I stand corrected. Last night, I saw August: Osage County, one of the shows I missed when I had bronchitis. It's gotten double-plus good reviews, but everything I read about it, sprawling family drama, incest, etc., really made me uninterested. In November of aught-four, I saw Bug, by the same playwright, Tracy Letts, and while I liked it, it didn't really presage a play I'd spend a hundred bucks for. But August was fantastic, a brawling, cruelly funny, complicated, not-too-incesty spectacle that didn't seem like it took the three and a half hours it did. I often think "this is really good acting", but I rarely feel like I'm watching real people, and I predict a Tony for Deanna Dunagan and at least a nom for Amy Morton. (The Tony Awards are on my birthday this year, which is also Father's Day--all the world will be celebrating something.) The principals are all from Steppenwolf in Chicago, which helps me not recognize them as actors. Anyway, great, rollicking, fun, well-written show. Know what, though? I'm all about the family bruhaha, and usually, and in this case, writers get the tension and resentments and anger right, but I can't think of an example offhand that depicts what I feel as family love. It's a kind of unchosen, tribal birthright thing that gives you the right of respect from people you might barely know. As for adult siblings, you often see depictions where they're trying to recapture some of the closeness they had as children, usually having banded together against some awful childhood. I'm not particularly close to my brother and sister, but we were so close growing up that it doesn't matter, what was there then is always there, and the same goes for the cousins I grew up close to. So yeah, it's great to be friends with your adult sibs, but that doesn't illuminate what sibling love itself is. (Again, examples of sibling rivalry and hatred are Baby Janeing all over the place.) As we learn from the syndicated Judge shows, the only force that can destroy sibling love is the lending of cell phones.