Survival is Progress
None the Less...
I am still in the post Cabaret mindset. I had not expected to be so moved. I know most of the lyrics by heart, so it was not the music as much as the shock. There was too much in common with the news cycle we spin on.
I am finding it difficult to escape the present overwhelming barrage of what ifs, and catastrophic possibilities. I have not escaped the reality of electionyearing, even and especially when I was sitting in the Kit Kat Club, just a few rows behind the tables that were waiting for those who could afford a grand per seat.
The theatre district was flooded with matinee goers, mostly retirees, braving the rain and all the overreported dangers of NYC. The theatre itself had been altered greatly and transformed somewhat convincingly, it was the mostly over fifty female auidence, that would never have been in the Kit Kat, but their enthusiastic support of the cast’s effort, more than made up for the unavoidable historical error.
The city is deceptively diverse in appearance, a sharp contrast to the white rightness of Lakehurst, which is so much more like the rural south than our proximity to NYC and Philly ought to be, a red stain in the center of this blue state. Many people here retired from there, very few of them have anything nice to say about the borough they were raised and well educated in, before white flight became a thing.
How to undo a half century of hateful fearmongering, here or anywhere, is beyond me. The mass delusion warm and well-fed red voting Americans writhe in is nothing I want to spend much time in.
Would it help if I tell you my granddaughters theater kid friends are at broadway plays on the regular? That theirs isn’t the only group that easily incorporates their gay friend as easily as straight?
That they seem pretty unanimous in thinking Trump is an assh.le? That although they get pushback on their rainbow t-shirts they outnumber the jackasses who respond with MAGA t shirts by large numbers?
Granted, they’re raised by a generation raised by mine who tell them to be good people no matter what they see?
We’re going to overcome this nightmare the networks are bathing us in because for them it’s a majority ratings opportunity.
If you can I’d recommend donating to small democratic candidates who need support in red states. Win or not their message is a call to our better angels.