When tracking down that video yesterday from the Tony-winning Best Musical from 2004, Avenue Q, I came across another video from the show which I thought was a lot of fun and worth following up with. It's a new recording of the song from the show, "For Now." It was done last year as a reunion of the original cast -- and it seems others who played in the show on Broadway -- on behalf of the Actors Fund to raise money. The video was made, like so many others during the pandemic, as one of those Zoom productions. But unlike most others, if not all others, this actually fit the song wonderfully -- for a couple of reasons. The first is that the design setting for Avenue Q is a background of brownstone apartments where the human and puppet characters live, and actors don't just perform down front on stage, but often popping out of the windows of their apartments. So, the boxes of the Zoom video are designed to look a little like that (as you can see below), and everyone singing in their own "window" fits in exactly with the show. But also, the song fits its time near-perfectly. "For Now" ends the show with the same music but changed lyrics of an earlier number, "It Sucks to Be Me." And the new words are about how whatever problems you're facing in your life, they're only problems "For Now." What's a very nice song and enjoyable way to end the evening takes on a new, touching resonance during the shutdown of a pandemic. They even tweak one line near the end (which I suspect was by the original song as a way to be able to stay updated whenever the show is performed), and there's a visual addendum in there, as well. Fun, too, is that they not only mix in together the actors and puppets -- but they've redesigned a few of the puppets to make them appear as if they too have been sheltering at home much too long.
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I've wanted to post this for a while, but what with the pandemic, the election, the insurrection, the American Rescue Plan and all manner of other stories filling in the cracks, it's gotten push back -- and back and back. Enough already. Besides which, I also want to get beyond just writing about politics every morning. Especially when so much of it coming from the fascist Republican Party pushing sedition makes my head hurt too much on far too many days. So, at last we get to Mary Schmich. When coming across Famous Quotes on social media, I always try to do research to see if it’s actually attributed correctly. I'm not sure what the percentage of accuracy is -- not as horrible as its reputation, but definitely bad enough that you should always check if you don't know for sure. Mark Twain would probably be pleased to know how much is attributed to him that he never said. However, for all that, I think the most famous of the mis-attributions came from the early days of the Internet, in the late-‘90s, I believe. And it involved the Chicago Tribune. You may even know the quote -- actually the very long quote, since it was part of a speech. It’s what became known as Kurt Vonnegut’s famous “Wear sunscreen” commencement speech, where the list of life-lessons that he supposedly explained at the very end of the speech were passed around and around the globe. Eventually though – it took about a year later – word finally, slowly started to get out that it wasn't actually written by Kurt Vonnegut at all, or for that matter, even from a commencement speech. Rather the "list" was a 1997 article by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, written as if she was giving a commencement address.. Mary Schmich is very good, and still writes a column for the paper. (For many years, she even used to have a special section on her official Tribune webpage specifically about “The Sunscreen Columns” – it included the original column, along with a couple of follow-ups she wrote about the reaction, but I don’t see that there anymore. I guess after 25 years, enough time has passed. Though if you go to the Chicago Tribune site and go to the Search box and start typing in “Mary Schmich” – the drop-down menu starts listing all the options and “Mary Schmich Wear Sunscreen” pops up as one.) If you haven't ever read the column -- or only read the piece as if supposedly by Kurt Vonnegut, or haven't read it in years -- it's well-worth it. The "commencement address" column was famous for a reason. It's smart and a lot of fun. And it's real title is, "Advice, like youth, probably wasted on the young." You can find it here. All the better, one of those other "Sunscreen Columns" concerned how, to her utter surprise in 1999, she was contacted by acclaimed filmmaker Baz Luhrmann (who, among his long list of movies, made The Great Gatsby, Strictly Ballroom and the film musical Moulin Rouge!). It turns out that Luhrmann, who's from Australia, read her "Wear Sunscreen" column all the way Down Under and actually wanted to make a music video using her column. This is an article by Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Caro who interviewed his fellow Trib writer Mary Schmich and wrote about how it all came to pass. For years, I’d never been able to find the music video, but finally tracked it down. Here it is – And if you want to reach more from Mary Schmich -- as I said, she's still writing for the Tribune -- you can find her work here. I enjoyed the musical Avenue Q, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2004, I don't love the show, though I thought the second act was very good, which helped me appreciate the evening. For my taste, the first act is certainly fun, but it had more of a sense of satirical sketches and didn't didn't its richness until after the intermission. The same two or three songs from Avenue Q tend to get all the videos from the show ("It Sucks to Be Me" and "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," in particular), so it was a treat to find this number posted, and most especially with members of the original cast. It's the song “I Wish I Could Go Back to College” performed by Stephanie D'Abruzzo; Rick Lyon; John Tartaglia. If Ms. D'Abruzzo looks familiar, that could be because she went to the beloved Northwestern. Okay, that's not the reason -- it's because when the series Scrubs did their episode "My Musical," she played the patient who has a head injury which causes her to only hear everything in song. (There's also another connection between the episode and Avenue Q -- a lot of the songs in the TV show were co-written by Robert Lopez & Jeff Marx who had written the songs for Avenue Q, winning a Tony Award for Best Score of a Musical. P.S. When one of the characters sings, "I could date my T.A.", the word "date" is not in the original lyric. It was cleaned up for television... The service I use for this website has a glitch that doesn't happen often, but when it does it deeply galling. Every long once in a while, it logs itself out, and I have to sign back in. That's not the problem. The problem is that unless I have remembered to tap my mouse-pointer outside the text element I've written in, everything I've written will be lost.
