What Goes Around, Comes Around

These startling lede grafs,

MORRISTOWN, NJ—In an innovative, tradition-defying rethinking of one of the greatest comedies in the English language, Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater's production of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 16th-century Venice.

"I know when most people hear The Merchant Of Venice, they think 1960s Las Vegas, a high-powered Manhattan stock brokerage, or an 18th-century Georgia slave plantation, but I think it's high time to shake things up a bit," Hiles said. "The great thing about Shakespeare is that the themes in his plays are so universal that they can be adapted to just about any time and place."

are today merely the lede grafs of an article in The Onion. But it won't be too long now before we'll see something of the like as the lede grafs of an article in the Theater section of the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. Replace The Merchant Of Venice by, say, Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Theater section by the Music section, and adjust the rest mutatis mutandis, and with any luck we'll have a parallel situation.

What goes around, comes around.

Well, sometimes, anyway.