Speaking of Josh Radnor... Yesterday, I posted a video of actor Josh Radnor, from How I Met Your Mother, singing a song he wrote to the words of a Trump rant from his Trump rally. In searching for some related material, I came across something I wasn't aware of. A couple years back, I posted video here of a two-night concert revival of the musical Little Shop of Horrors that starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Ellen Greene re-creating her original role. As it happens, in 2018 there was another revival of sorts for the show -- a semi-staged concert production done at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. that had a scheduled limited run of two weeks. It starred Megan Hilty (perhaps best known for starring in the TV series about a Broadway musical, Smash, though also with credits on Broadway including starring in the musical adaptation of Nine to Five) and -- Josh Radnor. (Yes, I knew I'd eventually get around to him...) I haven't been about to find much footage of it, but what little there is makes the production look like it was a great deal of fun. This first video comes from what looks to be either a rehearsal or a press performance of the songs to help promote the show. It's a medley with excerpts of two songs. Also worth noting is the older actor who eventually shows up to Josh Radnor's left is Lee Wilkoff, who played 'Mr. Mushnik' in this production -- but starred as 'Seymour' (the Radnor role) 36 years earlier in the original 1982 show. And here is an extended excerpt of the song "Suddenly Seymour" from the full production of the show itself on stage.
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Here's this week's latest marquee from the Laemmle Royal art house movie theater that I pass on my morning walk, which they change around every Thursday.
The video is pointed and visceral, and impressively brave, but what I particularly like about it as part of a tweet is the Twitter-comment that puts what's happening in the video in important perspective.
If you missed last night's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, it was an interesting broadcast. The Main Story was about the coronavirus in prisons and jails. And though that's a top some people might feel should be lower on the list of concerns, the Oliver team does an excellent not only showing its importance on a human level, but also how it affects others. And they do it with great skill and humor.
Most people likely Josh Radnor as the star of the long-running CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother. What he did over the weekend was pick up his guitar, take a bizarre rant by Trump during his Tulsa rally and set it to music.
Move over, Bob Dylan After two minutes of the song, your head is spinning at the lunacy of the words. And then you realize that there are still four minutes to go! The craziness builds, though, and with Radnor's fine performance, it held my attention all the way through, even if just to see how far off the rails it would spin. My fondest hope is that when Saturday Night Live next does one of their "at home" shows, they have Josh Radnor as their musical guest.
Yesterday was a monumental disaster for Trump. On so many different levels. And I think it has many more ramifications that meet the eye. Though that first glance at meeting the eyes is pretty awful all on its own, looking like maybe there were only 10,000 people in the 19,000-seat Tulsa arena, although reports say it was low as 6,200. And those may be right -- after all, though pictures of the area do look half full, we're not seeing the seating behind the camera which is presumably empty. I saw a quip from someone who said -- imagine being a person who got there early and stood in line for five days, realizing that they could have showed up 10 minutes beforehand and gotten a good seat 40-feet from Trump. And none of this even includes the human Petri dish there. Even "just" 6,200 people with no social distancing and most without masks -- in a city whose cases of infections have been going up -- is ghoulish, as they leave and spread out back home and across the country, coming into contact with the innocent. But still, just 6,200 when you pompously were promoting that you had one million RSVPs. One million. There isn't enough egg to cover the faces of the Trump campagn staff. I know that there are wonderful stories about teenagers across the country who signed up to make fake reservations under goofy, salacious names. But I'm sure it was more than just that. If you even say that they made 300,000 RSVPs, it still leaves 700,000. I suspect there were others who did something similar, and also actual Trump cultists who signed up to show their support -- not realizing how it would backfire. And campaign manager Brad Barscale, the Trump campaign and Trump himself didn't figure this out. They really seemed to think they had one million reservations and kept crowing about, not realizing the massive downside if they were even a little bit wrong. Let alone missed by 999,993,800 -- or 99.9%. Parscale even giddily danced about how much data they mined from all the reservations -- not ever realizing that (putting the fake RSVPs aside, which is a LOT to put aside) any of the real Trump masses so fanatical to be willing to make reservations during a pandemic were likely people already long-since in the Trump database. Perhaps worse though was the "overflow area" outside. Keep mind, the fact that they even had an "overflow area" -- and that there were plans for Trump and Mike Pience to address this "overflow crowd" means they were actually, really, truly expecting a massive crowd of perhaps several hundred thousand. Instead, the news reported that there were. dozens outside.
