Not what I posted twice, once as a disclaimer.
But just when I thought I could forget about my gaffe (if you insist on perusing me gaffing, see above link), what did the New York Times do today? It published Shawn McCreesh’s, “The Kennedy Center Crackup: A Trumpian drama has been playing out inside the performing arts center all year. It has been damaging for business.”
The first paragraph:
This year’s fall season at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts officially kicked off one Friday night in September with “The Sound of Music,” the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein crowd-pleaser about nuns and Nazis.
Furthermore…
The government officials and the right-wing press and hundreds of families settled into their seats. But before the towheaded Von Trapp children got the chance to dance, a voice came over the speakers: All actors needed to immediately clear the stage. There were “technical difficulties,” the voice explained. The crowd whispered as the curtain fell. It stayed down for the next 33 minutes.
And it goes on from there.
- I, for one, did not know Trump has had his name etched into a marble wall in the Center. That started me wondering how exactly you get etchings erased from marble.
- Ric Grenell, the new president of the Center, “wanted to be addressed as ‘the ambassador.’…hung huge pictures of himself with Mr. Trump in his theater box. He ordered the National Symphony Orchestra to perform the national anthem before every show it played.”
- Grenell apparently rarely shows up at his job. So he put in charge of daily management “a cast of small-time Republican operatives,” including “Rick Loughery and Nick Meade. They worked for political groups run by Mr. Grenell and function as his enforcers while he’s away. Because all three have similar names, many in the building refer to this troika as ‘Ric and the Icks.'”
- Mary Ellen Bowers, a new board member, “said that when she thinks about programming, she asks herself: ‘Are we welcoming families? Are we welcoming Christians? Are we welcoming believers?’”
- Another new apparatchik with no experience whatsover in arts management expressed wonder when he saw a Cuban ballet company dance. “‘Wow, they’re so talented they could be on a cruise ship.’” (The experienced woman, a dancer, to whom he said this, doesn’t know if he was serious or putting her on. I’d say serious.)
- Was he ⇑ the one who keeps saying he wants Paula Abdul sort of entertainment at the Center?
And it goes on.
Maybe all of this doesn’t have the éclat of, say, Kanye rapping Wagner,* but let’s give these guys time. After all, they don’t know what they’re doing right now. With some experience, who knows what will happen? I’d look forward to some sort of performance from…
Ric and the Icks! Live! Tonight! (Maybe.)
*Totally irrelevant, but when, in the ’80s, I went to a privately owned Fiji island, the name of the pilot who flew us in a small prop plane from the Big Island to the Little One was Richard Wagner.