Wherefore Art Thou Common Sense

If I could change the ending of Romeo and Juliet, I’d have to start at the beginning. I’d introduce basic communication skills, a smattering of responsible parenting, and possibly a chaperone. Despite what my English Lit professor would have you believe, Romeo and Juliet is not a love story. It’s a story about two emotionally unregulated teenagers, a spectacular absence of adult supervision, and two families who really needed group therapy before things escalated into multiple funerals. First of all, someone needs to sit Romeo and Juliet down. And honestly, it should have been the parents, but we all know how they were. Parents, amirite? So it fell to Friar Laurence. The friar wasn’t a bad guy, he just had the backbone of a cooked noodle. His grand plan to fix a multi-generational blood feud was to secretly marry two teenagers who met five minutes ago. He should have looked at them and said, “Whoa, let’s pump the brakes. You two have known each other for less than twenty-four hours.…