CATS!

 Is Cats a classic musical? I've avoided it mostly because many many people have told me to avoid it but when it comes up as part a a season ticket package for traveling Broadway series I guess I've been trapped in a tree I cant avoid. 

Cats came through Omaha last evening and for the first time in nearly two years I set foot in a theater to watch something in person. It was bizarre. Masked up, paranoid and hoping that fucking virus found me deplorable enough to avoid we entered the place to observe Cats from the front row of the balcony.

Did I like Cats, the 40 year old play that people either love or hate? Let me take 3 steps to do this.

1) The Orpheum Theater 

This place was built as a movie and vaudeville house damn near 100 years ago. It deteriorated over the years and I remember seeing a movie there as a kid in the 1960s for being a great Safety Patrol guy. Me and everybody else.

In the 1970's the old place was remodeled and turned into a Performing Arts Center and featured concerts and plays and whatever religious scammer blew into town. I saw Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine , Dizzy Gillespie yeah ok Im a jazz fan. But the Orpheum was built for 1927 people and  are lets face it 1927 people arent 6 foot 2. The first row of the balcony may seem great in theory, but theres a cement wall there and a railing.  6 Foot 2 guys cannot possibly get any leg room. In other words quite honestly the place is a dump for 2021. 

2) Cats Act 1

A bunch of talented actors, dancers and singers dressed as cats hop around a stage made to look like a junk yard sing some tunes, and with no apparent story line or plot it began to resemble a haphazard concert with some decent tunes and some that you couldn't wait to end. Then came the end of Act 1 with a rendition of the former guys favorite tune, Memories.

Now most people I've talked to left at this point having heard the only damn song anybody knows. Whats the point of going on? This is a plotless, pointless exercise in futility. We thought about bailing but stuck it out.

3) Cats Act 2

In the words of Larry David, it was pretty pretty pretty good. The tunes picked up, the plot didn't really improve but the old cat got to sing Memories two more times and I was entertained. The Magical Mister Mephistopheles sequence with a dancer doing flips, coat changing colors , and an energy that was quite remarkable was the highlight. Then it ended with the old cat singing Memories yet again and I was now aware why "nobody" likes this play, They all freakin leave at halftime.

My advice. Get there 90 minutes after the start time and you will think damn this is good.  I also just wish Andrew Lloyd Webber would write a play named DOGS!

And one more thing. Even the baffling Act 1 would have been better than the alternative act playing in town last night. The fuckin Eagles. Dude.

Nebraska Shenanigans!

 Years ago Alexander Payne made one of his quirky movies and called it Nebraska. The plot involved a small town in Nebraska and its group of rural folk and a lottery and anyway it was great. And if you lived here you knew all those people. And quite frankly it was scary. Scary in the sense that nobody who lives in the cities wants to live in that small generic town featured in the movie. Yet we are that close. And Im sure those rural folk dont want to live among us city dwellers either. What with our theaters and stores and the blacks and browns. Oops did I spill the truth?

Nebraska is a state with a weird unicameral system. We have a state legislature of only 49 "non-partisan Senators. There's no House. Just a gang of 49 people who get paid shit wages, consists mostly of old white men and a few old white women who want to keep their Dust Bowl values . But lately there are more and more blacks and browns and city women getting in the Unicameral and are sick to death of the fucking 1950s. 

We also have a unique voting system(and you too Maine) that splits electoral votes by congressional district during Presidential elections. So in 2020, the city of Omaha looked at that bull in a china shop traitorous shitbird, Donald Trump, and said no more. Joe Biden won this district by 9 points and thus got an electoral vote out of Nebraska. Oh yeah and by the way Barack Obama accomplished the same in 2008. In 2011 the GOP in Nebraska gerrymandered the 3 congressional districts by making our district more Republican. Thus we lost in 2012 and 2016 to a Mormon robot and a fucking reality show host who wears diapers. But 2020 was different. 

Now in 2021, the heavily Republican lege is screwing around again. They REALLY dont want a Democrat to win anything ever again anyplace in the state.  And instead of just appealing to people with your political philosophy, they just do what the GOP does to win. They cheat.

Gerrymandering is an art in other states. Here its just a blatant outright scam. The Republicans in the lege, and our Covid loving Governor with national aspirations (HA makes me laugh everytime) have an easy solution. Just split Omaha in two. Make the largest population base in the state the least populous by sticking half of Omaha in a heavily Republican area and sticking the other half in a even more Republican area. And of course then try and make it a positive by stating out loud.......ok wait for it now.....hey you city people, this way you get TWO Congressmen. Get it? 

But instead of accepting your GOP gift like a good Republican in rural Nebraska we here say hey fuck you. Thus, the fighting has begun. The legislature, in special session called by Pandemic Pete Ricketts, is hollering at each other. Rural white geriatric Senators ranting that the 2020 vote was fraud because the "illegals" all voted in Omaha and thus this is is nothing but a noble attempt to secure our already secure elections. The city led core of mostly younger females and POC's are fighting hard to avoid becoming the crazy liberal in the hick town. I dont know how this will end because generally we run about 50 years behind the times here, but it doesnt look promising . 

If this is happening here, its happening everywhere and has been for 50 years.

Pay attention dammit. These Republican fuckwads cheat better than anybody. Its in their nature. Like my old man said whenever a perceived good person got arrested, oh hell he went Republican.

