On March 27, 2010, journalist Kerry Reid read this essay at The Paper Machete.

26 years ago this week, a game-changing event happened in the life of American high school students. On March 24, 1984, a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal came together to scream “WE ARE NOT ALONE!”

The Breakfast Club made a stand for archetypes everywhere, telling them “Toss off your shackles! You have nothing to lose but your funky clothing and that black shit around your eyes. And maybe a diamond earring, but Daddy paid for it, so who gives a shit? Oh, and if you’re the brainy guy, you aren’t getting any nooky until at least college, and even then only if you’re really lucky or she’s really drunk. If you’re the brainy girl, you don’t exist yet. Just wait a few  years for Cameron Crowe to make Say Anything.”

I didn’t actually know the date on the letter that nerdy Brian Johnson wrote as the cri de couer for his comrades in detention until earlier this week. But here’s what sent me back to Hughesland: I begged Mr. Piatt for a a topic. Among the handful of very good ideas he tossed out was discussing what it’s like to be a freelance critic in the age of declining print media. I wrestled with that for a bit, because honestly, I’m sick of the bellyaching and free-floating fear and anxiety in my industry these days and decided some months ago to just stop reading all the punditry about it. For one thing, if the newspaper industry decides to deal with its many problems by, as a colleague put it, “painting the deck chairs pink,” well, there’s not a hell of a lot I can do to stop them. I didn’t screw the print media pooch, and I sure as hell don’t know how to unscrew it. As Sheldon Patinkin once joked “Did you hear the one about the Polish starlet? She fucked the writer!”

If being a critic is equivalent, as some claim, to being a eunuch at the orgy, then being a freelance critic is like being a quadruple amputee dwarf who cleans that eunuch’s chamber pot. With his tongue.

Think that’s harsh? You should hear what Mr. Piatt’s former counterpart at Time Out New York called us. In a March 10 piece for the Guardian, while pleading the case for keeping critics in regular salaried staff positions, David Cote, theater editor of Time Out New York, declared “We critics, reviewers, consumer reporters, call us what you will – are the dung beetles of culture. We consume excrement, enriching the soil and protecting livestock from bacterial infection in the process. We are intrinsic to the theatre ecology. Eliminate us at your peril.” Well sure, laying off critics always seems like a good idea at the time – until SOMEBODY ends up with scrapie!

Aside from the fact that I would have chosen a different verb than “eliminate” after that mini-aria to the ecology of scatology, I think Cote has a point. Though I’m not sure who exactly is the “livestock” in this analogy. But I thought – surely there’s a better way to describe what I do as I consume and digest and synthesize and ex…press all the passionate detritus, the fleeting images, the scrawled graffito carved on the desks of Chicago theater’s soul.

And then it hit me: In the troubled world of print media and theater criticism, I am not a eunuch, or a chamber-pot-cleaning amputee dwarf, or a dung beetle. I am the eyes and ears of this institution, my friends. I am Carl the Fucking Janitor.

You guys think I am just some untouchable peasant?  Peon?  Huh?  Well, get in line with  Mr. Cote. In the same piece, he decries the trend of replacing marquee critics with “a parade of jobbing freelancers with little experience and even littler clout” and maintains that “using writers with less power and prestige also allows a publication to bend the copy to advertorial ends.”

Now, I don’t know Cote at all, but the line about “power and prestige” suggests to me that he thinks that a critic having the ability to make or break a show or a company or a playwright or an actor is a good thing. AND that critics should aspire to be the Principal Vernons of arts gatekeepers, with that lordly $31,000 annual salary, a mortgage, and a reputation to defend – a reputation that one must bolster and protect by tossing out the occasional fifty bucks in freelance hush money to cloutless underachieving buffoons like Carl.

I know, I know – Chicago is a town with a great history of great critics who have built the reputations of great artists. Claudia Cassidy kept Tennessee Williams from hanging it up as a playwright by championing The Glass Menagerie in its out-of-town tryout – though it’s fascinating to note that this historic review begins with a caveat: “Too many theatrical bubbles burst in the blowing.” Richard Christiansen gets so much credit for building up Steppenwolf that they should probably airbrush him into that fantastic photograph of Amy Morton on the side of the theater — the Unknown Weston.

But times change, theater communities grow larger, and there’s no way one person can pretend to cover all that is important and wonderful in Chicago or most other cities, no matter how busy a dung beetle they may be. And so we freelancers fill the gaps, particularly with small theaters. We notice the mystery meat you toss up onto the knock-off Henry Moore sculpture. We pay attention. We look through your letters. We look through your lockers. We listen to your conversations. You don’t know that, but we do. No, seriously. We do.

Years ago, I was at a show at Links Hall as a civilian – no press kit, no notebook. I got into a little mindless pre-show chit-chat with the couple sitting next to me. They turned back to talking amongs themselves, and pretty soon I heard them harshly excoriating a review that had appeared in the Reader that week. As phrases like “stupid pretentious bitch” and “typical Reader hack” popped up, it naturally dawned on me that they were talking about my review. As proof that I am not, in fact, Satan incarnate, I resisted the urge to slip my business card into their backpack pocket when they weren’t looking.

