Q: Women are so mean. I’m the new girl at work, having started my job two weeks ago. Yesterday, I had a date after work, so I wore my date outfit to the office. It was a little sexier than my usual workwear. I was in a bathroom stall, and I overheard two female coworkers talking about me: mean, nasty, catty talk. My outfit was not terribly revealing. Why are women so awful to one another?—Upset

A: Imagine if there’d been three women in the Garden of Eden—one wearing a fig leaf a little on the small side and two to ostracize her for flirting with the snake.

Welcome to Putdownapalooza! This sort of gossip fest is a female specialty—an underhanded form of aggression against women who dare to commandeer male eyeballs.

For women, competition for mates is a beauty contest. While it’s good to be a good-looking man, for men, appearance doesn’t matter as much as it does for women. Because women get pregnant and left with mouths to feed, women evolved to prioritize finding a “provider”—a man willing and able to commit resources—over landing Mr. Adonis. Men know this, having co-evolved with women. They’re more likely to dis each other and also trash each other to the ladies over how much money they make than, say, how tight their pants are.

In short, if you’re an ugly millionaire, it’s best if you’re a man. However, if you’re a hot barista or pizza delivery person, you’ll still get plenty of dates—if you’re a woman. Because men evolved to prioritize physical appearance in mates, women will band together to punish other women for wearing revealing clothes or for being physically attractive. Women seem to recognize that other women do this. Research by social psychologist Jaimie Arona Krems suggests that women tend to dress defensively—wear less revealing clothes and dampen their attractiveness—when they’ll be around other women who they aren’t already friends with.

Prior research (by psychologist Joyce Benenson, among others) finds that girls and women tend to be vicious to newcomers in a way boys and men are not. For women, there generally seem to be “costs from incorporating a female newcomer,” Krems explained to me. The women we already know—“even those we can have some conflict with—may be less competitive with us. At times, their gains can be our gains. And very often, female friends protect one another”—sometimes from other women’s aggression. “In fact, we might even dress a little more revealingly … when we’re with our female friends than when we’re heading out alone … perhaps because our friends have our backs.”

Knowing this, when you’re going to be around women you aren’t yet friends with, you might want to wait until you leave work to slinky it up. As Michelle Obama said, “There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish”—for example, hacking into the new office hottie’s LinkedIn and promoting her to “Vice President of Lap Dances.”

Q: I’m a gay man, and I’ve developed a crush on my best friend, despite his not being my type. He’s very confident, and I kind of want to be him. I have many insecurities, and a mutual friend suggested what I really find attractive is how my best friend knows everything about me and accepts me anyway. The more I think about it, the more I suspect our mutual friend is right.—Wrong Reasons?

A: Ideally, the process of feeling good about yourself is not modeled on siphoning somebody’s gas.

There’s a keyword in “self-acceptance”—a big how-to clue—and it’s “self.” Self-acceptance involves your embracing your whole self—all your qualities and characteristics, positive and negative. Psychologist Nathaniel Branden explained, “‘Accepting’ does not necessarily mean ‘liking’” or that there’s no need for improvement. It means recognizing you’re a package deal, and you can’t have the good stuff without the stuff that needs improvement.

To crank up self-acceptance, recognize it’s not just a feeling but an action—something you do: deciding to like yourself as a human work in progress. When you accept yourself, you no longer need to slot somebody in as a romantic partner simply because they don’t find you repellant.

Just when Shakespeare scholars thought they had seen it all; actor, writer, director and professor Fred Curchack created something new and strange in 1983 with his one-man show, Stuff As Dreams Are Made On, a deconstruction of The Tempest featuring Curchack performing with an array of masks and visual trickery.

The play debuted at Cinnabar Theatre in Petaluma, where the New York native was living; Curchack later toured the show internationally to great critical acclaim.

Now, 15 years since he last performed it, the 71-year-old Curchack is reviving Stuff As Dreams Are Made On for a small run that features a performance on Saturday, Jan. 4, at Studio 64 in San Rafael.

“I’ve been asked to revive this show for a conference of Shakespeare theater directors from all over the world, apparently,” Curchack says. “I decided to do a few local shows, and one in Dallas where I teach, to get it up to speed with real life audiences.”

This is not the first time Curchack’s been asked to perform for scholarly groups, and the play has been heralded by critics as an ambitious and audacious examination of Shakespeare and of art itself.

“It’s about an actor who tries to do a one-man-show using text from The Tempest, and he plays all the roles,” says Cuchack, who incorporates puppetry, ventriloquism and special effects into the show.

Beyond its academic value, Stuff As Dreams Are Made On is also a wildly imaginative, obscene, sometimes scary and often hilarious show that has been a hit with audiences for many years.

