Hanging With Chad

I have never had any kind of trouble voting here in DC, as my polling place is literally one block up the street. Located in a run-down middle school (all schools in DC are run-down), I usually wander up the street around mid-morning on election day. There has never been a line of people in front of me; the only waiting occurs while the election official laboriously tries to locate my name on her roster. In DC, our election-day volunteers usually find reading a challenge. And my name is a bit of a problem. I am registered, of course, with my first and last name, just like everybody else. Unfortunately, my name happens to be one of the most popular male names in the English language, so there is always some question about which "Robert Williams" I am.

But aside from that mild frustration, I have never, ever waited in line to vote in DC. But we've all been inundated with stories of the massive turn-out expected this year, so I thought I'd avoid any problems and vote absentee.

Last week, I walked downtown to the election board to pick up my absentee ballot. I almost always voted absentee in Los Angeles to avoid the crowds, though I suspect these ballots are never opened unless the election is close enough that they will make a difference. And here in DC, national elections are NEVER close, the city is so overwhelmingly Democratic. Presidential candidates don't even bother to campaign here.

But I want to do my civic duty and vote and all that. The elections board downtown was hosting DC's early voting, and a very long line snaked outside the office. Fortunately, I skipped right in to pick up my mail-in ballot. It was a pleasant walk.

I now have opened my ballot and read the instructions, which confuse the heck out of me. First of all, with this ballot, you have the option of mailing it in. At your own expense! And Warning! It may require additional postage! But why don't they already know whether or not the ballot requires extra postage? Haven't they weighed it? It's a single sheet of paper. Since they don't know for sure what the postage for the ballot will be, you have to take the ballot to the post office to mail it. Ironically, but completely typical of the DC government services, the lines at the post office are always substantial, while the line at the polling office is non-existent. Perhaps I'll decline to use the absentee ballot and just go vote.

But here's the even bigger riot. In order to obtain an absentee ballot, you have to claim to be out of town on election day, or too incapacitated to show up at the polling place. However, if you don't want to mail your absentee ballot, you can turn it in to the polling station on election day.

Got that? You have to claim to be out of town on election day in order to use the ballot, but you are allowed to turn it in, in person, on election day.

Who's at the wheel of this thing?

s'Newz

...another in an occasional series mentioning current events which caught my interest this week...

Well, the final stretch of the presidential campaign has brought a few nuggets. It appears Barack Obama has an aunt (actually, a "half-aunt," if there is such a thing; she is his father's half-sister) who has been living in the country illegally for several years. Is this the October Surprise? It's a few days late.

Many folks are already calling the election in Obama's favour, which makes me nervous. Tempting fate, and all that. The worst offender may be one of my favorite political humorists, Garry Trudeau. The Pulitzer-Prize winning creator of Doonesbury is required to submit his strip days in advance, of course, and he has taken the initiative to assume Obama's victory in his daily strip for Wednesday, the day after the election. "If I didn't call the election, I'd have no premise for the week and be forced to write about something else. I didn't want to write about something else. This is history," he told the Washington Post. So, editors across the country have already received Wednesday's Doonesbury, confirming that Obama has won the election.

On the local theatrical front, the Shakespeare Theatre Company made news this week when it announced that their annual Free-For-All will no longer be a "Shakespeare-in-the-Park" experience. The event will move from the Carter Barron outside stage to the Shakes's home at the Harmon Center. There seem to be several reasons for the move. The idea behind the free performances was always to encourage new audiences to sample the regular season at The Shakes, but apparently, that has not been happening. What a surprise. Seats at Carter Barron are free. Seats for the regular season at The Shakespeare Theatre top out at 80 bucks a piece. It doesn't take a marketing genius to see those are two very different demographics. In addition, Carter Barron is not accessible by public transportation and is, of course, at the mercy of the elements, meaning that performances are regularly rained out. So, though the "free for all" concept will remain, future shows will be performed downtown, inside, and in early September. I applaud the move. At Carter Barron, the seats are uncomfortable, the sound is lousy, and, in June, the weather sucks. The Shakespeare Theatre will be adding performances to make up for the reduction in seating.




This last item is so horrendous, I had to save it for last. You just can't recover from it.

I can't recall an incident which has left me so sad, so flabbergasted, and so incensed, simultaneously. On Sunday, 8 year-old Christopher Bizilj attended a gun show in Massachusetts, advertised as "all legal and fun! No permits or licenses required!" with his father and his 11 year-old brother. A certified gun instructor placed a loaded semi-automatic Uzi in the child's hands, who proceeded to shoot at a pumpkin, while his proud papa reached for his camera. The recoil was too much for the third-grader, who lost control of the rifle and shot himself in the head. He died at the scene.

There are so many obscene elements of this tragedy, it's hard to write about. The gun show was a major event boasting that children under 16 were admitted free. To a GUN SHOW. The victim's father is a DOCTOR, the head of Emergency Medicine at a Connecticut hospital. He works in an EMERGENCY ROOM. After the senseless tragedy, this jackass father is quoted as saying, "This is a mystery to me. I really don't know why it happened." Are you kidding me? You placed a loaded submachine gun in the arms of a third-grader, and are now amazed that something went wrong?? You may be too stupid to live. You are CERTAINLY too stupid to have children.

