CULTURE CRUD I would not call myself a prude. Quite far from that, be it, herewith, recorded that neither do I get my bladder all a-bubble when life offers an innovative change from staid routines.
So much of the media hype we swim in our means of listening to each other is sheer cosmetic concoctions compiled to make the mid-sets we already have even more intense and oppressing. Don't believe all you hear, see or think you did.
This Di Vinci Code thing that's going the reading-seeing-roasting rounds right now, for instance, maliciously mingles medium thinking about a loose edge of theology and attaches to a story which would hardly qualify. To foist such a packet of mis-information off on the general to let them believe it to be fact rather than, as even the author of the book insists, it is intended to be read as fiction." One get the feel it is hardly worth of comment here or anywhere else.
I get very much the same feeling about a "literary work" which is now in its final "road show" round for testing and and touch-up and right now it appears as if it will migrate to the United States within the next ninety days. It will, backers seem to feel, become believed, quickly accepted, praised and passed along as Broadway's favorite musical production. Even as it getting ready to be shipped out it seems unworthy.
The show, which has been a sellout favorite at London's "National" Theater. The entire musical show is found upon a typical, two-day series of what blurbs have been lauding as "America's favorite TV show!" and is titled "Jerry Springer: The Opera". It is structured of a series of playlets or sketches done at a British Art Center theater to-do. The plot consists of typical Jerry Springer misfit people - to day-loads of such stellar characters and the first half of the play play sets up their problems. Very briefly one older, fat and unhappily married man, a transvestite, wants to be his girl friends baby. In their dancing she pulls his pants off and he is already wearing snow-white "nappies" - which will change to "diapers" in the American version. There is a line of dancing nurses and a fully gowned Klu Klux Klansman and white-hooded buddies burning a burning cross on stage and joined in their dance by the nurses and forty Jerry Springer, look-alikes. Jerry, having a rough day with such guests, shoots his warm up guy and is whisked off to Hello without delay to reconcile with Satan and Jesus.
Who, after all is this Jerry Springer? God tries to save him and a dead guest nearby takes up for Jerry insisting he was really a rather nice fellow. He was all that bad. All he ever did was to hold a mirror to people's failings and desires so we might see them as they really are or were. Isn't it true we all want our Jerry Springer fifteen second of fame?
Get ready. Watch for advance advertising lauding "Jerry Springer: The Opera". ..our next great Broadway musical production. Plan now to miss it.
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net May 18, 2006 [535wds]
