbits, was it true that such-and-such a star who Variety reported was working with him had signed for such-and-such a movie? He began rationing this sort of thing for moments when he found himself losing their attention. He stood at the lectern with his drugstore reading glasses and his notes and used sex to glue them to the text.
    â€œEvery culture and society renews its religious injunctions against sex as perennially as sexual desire is renewed, which is to say every third of a nanosecond. The reflexive whitewashing of the past that we do with respect to sexual mores,