I don’t believe Feeling Like Lula Mae. There is a subtle tone in her letter which leads me to believe things are not as easy or perfect as she imagines. I hear a familiar background music, the bass notes from Jaws.

“It’s a pretty healthy relationship. I think.” Da dum. Da dum.

“He thinks $200 jeans are reasonable.” Da dum. Da dum.

“He's not a snobby rich kid by any means, but….” Da dum. Da dum.

Feeling Like Lula Mae insists that she and her boyfriend are compatible; she offers as evidence people who “hate us because we’re such a good couple.” Perhaps she ascribes jealousy to the relationship when the envy might be of the fairy tale rise in financial status the coupling portends. In other words, Feeling Like Lula Mae personifies the American (false) hope that things will be all right in the end, that money doesn’t matter, that love conquers all. Her doubts are a betrayal of the American Dream.

The Dream used to be: you work hard, you get rich. Now it’s a return on an investment: you get good luck, you get rich. What good luck that she found a rich suitor! Marrying money is easier than working for it.

I have dated, worked for, been friends with people with money. The greater the emotional investment, the greater the need for clear communication because there is deep, wide breach between compassion and comprehension. Why does this wonderful boyfriend keep putting his girlfriend in the position of reiterating that she is without the means to travel on a whim or eat at restaurants? He either has an extremely poor memory or is simply mean.

It is not that her boyfriend cannot understand her financial limitations; it is that he refuses to believe they truly exist. Inside his optimism is a denial of his privileged position and, more dangerously for her, a refusal to recognize that her financial position is not a personality flaw or failure of her imagination. Somewhere he believes it is her or her parents’ fault for not being rich.

People are excused for not having compassion for the poor because the rich simply don’t have the experience of salary equaling food. On the flip side, those who work for a salary are admonished to defy physical and economic law to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; they are pitied for not being foresighted enough to do well when opportunity was right in front of them, as if opportunity is a bunch of $100 bills lying on the sidewalk.

Therein lies the Horatio Alger, dot com, lottery, Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages myth of accessibility and relationships. Therein lies the cruelty that Feeling Like Lula Mae is picking up. The boyfriend doesn’t really care, not about her, not about anyone.

We knew the end at the beginning, because we, especially here in San Francisco, know about Hearst Family history. We know how money, not all of it in gold, made and remade this place as it has many others. We all know, too well, about the fictionalization of history.

After fear had made ready the muddy streets, grief made its first appearance in the final episode of Deadwood. When Mr. Ellsworth is murdered, venality, that small side sin to greed, trumps love and hope and freedom. Despite foreshadowing and foreknowledge, I was shocked at the simple effectiveness of evil; a single shot, aimed well, ruined an entire society. True in life and in fiction.

There have been other murders in Deadwood, other losses, but as long as Mr. Ellsworth was doing the right thing, guarding family, honor, land and other holdings, there was hope that Hearst and the orchestrated cruelty and greed he represented could be held at bay. When murdered Ellsworth is brought through town, everyone understands that Deadwood, with its remedial corruption, has lost its fight against the power of institutionalized fraud – Hearst and his US government.

After cutting their losses, the only stories left to tell about Deadwood are soap operas –the most stilted of which is the lesbian relationship of Joanie and Jane. Tales are small now, of personal reconciliation with a reality reduced to family quarrels and mourning over what might have been. Perhaps Langrishe’s players can replay the tragedy for other towns or to those who remember it and wish for a different ending. Mrs. Ellsworth can bear proud witness.