Let Me Intratain You
About Art and the Human Condition
R and I swung our bags over the gate, and being the tallest of the two, he jumped the fence first. “Your turn now!” he said in a thick Italian accent. I took my sandals off and followed him barefoot, one cautious little step at a time. Finding my footing on a narrow ledge, I made it to the other side of the fence unscathed.
It’s been a year since I last trespassed private property. This time though, I had a very good reason to be there. R and I met a month ago when I volunteered for a rooftop garden event at Green Point, Brooklyn. “I’m a performance artist,” he said while perched on a third-story veranda.
I was captivated.
Once inside the community garden, R poured water onto the powdered cement he had been carrying in his bag. He prepared the mixture; his nails already stained grey from a previous stunt. Laying out the ceramic tiles on the earth, he looked at me and said, “I don’t do art to entertain people.” And in one of those perfect accidents, he overpronounced the “e” so that it sounded more like “eee” and conjoined the t and the r, so what I heard coming out of his mouth was “eentratainment.”
(Intratainment!)
I withheld my excitement at the discovery of this grammatical anomaly (which may be the birthplace of…
