Fate. Choice. Chance.

A little kid named Macaulay Culkin is ten years old (1991) and he's made more money last year than I've made in all my life. I'm fifty-eight. When I was ten I got an allowance. My allowance could buy important things like penny candy. Macaulay Culkin has wider options. He can buy Panama or Albania or Sri Lanka.

I'm sure that I have some talent and maybe I've made some contribution to our larger society. Let's see? I'm an inventor, an illustrator and artist, a writer, an innovator, a raconteur. I don't have three nickels to rub together.

Macaulay Culkin is cute. When I was ten I bet I was cute...It's tough for kids to be ugly. Even when they are ugly there's something cute about them and that's probably because people expect them to grow out of being ugly (which is kind of cute). On the other hand a lot of cute kids aren't going to stay that way. Check out the pictures. Charlie Chaplin hung out with Jackie Coogan when Coogan was five.It was a long way from being The Kid to Uncle Fester.

When I was eleven I was a choirboy. I got paid to sing stuff that David the psalmist and a bunch of Victorians who he never knew all wrote and it pleased in particular the biddies in the pews. The audience makes the difference. It does! Macaulay Culkin had about a hundred and fifty million admirers. Actually I would have needed only one doting dowager to put me in her will and I would have had it made. At ten or eleven kids on their own aren't capable of plotting scenarios wherein a wealthy spinster will fall under a spell. It's nice if they can sing Mozart or Matthews or Mendelssohn or whoever so well that old ladies might very well run home and re-write wills. Rich Episcopal ladies might be nuts but I suppose you need an agent to remind them of the things that are worth money.

Chances are choirboys would have a greater chance, or risk, of appealing to choirmasters, priests or pervs in the pews who think that they (the boys) are cute.

There's a distinction between an abstract audience that looks at an affection from afar and old ladies who are quite content with head-patting, cheek twecking and — if allowed — giving a moldy hug and those guys who view fulfillment as jumping into bed with a twelve year old soprano who might not be so appealing when or if he becomes a Basso Buffo.