"O les beaux jours!"

The first time I saw Beckett’s Happy Days I was sitting in French class in front of a wheeled tv-vcr unit that our high school called a “multimedia cart.” It was the spring of my senior year, after the AP exams; the certainty that high school would soon be behind us had exaggerated our ironic detachment from academics. That day, our French teacher, who had wanted all her life to be an actress instead of a French teacher, played us a video of her performance as Winnie, showing us her life on the stage, buried up to her waist and then to her neck, chattering and smiling frantically.

We snickered, I think, yet it was a traumatic moment: a vision of hell, as a place not of endless light or timelessness, but a place where your finest performance of the person you believe yourself to be ends up passing as comedy for the amusement of people who will forget you.