by Zach Raffio. @zachraffio.
HAVERHILL, MA. - Local theatre fan Mark Lopshin has reportedly misunderstood the meaning behind “dry January”, choosing to - instead of halting alcohol intake for the month - only read works written by playwright Tom Stoppard, the admittedly sleepy source confirmed.
“They say dry January’s supposed to be a good way to kick off the new year, but I’m mostly just feeling a sense of fear around the uncontrollable chaos in our world,” noted Lopshin, who has ironically increased his drinking as a result of his reading. “New year new me? How can any of us be made new if we don’t have free will? Or do we have free will, simply choosing not to exercise it because we fear our own potential - our own capacity for love? Do people really do this every year?”
Lopshin reportedly began the year with Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, posting inspirational Instagram stories that quickly turned into intellectually complex musings on determinism and the burden of one’s passion. His friends were eager to weigh in on Lopshin’s mixup.
“We tried telling him that reading the play equivalent of week-old shredded turkey is not what dry January means, but by that point he was already three hours into a rant about the second law of thermodynamics,” noted Lopshin’s close friend Jennifer Hurnuck, who’s not doing any form of dry January because, as she puts it, “margarita good”. “I hope he figures it out by February 1st… but then again, can anything truly be figured out? Fuck, now he has me doing it.”
This is not the first time Lopshin’s mixup regarding a behaviorally themed month has landed him in hot water.
“He thought No Nut November meant he couldn’t read the 1979 play Nuts by Tom Topor. Why the fuck would that be a thing?” questioned theatre director Maddie Mewell, who has spent years trying to convince Lopshin that there will never be a monthly challenge dedicated to senior citizen playwrights. “He failed that version of No Nut November by the way. He read the play.”
At press time, we asked Lopshin if he were looking forward to returning to normality once January ends, to which he asked us “if anything ever ends, and if normality can ever truly begin”. He then began to discuss the dangers of adultery and chaos theory, at which point we had no choice but to break the actual version of dry January.