"I…it was about two weeks ago. I was wal...

"I…it was about two weeks ago. I was walking down the street one afternoon and I turned up the stairs into my flat and I looked back and he was there, framed in the doorway, looking up at me. I couldn't see his face, because the light came in from behind him and he was in shadow, and he said, "I am Picasso." And I said, "Well, so what?" And then he said he wasn't sure yet, but he thinks that it means something in the future to be Picasso. He said that occasionally there is a Picasso, and he happens to be him. He said the twentieth century has to start somewhere and why not now. Then he said, "May I approach you," and I said, "Okay." He walked upstairs and picked up my wrist and turned it over and took his fingernail and scratched deeply on the back of my hand. In a second, in red, the image of a dove appeared. Then I thought, "Why is it that someone who wants me can hang around for months, and I even like him, but I'm not going to sleep with him; but someone else says the right thing and I'm on my back, not knowing what hit me?"

Steve Martin, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, from Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays, Grove Press, NY., 1996, p. 18.