How’s your handwriting? That is, if you’re not laughing by now…I mean, who writes anything by hand any more? Personally, I wish I never had to, because my handwriting is horrendous, worse than a doctor’s. I suffered early childhood trauma, well, girlhood trauma if you want to pick nits, by failing handwriting when I was in third grade.

My teacher, Mrs. Van Beuren, the sort of frightening woman with no neck I would remember the rest of my life even if she hadn’t given me an ‘F’ in handwriting, thought I was making a poor showing and thought that giving me a failing grade on my report card would make me try harder to master a lovely, flowing, flowery, effortless (for other girls) cursive script.

Except that an ‘F’ only succeeded in making me abandon cursive writing entirely and try instead to master the geometry of print. So I print, using long and short lines, dots, crosses, dashes, semi-circles, L-shapes, T-shapes, anything except the rounded curves of cursive.

The problem is that I write so fast my printing is also illegible.

Ah, but at a play all I have to do is show up and listen to the words.

How cruel. Giving a girl an ‘F’ for handwriting.

Pffffttttt.

I could write that.

If I had to…

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/theater/they-write-plays-for-a-living-but-hows-their-handwriting.html?contentCollection=weekendreads&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region&_r=0