> quoted article because archive.fo jewed me On a swipe-based dating app, I recently found myself reading an awful lot of comments about a shirt of mine. I am a massive fan of the ballet. I go to the ballet often. I read about the ballet often. I have a T-shirt from the Boston Ballet. It’s a simple shirt—the company’s logo, in white, on a black background. In one of the photos on the app, I’m wearing my Boston Ballet shirt. I have a Red Sox hat on, too, because I also love them. As a white male, I often hear how privileged I am, from people who know nothing about my life or any injustices I may have endured. There are all kinds of ways we can discriminate against someone. Maybe someone works harder or is smarter. Maybe someone is into more culturally enriched things than we are, which kicks into gear our personal industrial guilt complex. That was the first note I got. I’d never thought of myself as Cagliostro. How far might my dupery via T-shirt extend? A relationship? Marriage? Might I at least trick someone into coming to the ballet with me because I never have anyone to go with? Other messages: “Do you just pretend to like the ballet?” “I’m assuming you went to ‘The Nutcracker’ once and you lost a bet?” “You should be on Grindr”—a gay dating site—“with a shirt like that.” It was as if there was no way I could actually love the ballet—in which visual, musical and physical art coalesces at a rarefied level of beauty, the human body twining with music in an ethereal dance of poetry. Sometimes I’d look up the critics. They were doctors, lawyers, professors, with social media pages littered with testimonies and photos of self-ascribed wokeness, protest marches, inveighings against mansplaining. This is one of the reasons we don’t grow much anymore. We trend toward hypocrisy and homogeneity because so many people have a deep fear of being different. Hypocrisy is a form of bending to get yourself back in the line you think you should be in. Do you know what a “weather eye” is? It’s a term not used much anymore. It means scrutinizing someone hard, as if you expect him to do something wrong. That’s how we often view people who have passions afield from our own or who have passions where we have none. We don’t just put a weather eye on them. We put a full-on cyclone eye on them. And sometimes we blow them up, before anything about them plays havoc with our feelings or sense of self. This is the one-person dance of the self-saboteur. Now, you might be wagging a finger, saying, “look, Casanova, just take the photo down and slap up one of you in a golf shirt.” But I don’t want someone who doesn’t appreciate something I believe is basic to a well-lived life. Surely someone out there has been to the ballet a time or two. So long live the dance! While we’re at it, long live my shirt.