And now you have one less.

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

"I came up the year the Titanic went down."

Radio host, black-listed activist, sometime actor, oral historian, and acclaimed author, Turkel won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Medal of Arts, among countless other awards. A mainstay on Chicago radio, he found international fame with his oral histories, including The Good War, for which he won the Pulitzer in 1985. Earlier, his examination of the lives of ordinary working people became the source material for an under-appreciated, problematic, but highly personal musical called Working.

Being the musical theatre maniac that I am, it is that contribution for which I am most thankful. Sadly, the show derived from Terkel's book is a mish-mash of styles, with the music written by more than a half dozen composers, including Broadway Babies Mary Rodgers and Stephen Schwartz, pop superstar James Taylor, and cabaret stylist Craig Carnelia. Predictably, such an eclectic mix prevented a single style to emerge. The show wasn't helped much by the musical's text, which consisted of a series of monologues delivered by various working folks: a UPS man, a telephone operator, a newsboy, a teacher, a housewife, a maid, a waitress, a truck driver, well, you name it. Even illegal aliens and hookers showed up to tell their tales. It's little wonder that the show failed in its original production, but the musical continues to be presented on college campuses and in regional theatres. Currently, a revised version of the show is being prepared for the Old Globe in San Diego.

Clearly, Terkel's oral history still resonates. In his honor and in his memory, please enjoy the clip below, in which the heartbreaking Eileen Brennan is paired with the musical voice-over of Jennifer Warnes, to present one of the many moving moments in Working.

MILLWORKER, from Studs Terkel's "Working"

The Vet Who Did Not Vet

At the risk of overkill, I present another video swipe. It was never my intention for this blog to host Youtube retreads, but this one is really, really cute. Forgive me.

Sarah Shops, and escapes to Fake America

My friend Marni Penning continues to slay me with her video impersonations. Though I love 'em all, I hope they become obsolete after next week. It's being said, however, that Palin has left her maverick in the snow and gone rogue, in essence prepping for her own 2012 campaign. Well, I guess that'll mean Marni will be getting work out of this woman for years to come.

Check out the above video, and if you like it, double-click on the box and you'll be taken directly to Marni's Youtube page, where you can enjoy her other entries, in which Sarah deals with the debate, takes us on location in DC, and even talks trash in a hot tub (and don't miss the episode in the closet. It's a gem!)

[side note to Marni: Tina Fey has revealed that, after next week's election, she's "done" with playing Palin, she just has too much on her plate. Soooo, get your stuff to Lorne; it looks like they may be needing a Palin impersonator for some time to come!]

10 Years After Laramie

This month marks the tenth anniversary of several momentous moments. Ten years ago, I was in the midst of my first experience with touring. The Kennedy Center sent 9 actors and technicians across the country to bring enlightenment and theatrical goodies to the hinterlands, in Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I loved taking that tour, which brought me to places I would never have visited otherwise (North Dakota! Iowa! Green Bay!) It was a real actors' life, and I didn't mind that we traveled in a van rather than an airplane, and stayed at the Holiday Inn rather than the Ritz. We were a touring band of players, spreading the word.

As I look back on that period, I'm astonished that I did not know the world was changing dramatically while we were cris-crossing the nation. When your whole life is a van, a motel, and a theatre, it's easy to lose track of the outside world, even though you are in its midst. So, I completely missed the news that, in October of 1998, while we were entertaining kids from Maine to Minnesota, a young gay man in Wyoming had been lured from a small-town bar and brutally pistol-whipped about the head and body. He was then strapped to a fence in the middle of an icy field, and left to die. By a couple of "misunderstood" local boys.

The horrific murder of Matthew Shepard brought international attention to the ongoing homophobia of America, a place where all men were supposedly created equal. The event added new phrases to the national lexicon, such as "Hate Crime," and a year later, "Gay Panic," the deplorable defense strategy used by one of the monsters who perpetrated the crime.

Simultaneously with these events, the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York was prepping the world premiere of Terence McNally's Corpus Christi, an updated retelling of the Jesus story. In McNally's version, Jesus and his apostles were gay men. Word got out that the play included scenes in which the disciples engaged in orgiastic sex (untrue, there are no overtly sexual scenes in the play), and major protests were launched. The noise grew so loud that the Manhattan Theatre Club, which had previously hosted many premieres of McNally's plays, yanked the show from their season. An anti-censorship firestorm ensued, and the MTC was forced to reinstate the production, which went on amid clamorous protests from the Catholic church and others. Death threats were sent to the playwright, and when the play opened in London, a fatwa was issued against McNally by radical Muslims (why radical Muslims cared about a play which Christians believed defamed Jesus, remains a topic of debate, but McNally was warned not to travel to any Muslim state, as he would then be arrested and executed).

Audiences who braved the unruly mob outside the theatre in New York had to pass through metal detectors. To see an off-Broadway play. Welcome to America.

A revival of Corpus Christi is currently being staged in New York without protest. In Laramie, Wyoming, the fence to which Matthew Shepard was strapped for 18 hours is now gone.

Apparently the town which bred the monsters who murdered this defenseless boy has moved on. But I couldn't let this ten-year anniversary go by without notice.