Preface To Crawl: Themes That Are Not Nouns Make Me Uncomfortable

I often want to make them into nouns. "Crawl" becomes "crawling." For example.

Nouns seem to be more understandable. A verb as a theme seems like an imperative sentence, a command. "Crawl" becomes "crawl!" This is not my intention.

In fact, of all my themes for this year, every one has been a noun. A show in which the theme might have been "sit" became "sitting." The most recent non-noun theme was from November 16 of last year, & it was "Destroy!" which was meant to be an imperative sentence (although I did have songs about destruction therein). Right before that, on November 2, I had a rare show with an adjectival theme: "Hungry!" Which, you know, could easily have been "hunger."

Crawl can of course be a noun - "the traffic moved at a slow crawl." Or a description of how an animal moves. There's also a "crawl" in the jazz sense. It's a type of dance.

Yet when I see "crawl" as a theme, it doesn't feel like the noun version. It seems like a command. I shall leave it, however, the way it is.