The envelope please...

[tzikeh]

This runs a close second to the "Country divided on whether George Bush is a uniter or a divider" article in the "Most Despicable Irony" contest:

Principal cancels high school's spring play, The Crucible, because of the negative reaction of town's church group. (NYTimes article, reg required, free, no spam)

ETA: The Crucible was replaced by A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play which includes pre-marital sex, drug-induced hallucinations and overpowering lust, and bestiality with a character named "Bottom" whom one *might* call a human-animal hybrid.

Comments

[luminosity]

As I said earlier, JESUS H. CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I think Jesus himself might have said the same thing.

In Aramaic, of course.

[luminosity]

[checks babelfish for English to Aramaic translator]
[no joy]
how do you say "fuck" in Aramaic anyway?

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I dunno - maybe that bit in the Bible about "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do" was mistranslated; possibly he was saying "Oh, fuck me sideways with a lipstick-red Ferragamo pump, this *bites*."

We should look into it.

[amireal.livejournal.com]

My nice lovely Jewish High school once let us put on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

And then started protesting the costuming choices for the whores.

My discussion with the principle went like this:

"Did you *read* the play before you approved it? There are *six* whors. *SIX*. They have an entire scene devoted to their whoriness. Did you maybe skim the play?"

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

when i was in college, we did cabaret. the poster design had a line of dancing swastikas (two branches were ordinary black bars, i mean to say, and two were legs in fishnets doing kicks) dancing out of pandora's box. people went bananas when we started hanging them (and tore them down, which was why we cared, 'cause as you know posters are expensive) -- as though we were actually plastering the walls of the university with swastikas. the "dramatic society presents" and "by kander and ebb" didn't register with them, apparently. except with one guy, who said we were wrong, there were no nazis in cabaret.

um.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

There are no Nazis in Cabaret.

I...

Did... you, you know, explain the show to him?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

man, we tried, but -- oy. [shakes head] the solution (i almost said 'ultimate solution', which is actually just a little too close to ironic for my taste) to the disagreement about the posters was that we'd add a caption that said "Germany, 1939: ... and it was the end of the world" to the remaining posters before hanging them. how that was supposed to help, i have no idea.

i don't know if that guy came to see the show, now that i think about it. but there were definitely nazis in it. :-} my boyfriend played one of them, and let me tell you, it's weird to be sitting in the house watching a rehearsal and have someone's arms come around you from behind and look down to see who it is and there's a brown sleeve with a swastika armband on it. the jewish sensibility jumps a couple of feet at that. (we also had concentration camp prisoners, in a sort of weird quasi-dream-sequence thing toward the end. the original idea was that everyone who wound up in that scene would get whatever symbol the nazis would have given them, but we had to scrap that when it came out like 80% pink triangles. i might have been the only one -- and i wasn't in that scene, i was the conductor, so nobody saw my symbol until the curtain call -- who was actually 'correctly' wearing a yellow star.)

[amireal.livejournal.com]

Some people just don't get it.

And apparently don't bother to research before they speak.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

...

Possibly he just looked at the title and went - "it's funny!" And that was it.

[amireal.livejournal.com]

She, and somehow I highly doubt that was it, it was during Nathan Lane's highly publicized stint on the broadway version. And it wasn't just her that approved it, it had to be by the school board. And without trying to sound snooty, it was a very rich public school. It's not like it was a mystery.

*facepalm*

[amireal.livejournal.com]

erk private school. I meant private school.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Hah, my high school had the same thing happen! (My sister was one of the whores.) Of course, we were a tiny little hick town, so-- unsurprising, basically.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

i am TOTALLY going to build an atheist commune in massachusetts one of these days.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Oooh - can I be the first charter member?

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

as long as you also support radical personal autonomy, sure!

...although I'm not sure how well that works in a commune setting. Hm. Maybe it'll have to be an atheist loose affiliation.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Charter:

You must support radical personal autonomy, except for the job wheel.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

Oh, for fuck's sake.

This is why I get student evals complaining that they "prefer not to fill [their] mind[s] with obscenity and profanity," and thus I shouldn't use The Shining in for God's sake college English class.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

ICON LOVE.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

I think I can safely say that I am the only person on LiveJournal who has an icon of her mother-in-law giving the finger.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Well, they learned from Barbara Bush and her "beautiful mind".

:P

[kismeteve.livejournal.com]

Why are people so STUPID?

[amilyn.livejournal.com]

I am speechless. I think if I were the drama teacher who got MSDN approved I'd be laughing a lot through the fury at The Crucible being cancelled.

That's just...something else. I don't know quite what...perhaps...facism? Yeah...that'll work.

So. Frelling. Screwed.

[lanchid.livejournal.com]

To the objectors: You keep using that word, "morality." I don't think it means what you think it means.

Let's put on a play!

[typo.livejournal.com]

Jeremy is, as I type this, looking in to what it would take to go down there this summer and mount a production of The Crucible with members of the local community.

Re: Let's put on a play!

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Any luck?