Believe or don't, I'm an optimist. Still, I'm dialing down from 300 to 200.

For years, pals o' mine who make cool stuff happen — arts groups of course, but also driven individuals including, though not limited to, folks such as Soapy Jones, Bo Hicks and David Allgood — crafted this sad realization: Even as a city of about 100,000, with 38,000 students teeming nearby, thousands more in the county and surrounding counties, there are 300 locals you'll see at everything, and anything.

You know who you are, and even if you don't know who I am, you probably know my face, as I've seen yours, being one of the 300 who'll get off our duffs to give things a try. I don't know if it's the pandammit, the aging-out of folks who enjoy being in public somewhere absent — or at least temporarily detached from -- a cellphone or tablet, but it seems our number may be dwindling down to more like 200.

Where is everybody? Even if you grant a generous 300, that leaves 137,700 living, breathing folks doing ... what? Endlessly streaming? Re-watching Tide victories? Fishing and reading .... OK, I'll grant you that combo platter. No better time to catch up on lit than while dangling things in water, waiting for something that will likely never come.

Before you riposte, yes I know some don't have the wherewithal, the health, the means, the energy to get out and about for all new writing, or music, or theater, or sculpture. I get that. None of us expects 138,000 to show up for anything, save of course football, for which all manner of impedance and infirmity shall be overcome.

You'll still see newish faces at times, especially for one-time events, assuming word's gotten around. And believe me, that weighs heavily on us at The Tuscaloosa News, as we try to share good words.

Jeff Wilson sold out his second run of The Globe Restaurant — the late and much-lamented Shakespeare-themed eatery — recipe books, and has ordered a third printing. At the Lookout Rooftop Bar signing May 14, fans of Chef Jeff arrived early, buying multiple copies. As I left, the line was still wrapping around the bar. Going by printing, he's already surpassed the Tuscaloosa 300.

Did my feature from days before aid that? Possibly. I know he'd already sold books at a previous signing, mainly by word-of-mouth and social media. But this second wave, sure, the story may have helped. 

We're not in the ticket-selling business, but if the information we share stirs a beneficial effect, arouses interest, gets someone moving, then yay, because I love my city. Involvement enriches everyone. 

After all these decades at the scribbling game, printing words on wind, here today, gone with the fish wrap, I've concluded ... absolutely nothing. A prime example: Richard Thompson, very likely the greatest living singer-songwriter-guitarist, and yes, that includes people named Bob, Bruce, Tom and whatnot. That his name doesn't jump out as the others do concerns me. I harped on David Allgood to book him at the Bama several years back; interviewed RT for the third time, wrote about that, wrote my column about how you should go check this guy out, you'll kick yourself if you don't, and the like.

Though no expert on any one thing, I'll admit to being capable at various pursuits. Synthesis and pattern recognition being amongst my many weapons, I can translate into narrative the intelligences of painters and photographers, bug people and astronomers, musicians and dancers, greased-hog wrasslers and wrassler-wrestlers, thespians and academicians, economists and ecologists, disease specialists and fund-raisers, composers and collectors, morticians and preachers, broadcasters and storytellers, athletes and activists, gurus and rattlesnake handlers, sculptors and circus clowns. I can absorb thoughts, churn the conglomeration into words, then spit a story out for the baby birds to ingest. Nice image, eh? Professional writer at work.

In real life as on pages, I'm Jackarse of all trades, master of not much. I'm a writer, but also a photographer. A singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter. An actor and director. Wanna see? The summer Shakespeare group I co-created, The Rude Mechanicals, will perform "The Tempest," starting Wednesday, and running through June 4. Then we'll be back June 22-25 with "Much Ado About Nothing," which I'm directing. I'm also leading the half-hour of live pre-show music before each performance, at 7:30 p.m.

On a good four-night run, the RMs may top 500 or more, if weather's fair, or the play popular. Runs of "Macbeth" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" have drawn, over several nights, about 1,000. And we'll have been at it, as of 2022, for 20 years now. 

If you had to guess — say you've warped back to the '90s, and fallen under a Trivial Pursuit challenge — would you think that Jack phrase, referring to someone with either a mess of skills, or with severe attention ... Squirrel! .... deficits, derived from Mark Twain? The Holy Bible? Shakespeare? Absent knowledge, guessing one of those usually earned you the TP pie slice.

In this case, it's Shakespeare-adjacent. You get a half slice. A sliver.

The Bard of Avon wasn't the only pop author of the Elizabethan era; he was just the finest, the one best remembered, most revisited. There were others, successful in their day, such as Robert Greene, who created the 1592 booklet "Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance" — that pratfall of a title may suggest why his words didn't transcend centuries — a satirical tale skewering contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge and George Peele.

Greene saved ugliest vitriol for the man from Stratford, deemed " ... an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." You caught "Shake-scene." Subtle, as groats' — a small coin — wit will be.

"Upstart" because the Bard was largely known as an actor in 1592, though he had written entertainments "The Comedy of Errors" and "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and history plays "King John" and "Henry VI."

He was in progress on epic poem "Venus and Adonis," and plays "Richard III," "The Taming of the Shrew" and "Titus Adronicus," all crafted within the next year or so. The year after that, he completed sonnets, another epic poem, "The Rape of Lucrece," and plays "Love's Labours Lost," "Richard II," and "Romeo and Juliet." Before the century ended, he wrote "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Merchant of Venice," "Henry IV," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Much Ado About Nothing," "As You Like It," "Julius Caesar," "Henry V" and "Hamlet."

The crow done up and started. Greene felt this country bumpkin had no business in the playing fields with university-educated poets Marlowe, Lodge and Peele. It's the same classist nonsense that sets conspiracy nuts loose, thinking one man couldn't have written those words, words, words, not rising from such humble origins.

His dad, John Shakespeare, was a prominent and prosperous fellow as a businessman — glove-maker — and alderman. Though it's true Will never attended Oxford or any other college, his education at the King's New School in Stratford would have been based in classics, taught by Oxford dons.

And sometimes, you know, art arises from unlikely sources. Only one way to find out: Experience it.

Greene buried the lede in "absolute Johannes Factotum." Johannes was the Latin version of John, source of nickname Jack. Factotum was a term, often derogatory, for someone who does a variety of work. Et voila.

It's not bad company. Maybe, 400 years from now, Tuscaloosa art will surpass 300.

Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.