Forty years ago today, I was a fairly non-political student taking summer classes at the University of Kansas, and I did not pay much attention to news about the Stonewall Riots in New York City. Now, of course, the whole world marks the occasion as the birth of the Gay Rights Movement. But the battle is far from over. PLEASE ASK, PLEASE TELL.
I saw the late Farrah Fawcett in the 1983 Off-Broadway production of Extremities, but the thing I remember best about the show was that there were two men who were standing guard down front, on the orchestra level, one on each side of the stage, facing the audience. I don’t know if they were there to protect FF because she was being stalked in real life; or whether they were there, as per some newspaper reports, to keep anyone in the audience from leaping up on the stage to protect FF when she was being brutalized, in one of the scenes, by a would-be rapist. Of course, in the play by William Mastrosimone, FF turns the table against her would-be rapist, and ends up torturing him mercilessly. Perhaps the two guards were really there to protect FF from men in the audience who might have been outraged by the reverse brutality.
These days, on television, I mostly watch only MSNBC because, as per their slogan, it’s “The Place for Politics.” But, since noon of yesterday, the station has been featuring Michael Jackson non-stop. His many fans should be thrilled that, somewhere from the great beyond, Michael’s countenance has now morphed into “The Face for Politics.”
As the whole world watches what’s going on in the streets of Iran after their election, the talking heads on TV keep referencing the bloody Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 in China. No one seems to remember the peaceful People Power Revolution of 1986 in Manila, which toppled the regime of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.
This just in from the Land of the Houyhnhnms: “Tweeting Twits are the new Yahoos.”
Dick Cheney says he is now FOR gay marriage. This is probably the religious right’s brilliant Machiavellian ploy to turn liberal Americans AGAINST gay marriage.
Trick or Twit? Although I do Twit on occasion, I find that I have more than 140 characters in my life at any given moment in time. Facebook is another matter altogether. It assumes that there are people who are interested in everything I’m doing every single moment of what’s left of my life, and vice versa. Pure hubris.