I’ve been meaning to write a long post for some days but something keeps getting in the way. Work progress notes, social obligations, exhaustion and recovery at the painful process of getting Richard II on stage and in front of those not involved in the creative process. And now it’s 11 PM and I should be thinking about sleep but, instead, I’m letting my fingers do the walking across my laptop keyboard and we shall see what ends up spilling out. It could be anything as I’m just punchy enough to not censor myself in quite the way I usually do when composing these glimpses into my interior life.
We’ll start with Richard II – four more chances to catch it tomorrow (Thursday) and Friday at 7:30 and Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 at Bell Tower Players in the East Lake UMC Cafetorium at Oporto-Madrid Road and Second Avenue South. The cast, ranging in age from 19 to 86 and in experience from second show as an adult to decades on stage are embodying what I think is important about community theater: Coming together as a community to tell a story that cannot be told by a single individual. Personally, I’m relatively happy with how it all turned out although I am busy, as I watch it multiple times in performance, nitpicking at all my directorial choices and beating myself up on what I now perceive I should have done differently. Live and learn. This is the third Shakespeare I have directed over the last three summers and each has presented very different challenges. Will there be a fourth next year? Let me recover completely before making a final decision (although I have been noodling around with some ideas for The Tempest).
Speaking of the performing arts, the Kennedy Center honorees, the first under the new regime, were announced this morning. Given the seizure of that cultural institution’s levers of power by the executive branch and the battles that have ensued (and I am fully expecting a renaming to The Trump or The Trump-Kennedy Center before too much more time elapses), the choices actually aren’t that bad. The rules have always been important contributions to America’s cultural landscape, be living, and be willing to attend the ceremony. Given that most artists are of political beliefs incompatible with the current executive party line, there were plenty of jokes about Kid Rock and Scott Baio being amongst the honorees. Seeing Gloria Gaynor on the list makes this burgeoning gay adolescent of the late 1970s heart happy. And my sister is probably reserving her tickets to see Kiss. (She’s been a huge fan for nearly fifty years to the point of having a working Kiss pinball machine in her basement).
This of course brings us to the continued rise of authoratarianism which has moved from creeping to Maserati driving I-80 across the Bonneville Salt Flats over the last few weeks. Some 19 year old DOGE operative best known as ‘Big Balls’ got punched in the nose by a 15 year old girl on the streets of DC and the rhetoric of DC being a crime ridden slum (it’s not) is everywhere and we’re federalizing law enforcement and moving in the National Guard. Their much touted sweep of the streets netted 23 arrests, mainly of low level offenders. If the streets were full of thugs and murderers, you think they might have found a bit more. The truth is, of course, that violent crime rates are significantly lower in DC and nationally and have been decreasing for years, other than a brief spike during the pandemic shutdown. Birmingham, which has long been touted as a ‘dangerous’ city as it’s majority Black, has a murder rate this year 50% lower than last year and most of the city, even in Black neighborhoods is quite safe. I’ve almost never felt endangered in my nearly thirty years here.
The issue, of course, is that this is another testing by the administration of just what they can get away with before there’s pushback by the courts or the public. The vast majority of the population strongly disapproves of the administration’s policies and its heavy handed ramming of Project 2025 down our throats. But there has yet to be any unified opposition that the majority can get behind. The Republican party under Trump has spent the last decade concocting a mostly fictitious narrative of urban America as a hellscape of out of control ‘woke’ minority governance, invading hordes of undcoumented immigrants, and public schools performing sex change surgeries on elementary school students. It’s all ridiculous if you spend any time looking around at objective truth but it’s an easily understood story and it’s reinforced in easily digesitble sound bites by a well financed media machine. The Democrats have not spent much, if any time, creating a strong and easily understood counter narrative. Human nature relies on stories to understand the complexities of the world. The side which can best tell the story usually wins. The other side gets its exhibits scrubbed from the Smithsonian.
Trump remains a chief symptom of out of control vulture capitalism determined to transfer all things of value from the commons to private ownership of a new aristocracy. The prestigious institutions – universities, media companies, professional associations – that could best offer a counter narrative are all busy rolling over and offering up their bellies to the administration to scratch as their leaders choose private privilege and membership amongst the elite over public good. Where does it end? I don’t know but the tensions between the various groups behind the transformation of society – religious zealots, insanely wealthy capitalists, tech bros – all of whom are using the current administration to further their own goals seem to be getting worse and when Trump is gone, as will happen – he’s not immortal – the jockeying for position and dictating of the direction we next head is going to get awfully interesting. Do we end up in Gilead? In Brave New World? In a new industial serfdom? One thing history teaches is that anything is possible. This is all not the sort of thing I should be thinking about right before bed.
Someone told me this past week that I was Birmingham’s answer to Kevin Bacon. Everyone in town either knows me or knows someone who knows me. I suppose that’s what comes of having a number of very different circles of acquaintance – UAB, VA, aging adults, elder care and policy, classical music, theater, writing/spoken word, liberal religion, liberal politics, patients, patient families etc. With all this going on, there’s no way I’m going to leave town when I retire. I’m much too embedded in everything that goes on around here. A couple of people have asked me if I would consider running for local office once I retire. My answer to that is not just no but hell no. I am no fan of how modern politics is conducted, I have a few skeletons I would like to keep firmly in the closet and not trumpeted across the blogosphere, and I much prefer working behind the scenes as an eminence grise. With Richard II out of the way, I’m going to keep my head down and stay home for a few months and play catch up and maybe take a vacation for a couple weeks. Who am I kidding. Someone will ask me to take something on in the next few weeks and I’ll be off to the races again. Somebody stop me.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 