I’d like to think that Cote’s jaudiced view on the abilities of freelancers came about because he didn’t have the Reader around in his formative years. Lord knows I took it for granted myself – until I spent seven years living in San Francisco and learned to my consternation that most alternative weeklies don’t have a dozen freelancers covering every damn show in town.

Those days are gone, too. But I can’t help but feel that staff critics who bemoan the loss of their prized berths are mourning more for themselves and their privileges than they are for the health and diversity of the theater community. A phrase, incidentally, that should probably be banned – a biologist/magician/performance artist friend of mine in San Francisco once stopped a meeting dedicated to “building the theater community” cold by pointing out that, in ecological terms, a “community” is a group of organisms who compete for resources with sometimes-fatal results for the less-enterprising members.

I almost never hear daily arts critics, for example, talk about how perilous it is to live in a society where I can make more as a freelancer writing about theater than most theater artists will earn for creating that work in the first place. Dung beetles – or Slimy Leeches?

Thing is – arts criticism in general and theater criticism in particular has, almost without exception, always been the bailiwick of a certain kind of person. To put it as bluntly as possible: White White White is the color of our critic! So when we ask, as someone did in a fine article a few years back, “Why is Chicago theater so white?,” it’s only fair to ask in return “Why is Chicago theater criticism so white?”

Like the Shermer High kids stuck in the library, ethnic, racial, and class distinctions among critics tend to be nonexistent – so stylistic differences in posture and tone become magnified. Your earnestness touches blades with my snark. Our use of the editorial we shall go mano a mano with me and my love of first-person anecdotes.

This lack of actual cultural diversity in criticism isn’t wholly accidental, and “alternative” papers haven’t been any better at bridging the divide than the mainstream press – indeed, they often have worse records.

Katha Pollitt noted the phenomenon back in 1996 in a fabulous little essay called “Affirmative Action Begins at Home,” in which she said “People are carefully slotted – and slot themselves – into remarkably precise positions in a complex class, racial, and social order that then determines what they see and what they know….For the denizens of the tiny cocktail party that is liberal journalism, it’s the other denizens, plus their friends, classmates and former students and interns, plus all those people’s grown children and their friends, all twined together in an eternal golden braid of network and schmooze. The workplace is white because the social world is white, and vice versa. Merit doesn’t really come into it.” The simplest terms. The most convenient definitions.

Give Big Bri Johnson a cultural studies course or two and he might have written the same thing in his letter to Vernon. As it is, I spent a few years freelancing with the East Bay Express – an alternative weekly that covers Berkeley — Official Town Motto: “We’re more liberal and transgressive than you’ll ever be, so  fuck off,  you heartland squares” — as well as the historically vital African American community of Oakland. Go ahead – guess how many minority editors and staff writers worked for the alternative paper in the biggest “progressive” stronghold in America. Yet there was room for an arts editor who inherited the job once held by his old man, making him the Luke Russert of the alternative press, if you will.

It’s theater criticism, not neurosurgery, and the ugly and beautiful truth is that anyone with a certain flair for writing and a willingness to sit through hundreds of productions and read a lot of other reviews and essays can probably develop a workable knack for it. And whether that knack is rewarded with a place on a masthead or a living salary doesn’t mean that a writer is inherently good, anymore than membership in Actors’ Equity or LORT or the Dramatists Guild bestows infallibility upon actors or theaters or playwrights. Credentialism and institutional imprimaturs aren’t necessary for good art. I’d sit through Emily Schwartz’s Mr. Spacky…the Man Who Was Continuously Followed by Wolves for Strange Tree Group a dozen times in a row, even if they were doing it in a parking garage in the middle of January. And I want to kill almost everyone involved with Turn of the Century at the Goodman. Slowly. With sharp pointy things. On YouTube. So why is it critical – no pun intended – for arts reviewers?

In one of my favorite novels, Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion, a wide-eyed neophyte arts journalist, Alred Briggs, comes to post-World War II Manhattan straight from the Navy. As Powell writes, “Briggs had hoped for assignments in the field of sports but the editor felt that literary training and education were required for that, whereas art was a department where inexperience and ignorance would not be noticed.”

So to all you mainstream media critics beating the drums of doom over “the death of criticism?” C’mon Vern! The shows haven’t changed. You have. You got into theater criticism because you thought it would be fun and that what you wrote would matter deeply to the people doing the art and that you could live a middle-class lifestyle at the same time. And then you found out it was actually work, and that quite a few people who don’t get to make a living at the thing they love thought you were full of shit. Oh sure, they’d pull out a nice quote from you for their posters or Facebook page, but it’s asses grabbing some wood in their space that matters, not your deathless prose. And that bummed you out.

Maybe this is just the yammering of a disillusioned dung beetle incapable of digesting sour grapes. Maybe I too thought I would be John Lennon – or at least John Simon — and have had to settle for being Jackie Harvey of The Onion’s “Outside Scoop” column. Who knows? What I do know? That clock is 20 minutes fast.