Dozens. Trump officials tried to explain way the empty seats inside the area as the result of protesters blocking the entranceway. Forget for the moment that a) there were three entrances, b) there were many more Trump attendees than protesters, and c) all news reporters said there was no such problem and zero Trump attendees were straggling outside unable to get in. More to the point is that this attempt at an "explanation" overlooks that there were only dozens of people in the "overflow area," not one million. People who were never expected to get in the arena but were mean to be only in the "overflow." Dozens. Despite Trump's posturing, threatening note about how protesters and "anarchists" would be treated, only one protester was arrested. And really, that was a shame that the police arrested that one protester, since the overflow crowd could have used the company. However, there was much more at play here than just the surface embarrassment for the Trump campaign because of their miniscule rally. As I said, I also have a feeling that this one rally alone could actually have big ramifications to the political landscape. Consider: Yes, we know that the campaign will, of course, be ridiculed for having ridiculously less than one million people attending. And yes, it will also be ridiculed for the arena only being less than half-full -- in a state that Trump won in 2016 by a margin of 36.4%. However, various other issues struck me. I think it puts campaign manager Brad Parscale’s job at risk – even before, the campaign is down by from 8-12 points and Trump was so upset by a CNN poll that he had a campaign lawyer send a bizarre "cease and decist" letter...and now on the heels of that is this empty rally that Parscale has been touting. It may even make Trump wary about having rallies, not wanting to risk empty arenas again. Yet if he does hold rallies, since rallies are his life-blood, and they’re as poorly attended as this in Tulsa (which they likely could be, since the pandemic isn't ending any time soon, nor is Trump likely to pick up new masses of supporters), it risks confirms a failing campaign. The rally also showed that he has little to talk about, and that what he did say at the rally was just a lot of flailing – I mean, good heavens (the polite term), you have Trump standing there on stage and literally telling everyone, "So, I said to my people 'Slow the testing down, please.'" (which you should expect to see over and over again on Biden campaign ads) -- which will only add to the “exhaustion” level of people getting tired of hearing Trump rant about nothing that matters to their lives...like unemployment, the economy, the pandemic and national social change, none of which were really topics brought up in over an hour of talking, talking, talking, talking. (And let's be clear about one thing -- no, Trump was not "joking" about slowing down testing, despite his staff desperately trying to explain it away. Trump has brought up the idea of less testing previous to this, and often. He was not joking.) And to top it off, what we learned from the rally is that six members of Trump’s advance team who’d been in Tulsa preparing had tested positive for the coronavirus, including two Secret Service agents. That's just six people from Trump's advance team alone -- imagine now the 6,200 people who were there. The rally is going to be a coronavirus disaster, a dangerous human Petri dish spreading COVID-19 out as all those people go back home, with accompanying deaths. The humiliation and shame this will cause will only increase the perception that Trump is unwilling and unable to deal.with the pandemic -- and concerned only about his campaign, not the human life of Americans. All from this one rally. Now add in the disaster the day before with the SDNY U.S. Attorney's office. To be clear, I don’t think Attorney General William Barr’s job is at risk – he's deeply valuable to Trump -- but I honestly don’t think it’s safe, no one is "too" valuable to Trump. And Barr has had a truly terrible couple of weeks. Losing in federal court trying to block the John Bolton book. Losing not just one, but two cases in the Supreme Court that upset Trump so much it prompted to whine publicly that they don’t like him. Screwing up the SDNY firing of Geoffrey Berman monumentally on every possible level -- removing a Trump appointee with someone non-partisan who is a highly-respected career prosecutor and considered even tougher than the fired Berman, blaming the firing on Trump who blamed it on Barr, all of which freed up Berman to testify in the House. I don’t think Trump wants to fire Barr and likely won’t. But this is Trump. If he’s seen as repeatedly losing in the court system and feels unprotected, someone is going to get fired. It’s what he does. Jeff Sessions was the first national figure to endorse Trump and was intensely loyal – and yet Trump ended up slamming him in public for a year, firing him and is now campaigning against him in Sessions run for the senate in Alabama. Barr is not about to get fired – but he has to know he’s not safe. Then add the ridicule of “Water Gait” (you have to love whoever came up with that), becoming a laughing stock for being unable to walk and drink water. And national protests over social justice from which Trump's threats and then fascist abuse of the military against peaceful protesters were seen as so contrary to American principles that the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff apologized for his involvement and retired generals spoke out against Trump. (A disastrous event for which reports have begun building that Attorney General Barr was more involved in than previously thought.) And top it off with a pandemic that has so far killed 122,247 Americans...for which Trump's head-in the-sand response is to say to "Slow the testing, please." And we didn't even get to the embarrassment of the bunker debacle. And after all the disasters for Trump on the Weekend of Many Humiliations and the disastrous past two weeks come all the inevitable excuse explanations and finger-pointing. It's because of the BLM protests, it's the teenage kids, it was Barr's fault, it was slippery, it's because the court doesn't like me, it's because the guy I hired to be National Security turned out to be a wacko. And here's the problem with all that -- it's one thing to point at each single problem individuals and say "That's not my fault" and have it stand alone, but ultimately the “It’s not my fault, ever” starts to look pathetic when they pile up on top of each other like a train wreck. Which they've done the past two weeks -- or past week -- or just this past weekend alone. And when people go to the polls to elect a president…what sane person seriously, truly wants a president for whom nothing is his fault – at any time, but especially during a pandemic and time of national social change??? Not my fault, not my fault, not my fault, not my fault, not my fault – don’t look at me, not my fault. It because just too exhausting and understandably dangerous. As 122,247 Americans have died, and protests fill the streets -- and a president is so delusional that he boasts one million people will show up, but only 6,200 do. And the thing is, all the sane people in the middle don’t have to be SO exhausted that they decide to vote for Joe Biden, just 2-3% who might not have otherwise. That turns a razor thing 51-49% election into a 54-46% landslide. How bad have the last two weeks been for Trump? No, just make the question how bad was the past weekend? Actually, no, just make it easier and ask how horrible was Saturday alone for Trump? There is now an iconic photo of Trump crossing the White House lawn looking crushed and totally depressed. In fairness, it might have just caught him at a bad moment – but “in fairness” only goes so far because it still encapsulates everything. Mere hours after what was supposed to be his great triumph of one million cultists, his return to love-fest rallies that feed his craving for attention, it is the look of someone who once promised you would get tired of winning so much but is now deflated. Because not enough people showed up to cheer him. There have been and will be many important markers doing the election. This weekend is not the most important one -- but make no mistake, this weekend was a hugely important marker. The election is not “over” or close to. But I think we’re dancing around a turning point. And the rally in Tulsa is at the center. |
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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