Sometimes I remember to tap outside the text element when writing. Sometimes I forget, but I haven't written much, and it's easy to write it all again. But sometimes I come to the end of a long article, only to discover that I've been logged out, and the whole piece is lost. I should note that that's not a fun feeling when it happens. Occasionally, I remember the article well-enough to just retype it as best I can. Often, I just throw my hands up and say, "Screw it," and come up with something different. After I wrote the article for this morning -- and yes, it was finished -- I started to save it...when the site just logged itself off, and kicked me off. After ungnashing my teeth, I logged back in, hoping beyond hope that I had indeed tapped outside the text element box, not remembering if I had -- only to discover that I hadn't, and the whole article was gone. I was in the midst of saying, "Oh, scre..." when I stopped, because it was not a piece I wanted to just toss away. I was also not anxious to remember what I'd written and type it again, because it was not an especially enjoyable article to write in the first place. To have to write it twice? Even less so. But in the end, it was not an article I was willing to toss away. Happily, I was able to remember pretty much all of it. Unfortunately, I was able to remember pretty much all of it. Yesterday, I watched a bunch of news shows, all of whose opening story was about the gun massacre in Boulder. Many of them spent 40 minutes of their hour on the tragedy. The theme of them all was that outrage was so high that perhaps this time Congress will act on some kind of "common sense" gun legislation, any kind, especially after there being two gun massacres this week alone..
As generally optimistic as I like to be, I don't see that happening. It didn't happen after Columbine. It didn't happen after Sandy Hook. It didn't happen after Las Vegas. It didn't happen after Parkland It didn't happen after Aurora. It didn't happen after Virginia Tech. And it not only didn't happen after any one of those national heart-sickening gun massacres, it didn't happen after all of them together. Nor did it happen after the Pulse night club Tree of Life Synagogue El Paso Walmart Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Umpqua Community College Lafayette, Louisiana movie theater. It didn't happen after all of those. And honestly, Sandy Hook alone would have been enough. It also didn't happen after 31 mass gun shootings in 2019. Or after "only" 17 mass gun shootings in 2020 when Americans were sheltering at home. For the record, a mass gun killing is when four people are dead, not including the shooter. Three dead doesn't count. So, if it didn't happen after all of that -- and Sandy Hook wouldn't have been more than enough -- I just don't think anything at all will happen after Boulder and Atlanta, even though they both happened the same week. Especially with the Senate split 505-50. Yes, that's very pessimistic But -- I do think that if three things happen (together, or in combination, or maybe even just one), then maybe possibly conceivably there could be a change, and Congress might take some kind of action. Those three things are: 1. The corporate-owned terrorist organization NRA went bankrupt and out of business, and were unable to make political donations to Republicans in the Senate. 2. Enough Republicans in the Senate got defeated to give Democrats a super-majority. 3. The filibuster rule got changed. If a combination of those happen, or arguably even only one, then I do think it's remotely possible for Congress to pass some positive legislation. The thing is, all of them are major hurdles. And right now, I just don't think it's likely that anything will happen. Not if nothing happened after Sandy Hook. Or after Parkland. Or after Columbine. Or after...oh, you know. You know them all. Sadly. But I live in hope of at least one of those changes for the better. Let's head back into the crosswalk for another "Crosswalk the Musical" extravaganza from The Late, Late Show with James Corden. For this production, they do The Sound of Music. And they end up using a lot more celebrities than usual in the cast. That's because this was part of a prime time Corden special, and all the stars are in CBS shows. They include Allison Janney, Anna Faris, Kunal Nayyar (of The Big Bang Theory), and Iain Armitage (from Young Sheldon)/ |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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