“I’m trying to make it very entertaining, very outrageous, very dirty,” Curchack says. “It’s not for kids.”

The balance between Shakespeare and outrageousness is the secret to the show’s success, and Curchack says Stuff As Dreams Are Made On resonates with people who can’t stand Shakespeare because it confronts the way that Shakespeare’s works are often presented in our contemporary culture.

“Often, the rich spirituality, psychology and existential insights that are Shakepseare’s contribution end up being analyzed merely as political insights,” says Curchack. “Of course, he was hugely political, there’s no question about that, but that’s not all he was doing.”

In reviving Stuff As Dreams Are Made On, Curchack finds new meaning in Shakespeare and his own work through the process of re-making the masks and special effects and adapting the physically-demanding show to his 71-year-old body.

“All this stuff is what I love theater for, it awakens interest in all sorts of things,” Cuchack says. “Most of all, re-learning the lines and reinvestigating what they really mean. Where do they touch my life on the deepest possible levels? There’s a whole host of things to think about, but it’s no longer in order to have a hit show, because it’s already been a hit show; now it’s in order to really work on myself in a way that’s fulfilling.”

Fred Curchack performs ‘Stuff As Dreams Are Made On’ Saturday, Jan. 4, at Studio 64, 64 Louise St., San Rafael. 8pm. $20–$25. studio64marin.com.

The top 10 films of 2019, in alphabetical order: The Big Hack, Captive State, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, The Lighthouse, 1917, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Parasite and Us.

“We’re Americans. Get the rope.”—Us

“You’re Americans. Just barge on in.”—Midsommar

Such is my country these days. We seem to be Rotvalla-pissers one and all, like the chump in Midsommar who wees on the sacred, dead ancestral tree of the Swedes.

I suppose we’ll be spending more time in the bunkers before we get out to the barricades next year. This year’s cinema was heavy on stories of the immured (Parasite) and the entrenched (1917). In 2019, even Captain America said, “To hell with this, I’m heading for the past.”

In Jordan Peele’s eerie parable Us, America isn’t filled with just the rich and the poor, but with the influencers and the influenced. It isn’t easy to pick apart his story of the hordes in their government-funded Plato’s Cave. Yet it does merit space next to the business of the grateful, kowtowing subterranean lodger in Bong Joon-ho’s uproarious Parasite, a movie composed with a perfection rivaling Hitchcock’s. Joon-ho’s film takes place in such a complete Yankee colony that little will need to be changed if they have to do an American remake. (Shoot it in Houston where grotesque wealth and flood-plain hovels go side by side).

Captive State demonstrates what a real occupation and a real resistance looks like, with alien overlords dwelling in their own cellars (they rule us from underground, because they can’t bear human stink). The Great Hack was another type of horror story about rats in the walls; a terrifying documentary about the kind of social-media manipulation that overthrows governments.

An escape from the present, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is, on this list, “one of these things that is not like the others.” It’s not just edgeless nostalgia, a fantasy of wide-open spaces; but an irreplaceable vision of L.A. as a mecca that distingerates under people’s feet, a “slide area” in writer Gavin Lambert’s phrase. It’s the glittery version of Scorsese’s masterful vision of the blandness and crookedness of mid-century America, The Irishman. HBO’s The Watchmen, which would have been on this top 10 list if it were a movie, also had the sense of the walls closing in—the bunker-dwelling Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) is similar to the entombed prisoner of Gotham, Arthur Fleck in Joker. The Watchmen also parallels The Irishman’s idea of a sense of a decades’ worth of defective history, ignoring what ought to have been taught.

Jojo Rabbit took its own liberties with history, even with its own version of Anne Frank concealed in the attic—maybe it’s a measure of the shocks we’re enduring that the funniest movie of the year had the gallows in it. One feels a little cheap awarding Waitit’s robust film precedence over Terence Malick’s ode to ultimate Nazi resistance, A Hidden Life. The latter is one the most beautiful advertisements for martyrdom ever made. Malick’s images of the peace and beauty of farming in the Alpine foothills left nothing to be desired. As an interminable vision of moral stalwartness it recalled the Mark Twain quote: “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”

By contrast, Robert Eggers’ glorious black-and-white The Lighthouse is lighter, in a dark and horrible way. It’s based on the lovely old Down East joke with the punchline, “Oh, don’t dress up. There’s only going to be the two of us.” Here a sordid-and-flatulent old lighthouse keeper (Willem DaFoe) and a young pup (Robert Pattison) are trapped in their own phallic prison. Made by one of the last directors who really seems to read; it was one diabolical mindbender, teasing the opposition that attracts. Whether we like it or not, in the lighthouse America, there’s no “them or us,” there’s just “us.”