Nebraska is already Republican enough. If they bust up the biggest city, its over for us blue dot people. We in Omaha have no desire to be governed by a gaggle of hayseeds from Wahoo. 

Insanity!

 

Disorder in Afghanistan. The perceived botching of an evacuation. Forced forward by a political party that openly supports an insurrection to restore a mad man to office though he lost by 8 million votes. Jump on Biden, blame him for the deaths of 13 Marines blown up by a daily occurrence in that country. A suicide bomber. Call for his impeachment, call for him to resign. Call him senile. Divert attention from their true goal. To gain back power. 

Meanwhile the chaos going on in this country gets worse and worse. The vaccinated Republicans casting doubts on the prevention of even further damage. Ginning up a base of weak minded cultists to deny science, refuse masks, hawk quack remedies of horse de-wormer and snake venom instead of simply getting a free fucking shot . Look, idiots, these GOP ghouls don't give a rats ass about you. They care about retaining their money funnel. And by denying Joe Biden any progress on getting this pandemic behind us, by denying Joe Biden the credit for one of the most efficient evacuations since Dunkirk, by doing nothing to advance the country they load their bullshit guns for 2022. Hey and it may work.

Americans are not smart. They believe whatever they see on Facebook from some Russian bot. The refuse facts. They hang in their bubbles and think anything that goes against them is rigged. They worship a game show host with fake hair, a fake tan, and a fake sense of humanness. Because they're dumb.

Covid 19 should be completely manageable by now. But these mush brains, fueled by Republican bullshit artists, Republican bullshit TV news networks, and Russian propaganda designed to create this chaos have stalled any progress. In fact we are regressing. Going back to square one. Record number of infections, unvaccinated children put at risk, Republican Governors participating in the stalling to satisfy their own political ambitions to be the next Cult Leader. Loudmouthed thugs disrupting meetings designed to save lives, the sight of nurses and health care workers demonstrating outside overcrowded hospitals against vaccinations. It is insanity. 

The only silver lining? MAGA devastated by their own ignorance. I'm just not above it any longer. Just fucking die already.

Thinking Again!

 Its been awhile. Its overwhelming to live normally any longer. If you're not a drugged out zombie lurching from day to day in some happy pipe dream every single day brings a new outrage, a new realization that humanity is close to extinction, that people in this nation have no desire to learn anything new, that America is fast becoming a nation of mean nasty assholes and fascism is the preferred choice of way more people than I ever thought, it sometimes depresses you to the who the hell cares mode. Im over that now.

1) The entire L part of the country, ya know that L on the map going from North Dakota down to Texas and over to South Carolina is a gigantic tumor on the rest of humanity. What motivates these people? Anything other than owning the libs? A feeling of inferiority that can only be handled by getting even dumber, more crass and putting your own life at risk just to feel in charge. Here in Nebraska, usually a reasonable race of people, the two cities with any sense of diversity and liberal thought, have over 70% vaccination rates, while that overall state rate is barely 50%. Basic math tells you that if you remove the cities from Nebraska (oh be still my heart) the rest of the state is resisting big time. The recent study showed that in each Nebraska county the bigger percentage of the vote that T***P received, some as much as 90% , the vaccination rate plummeted. That'll show em right MAGA? This is insanity . Welcome to Rickettsastan.

2) Texas. How in the fuck did Texas residents allow this to happen? Texas is between 45-50% blue. Yet the GOP terrorists have such a stranglehold that they are allowed to turn it into Taliban State. The abortion law in Texas written by white males with real repression issues isn't about saving lives, its about controlling the harpies who tempt them. For chrissakes, Texas whacks living breathing real humans all the time, some of whom may even be guilty and not railroaded to save a DA's reelection bid. So why the sudden concern about a rice sized glob? Control. Control of a gender they fear. And the deputization of rootin tootin vigilantes to enforce it is perhaps the most Texas thing since they assassinated a President. Abbottistan may be worse than Rickettsastan. Makes you wish the tree had been bigger.

3) College football is back. Packed stadiums full of maskless morons screaming and spitting at each other over watching 20 years olds play a game. Announcers are so excited they are just short of masturbating right there on the air.  The reaction of this year, full stadiums, no masks, no vaccination proof, is a direct reaction to last year's mandates of no fans, no fun and the most important factor, no money . Athletic directors all over, basically money changers, are risking lives to rake in the bread. Cross your fingers and hope nobody dies is sound medical strategy. 

4) A personal story related to the above. My Dad's college of choice after WW2 was Fordham University in New York City. I used to enjoy his stories of 1940s New York, Yankee Stadium, The Polo Grounds, being a messenger in Manhattan, Joe DiMaggio, heckling Ted Williams, bad football. This year my alma mater, the University of Nebraska, scheduled Fordham to be a paid sacrificial ram in the first game in Lincoln in 2 years. I was giddy. Oh how my Dad would have loved being there in Fordham gear and telling everyone he a Fordham grad. So I was going to be his surrogate Fordham fan. I had his old FU hat, his old Fordham t shirt he only wore once before he passed. I had to be there. Then came the University non policy. No requirement for masks, no vaccination proof, just business as usual. Jam yourself into a seat made in 1923 for 1923 asses and have the person next to you sitting on your lap. Thanks Nebraska. My dream crushed yet again by your 1923 vision of life. I didn't go. Sorry Dad.