I was having dinner at the bar of a downtown Irish Pub when a woman sat next me and began chatting in a playfully crude half drunken manner that would swiftly have gotten me thrown out on my ear and probably banned for life had the roles been reversed. I was amused at the glaring modern day double standard but this Kim gal refused to see it. 

  She was tall with long black Mediterranean hair filigreed with silver and had once no doubt been a stunner. But her fifty-eight years and possibly a fast lifestyle had taken their toll and there was a twinkle of desperation in her eye as she ordered two quick glasses of wine in succession. 

  She informed me that she was an artist, a playwright.  

  “Uh oh,” I thought, but said: “that’s interesting, around here? Where could a guy go to see one of your shows?” 

  Turns out she had recently won some sort of small theatre group award for the production of her latest play. 

  “What’s it about?” I asked.

  “It’s an erotic thriller,” she explained. “It takes place in an elevator. A man and a woman, total strangers, are trapped inside. It’s really charged and the woman ends up strangling the man.” 

  “Hmmm, doesn’t sound like something I would want to see.” 

  “No, no, no!” she protested, now quite drunk. “There’s so much more!”  

  Anyway, days later I had gotten hold of a copy of the script and read it. In the play a woman, perhaps a therapist—though it wasn’t quite clear—who was also somehow involved in a sexual cabal involving choking and a depressed suicidal man are stuck in an elevator. There was what passes for erotic tension between them I suppose, though I am by no means an expert on the subject, and the man eventually convinces the woman to choke him to death as he hadn’t the courage to follow through on his suicidal urges himself. I gather it was always a dream of the woman to consummate those cabal choking impulses. 

  Kim was anxious to hear what I thought and called me as soon as I had texted that I had read it. 

  “Firstly,” I asked, “what sort of theatre group are you involved in? And secondly,” I went on, “what was your relationship with your father?”

  “Why do you ask that?” she asked, nonplused. 

  Well it turns out he drank a lot, was abusive, and ended up institutionalized for much of her childhood and adolescence. 

  “Ahh, yes, I’m sorry,” I said. 

  After I told her as diplomatically as I could what I honestly thought of her play, frequently having to talk over her angry protestations, she called me an asshole and we ended up politely wishing one another the best and never spoke again.