Our Society’s Legacy: Irreversible Environmental Blunders?
Some local fossil fool fanatic planted an over-sized wooden political poster at the intersection of local route 7 and the Berlin Turnpike in 2008 saying, “Drill, Baby, Drill!” What if someone put an oil rig or coal mine on his property -- like we find in West Virginia -- and conducted a follow-up interview, would he have a different opinion? Perhaps not. Among the most frequent political deceptions is how politicians tell us we should act for our children – no matter the issue. Really? Read More
Juvenile Injustice in our Schools
Many students and parents are rightly upset that school principals, administrators and counselors conspire and combine with police assigned to the schools (called “resource officers”) to make schools more like prisons. Police are assigned to almost every school with one principal function being to criminalize what used to be student discipline, to stigmatize young students, to compromise their futures - what schools they may attend and what jobs they may aspire to have. To give you some idea how big a problem this is, in Loudoun, in the 2011-2012 school year, there were 2,676 discipline cases. Read More
Potomac Nationals Games – A Minor Leisure Time Option
The Potomac Nationals' cozy 6,000 seat stadium in Manassas provides an affordable "up close and personal" opportunity to watch a baseball game. While I enjoyed being at the ballpark just because it was a leisurely was to spend 3 hours on a magnificent 68-degree, slightly breezy and minimally overcast spring day, I pondered why anybody would want to be there, watching young major league wannabes suit up for a small wage, chasing a dream with daunting odds -- and the larger question, "How does minor league baseball overall draw 41 million fans each year and manage to stay in business?" Read More
ASC’s “Custom of the Country” Strikes a Modern Chord
This morning I read an article in The Washington Post that helped me understand why the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton sometimes devotes its prodigious talents to plays that aren’t as hot as its actors, like “The Custom of the Country”: they do it to show that we resemble our ancestors more than we differ from them. In spite if Twitter. In spite of nuclear physics. In spite of Keurig coffee machines and everything else the human race has achieved since 1619, when that play was first staged in London’s original Globe Theater. Read More
Just a 16-1/2 Year Old Kid!
I’m just a kid, 16 ½ years old. The half year matters. I’m getting older. I play b-ball and f-ball at Park View High School and can palm a ball. I like rap, rhyme and rhythm. I’m kind of square. I hang with great kids, no h8ers, and I’m blessed that they seem to like me. My Mom and Dad are fine. My Dad’s white and my Mom’s black. So I’m like President Barack although I’m Caleb and my parents are race-reversed. Like a verse I’d rehearse. I’m a person of color but don’t feel that I’m treated differently. Read More
Gazebo Struggles at WLT
Alec Coppel’s play The Gazebo, which is onstage now at Winchester Little Theater, resembles nothing so much as the old situation comedies I remember from the era when I used to watch TV. It’s about a guy who writes TV shows pretty well but is not adept at ordinary life. Read More
Young “Strangers” in a Hostile Land?
Jefferson wrote that “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” About ten years later, the promise of this declaration shrunk in the context of our nation’s constitution, hollowed out by excluding coverage of “these rights” to slaves, to women and, basically, to persons without property. Read More
“Into the Woods” Showcases Shenandoah Talent
Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods must pose a tempting challenge for directors. The play interweaves the plot lines of four familiar fairy tales, distorting them in the first act and subverting them in the second in a way that flips the bird at conventional expectations, many of which deserve to have the bird flipped at them now and then. Read More
Entertainment
Aquila Theater Offers “The Greatest Works for The Greatest Number”
At first glance, I took Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac for a comedy about a misbegotten wretch whose every chance for happiness is thwarted by his nose, which looks like a noble erection. I expected to laugh at his plight for a while and then watch the tables turn, click by click, until Cyrano was sitting in the big chair at the table’s head, with the pretty woman in his lap. That’s how comedy should work. But in the middle of the second act, that wretch exerts a force of will the likes of which I’ve never seen on stage. After that I didn’t laugh at him again. Read More
Beautifully Orchestrated “Opus” at Winchester Little Theater
The opening scene of “Opus” says a lot about what’s to come. Four men sit on four black stools in a line along the back of the stage. They’re lit from above by turns as each of them responds to a question that we didn’t get to hear -- it must have been asked before the curtain rose. The lead moves among them like an idea wandering from one mind to another -- it’s not clear if any of them knows the others are speaking, or even present, but it is clear that they are being played, if you will, like instruments, each voice distinct in tone and content, no voice asked or allowed to carry the melody alone. Read More
Bravura Performance at Studio Theater
Early in “An Iliad,” the minstrel says he hopes he never has to tell this story again, meaning, I suppose, he hopes audiences will finally outgrow battle lust and let him do some new material like “Song of Myself” or “Paradise Lost.” Later I think he hopes we’ll outgrow war itself, and thus release him from the fate of bearing witness through the ages. And by the end of the play I’m pretty sure the story harms him, diminishes him, takes another little piece of his heart every time. How much heart can he have left? Read More
“The Lion in Winter” Roars!
