◌  “Ten Years in a Long Sleeved Shirt”

28 January 2009

Ten Years in a Long Sleeved Shirt, by noted comedian and heroin addict Greg Fleet: This show is basically about obsession, about love, about romance, and about drugs. I’m not usually a fan of standup, of monologues, or of drug stories, but this is one of my favorite performances of any kind.

In junior high we saw Straight Up, an anti-drug special. It was bad. It was bafflingly bad: it confused us, at age 13 or whatever, about how something so bad could be made by good people. It was was past mockery (though some have tried) and into the zone of things that make the viewer less fully human.

With Ten Years in a Long Sleeved Shirt, we would have seen some hair-raising storytelling and left with a gut understanding of how people come to take hard drugs, how wonderful they feel, and how utterly they will crush you.