LIVE THEATER WORKS TO EXPLAIN CURRENT EVENTS

Live theater? Please.

I’ve got a jacked up bill with Ziply Fiber, an AppleTV account, and the most important:

Three channels of C-SPAN, the kings of slow TV, which is just my speed.

Why would I leave the room with the big screen? Ever?

For live theater, I leave for live theater.

Don’t you?

I saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Before I showed my covid-papers for the Ellyn Bye Studio at the Armory, I navigated the theater of the parking garage, and watched the drama of the audience arrival.

As stunning as this sounds to me, I was early. Equally incredible, we had great seats after the tickets we had at will-call weren’t there. I half-expected someone to tell me I was in their seat.

My early arrival felt too early, like the crew was still setting up the stage.

They were, except it wasn’t the crew. The high school musical approach to mixing actors with the audience was an added touch.

Ask me about the time Billie Holliday chose my lap to sit on during Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill.

I’m not a lap-dance guy in any bar and grill, but I was that night.

When is the last time Billie Holliday jumped out of a screen and sang a song so close that you could feel her breath?

The Longest Stripper Show On Stage

Portland is famous for the number of strip clubs provided for urban entertainment.

I say urban entertainment for the population buffer. A small town stripper might be someone you know, which isn’t always a bad thing.

Once the play started and Hedwig descended the staircase, the suspense began.

Wearing the most elaborate, camped-up, costume this side of Darcelle, the star did a turn like few others.

While peeling the proverbial onion, Hedwig answered some of the most important Life Questions:

Are we who the world thinks we are?

Does anyone really understand us?

How can we be more clear?

The Deadly Live Theater Of Ukraine

From looking like the first lady member of KISS with all the gear, to a chunky guy in hot pants and black taped nipples, I couldn’t stop thinking of Putin and the Russian invasion.

I doubt that Putin would approve of Hedwig, but like the star, Putin has shed his civilized-man costume to stands before the world in his true image.

Which is?

Last night I thought of Ukraine while I fulfilled my plans: drive a group to a winery for drinks and food trays and that warm cuddly Oregon feeling. Then pick them up.

I wore a tuxedo for the occasion. In between the drop-off and pick-up, I stopped into my local tap house for a beer, and to show off the tux. I wore a covid mask, too.

Before you wonder, I’m not an Uber Driver, but a Duber Driver: Dave’s Uber.

So I drove everyone to a house where we ate homemade M-soup, played games, pet the dog, and let a baby sleep in my arms.

I like to think it’s a peaceful night played out around the world where a man in his mid-sixties feels a peace he’s never felt in the bosom of family, friends, and four-legged mood enhancers.

Except Putin, two years older than me, needs to show the world that there’s no shortage of shit-bringers as he brings his own special brand to Ukraine.

Putin, A Traditional Dictator Doing Dictator Work

We’ve seen the hopeful faces of young women looking forward to the lives they plan to lead.

They are the smiling faces we see in news reels of the German economic miracle of the 1930’s.

Unfortunately, they are also the terrified faces in the bombed out streets of Berlin hiding from the Russian invaders at the end of WWII.

In post-war communist East Germany, Schumacher says she was forced to sign a statement effectively denying the rapes even occurred. In the official narrative of the German Democratic Republic, the Soviets were liberators — not liberators who committed war crimes.

Today young women and children are saying goodbye to men between the ages of 18-60 while they flee the Russian destruction in Ukraine.

From busses to trains to cars to walking, they packed a bag and left to find a safer future than one with Russians hunting them down.

Their babies and dogs and families are uprooted and seeking shelter from what? From the whim of a dictator flexing his ‘Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Invade Wherever I Want To Invade’ muscle. And it’s not the muscle in his head.

What happens when a man is responsible for his country being banned from the community of civilized nations, or at least nations that don’t try and turn their neighboring cities into Aleppo.

Putin seems cast from a familiar mold, one that has low regard for human life, low regard for suffering, and a high regard for his own safety with his long table keeping visitors more than a poison dart throw away.

Like the German women from the 40’s in the hands of the Russian ‘liberators’, Ukrainians now have a fresh supply of Russian horror stories to weave into family histories.

None of them deserve whatever Putin wants to share from his plate of sickness and barbarism.

No one does.