I’m a big movie fan and two of my favorite Peter O’Toole movies are The Lion in Winter and Becket. O’Toole played Henry II in both films but his stand-out portrayal of Henry in The Lion in Winter was unparalleled. So my problem centered upon suppressing remembered epic O’Toole scenes. Could James Keegan*’s Henry II erase O’Toole’s stamp of prodigious memories and implant an entirely new vision of Henry II on my brain? Read More
What Makes “Peter” Fly?
Shenandoah Summer Music Theatre’s charming production of Peter Pan honors two traditions that help explain why Peter’s been around for 107 years: the actor who plays Peter is a woman, and the actor who plays Captain Hook, Peter’s arch-enemy, also plays Mr. Darling, the father of the girl Peter loves--or would love if he let himself grow up a little bit. Read More
On the Glories of Staging “A Midsummer Night” on a Midsummer Night
“Am I crazy to do it this way?” McMath had asked me earlier, and I had assured her that she wasn’t crazy, that "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" was meant to be staged outdoors on a midsummer night. It is, after all, a play about semi-human creatures who live in the woods and prey on people who stray from safer places into haunted forests, people like all of us sitting under the tent and gazing out into the darkness, which scares us a little, despite our rationality. Read More
News
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane… No, It’s a Drone
Just when you stopped being surprised about black helicopters flying East and West to and from Mount Weather, we have Drones (unmanned aircraft) in America, one crashing to the ground in Northern Virginia recently, so we know they are no longer just in the Mid-East seeking out and blowing up terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen; they’re also here surveilling us. Read More
Russell Baker — All Grown Up
When word got around that Russell Baker, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize, for commentary and then for biography, was going to speak at St James Church in Lovettsville, neighbors reached for their copies of “Growing Up,” Baker’s memoir, hoping to get his autograph and to hear from the man who wrote how three strong women helped him “amount to something.” Read More
Do We Know an Unjust Prosecution When We See One?
We all know presidential candidate, former Senator John Edwards, had an affair with self-styled avant-garde film-maker, Rielle Hunter, that they made a baby while Edwards’ wife was battling cancer, that Edwards first denied it was his child, that Edwards’ loyal friend, Andy Young, said it was his, and, finally, Edwards admitted, yeah, that’s my child. Thus have we removed all doubt that Edwards is a despicable human being. But was any of this a crime? Read More
Politics
“Tebow Bill” Passes State House; Intercepted by Senate
Home school advocates are suffering buyer’s remorse and lately demand the right by legislation to select ala carte services from the public schools that they, by homeschooling, have pronounced unworthy to educate them. Read More
How Hagel Could Have Responded to McCain
On January 30th, two-term Senator Chuck Hagel (R, NE), a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, faced sharp questioning from Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee and in particular, from a fellow Vietnam veteran, Senator John McCain (R, AZ). If confirmed by the Senate, which is likely, Chuck Hagel will become the first enlisted person and the first Vietnam veteran to serve as Secretary of Defense. If I had been in a position to help Hagel prepare for this contentious hearing, here’s how Senator Hagel may have responded: Read More
Live Fire on the Range
The name AK47 comes from the second version of an assault weapon designed by Soviet Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947. When fired in full-automatic mode, this AR fires continuously for every trigger pull. There have of course been design improvements and model changes since its origin. The magazine’s capacity is 30 rounds. It can shoot 100 rounds a minute over an effective range of 400 meters. Read More
A Recollection of Ed Koch
If there was ever a force of nature in politics and life, a model for talking, arguing and doing, it was Ed “How’m I doing” Koch, the former Councilman, Congressman, and three term Mayor of New York City. We could use more politicians like Ed, who cared so deeply and worked so hard until finally his heart failed him at 88 years of age last Friday morning. Read More
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