Roland Barthes, heart attacks, and Steeler football

ACTF was disappointing. I mean, Normal, IL, was cool and all, but sometimes I'm not in the mood to handle the talk of just how impossible it is to find work as a playwright or dramaturg.

Instead, I will talk about tonight's class, where we talked about Roland Barthes's Mythologies. Good book, fun theories. Part of it talks about wrestling, and how an audience can experience a communal catharsis from live events. (Yes, he was talking about signifiers in a scripted event, but still...) Flash over to this story. Yeah, when I saw Jerome Bettis fumble near the end of the Steelers game, and what that signify (as the last event of Bettis's career), I figure that Steeler nation had a collective, figurative heart attack. Apparently, one guy had a literal one.

How's that for a catharsis?