New Rome will be destroyed
By the attacks of new vandals.
God always remains silent.
-Dejan Stojanovic
I left yesterday's narrative with P and me driving back up I-99 last Saturday afternoon through Gang Mills, Painted Post, and then Corning. We had just enough time for a quick nap and change of clothes before hustling to our dinner reservation at our favorite little Italian place in Elmira, then to go see the off-Broadway troupe perform Oklahoma! at the Clemens Center.
We both love live theater, and our last experience at the Clemens Center with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), only a few months before the pandemic, was pretty wonderful. So we traveled with hope this past Saturday night, ready to tap our toes and hum along with an American staple.
We even pulled on our cowboy boots for the occasion.
Supper was a little hurried at 1157 North, crowded and understaffed like pretty much every restaurant these days. We sat at a high top in a dark bar that looked like it had been lifted from the set of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, with a big bartender taking care of a cast of characters along the bar who were clearly locals who'd walked in from the surrounding neighborhood. We stuck with appetizers in the interest of time, shared a nice Chianti and marveled a little at the scene on the television of the Notre Dame-Navy postgame. All these young men smiling after Navy's annual drubbing in South Bend, shaking hands and generally showing the good sportsmanship I've noted in the past about my beloved Trojans' hated rival. We left feeling pretty good about the state of the world, and of the country.
After a short drive to the Clemens Center we struggled with parking, and ended up arriving after they shut the doors for Act One, Scene One. I dropped off our coats while Peg tried to navigate her way through the process of buying a couple glasses of wine. As a Covid precaution, they would not touch a credit card (although, oddly, folding money was okay), instead directing us to install an app on our phone that would allow us to open a bar tab. I struggled. I swore. I announced I was too old to learn this new trick just as the app finally installed itself and somehow connected my phone to the cash register. We made our purchase and were on our way, just as the doors opened for the late arrivals to find their seats between scenes.
As it happened, I was too old, way too old, for the whole experience to follow, despite the fact that P and I seemed downright youthful among all the Q-tips in the crowd. The place was packed, 100% masked (a couple folks made faces at me with my mask pulled down around my chin so I could enjoy my cabernet in a can, but whatever), and no doubt excited to revisit a musical that had been a part of their lives from the very beginning.
The first hint that this was not going to be what we expected came as the stage lights were raised and onstage appeared a rather large African American person in a too-short miniskirt, maybe 6' 3" and 250 pounds or more, with long dyed blonde tresses, strutting and singing the old standard, I Can't Say No.
"Peg, is that a . . . dude?"
"Yes. Yes it is."
[S]he grinded and pranced and rubbed herself against a scrawny guy in a traditional cowboy costume. The crowd laughed because to gasp would be to give oneself away as one of Them.
The set was strangely spare, decorated with an occasional six-pack of Bud Light on an archipelago of picnic tables because, well, Those People drink Bud Light, don't they? This is Oklahoma, after all.
The performers were all very, very good--the female lead was most recently part of the cast of Hamilton--but the jarring injections of twenty-first century culture kept both of us on edge. In one scene, in which Jud is alone in his shack plotting badness for his rival Curly, they chose to darken the stage, and place a camera a few inches from Jud's jaw, uplighting his face and projecting it onto a huge screen behind him.
The anesthesia person in the room made an immediate observation.
"I wonder what he's on?"
"Huh? Why do you say that?"
"Just look at his pupils!"
In fact, his pupils almost effaced his entire iris, two huge dilated black spots.
"I'm guessing amphetamines. Or maybe coke. Or both," she continued.
Once she noted his eyes, I lost track of whatever else was going on in the scene. The acoustics were strangely awful anyway, or P and I are both going deaf, because neither of us could understand much of the dialogue.
Finally, mercifully, we reached intermission, and P and I sought out a restroom and more anesthetic from the concession stand. And popcorn. P wanted popcorn, so by God she got popcorn.
We returned to our seats hoping things might get a little more normal, and it seemed that might be the case as we heard the small orchestra start to play the Surrey with the Fringe on Top. Then as the lights dimmed they shifted strangely to a minor key, giving the whole number a lugubrious feel.
Then a dancer emerged, an African American woman with a shaved head, white spandex shorts and a loose white shirt proclaiming "Dreams Be Real" in large black letters. She commenced a wild interpretive dance around the stage.
"I don't remember this from the movie."
It got worse. The climax came when she flopped over backwards like an inverted spider so her vulva could wink at the audience through the spandex.
No one gasped.
But the Donkster had had enough. "Are you enjoying this?", I asked.
"Not really. Are you?"
"Nope. Let's get the hell out of here."
So we abandoned our very good, very expensive seats in the orchestra area as some sort of barn dance scene began onstage, and strode through the doors and into the lobby.
The nice old ladies at the coat stand seemed surprised to see us.
"Is the show about to end?"
"No, we just had to leave. She's got call." I gestured to Peg, standing behind me holding an almost full glass of cabernet in one hand and the can from which she poured it in the other. The coat ladies seemed not to notice.
"Oh, that's too bad. Hope things are okay when you get to the hospital."
And that was that, our foray into modern American theater's take on a classic musical abruptly ended.
A little research afterward revealed that messing with Oklahoma is sort of a fetish of the woke left.
There was the time they had an all-black cast, not a bad thing really when you consider the mostly forgotten role black cowboys had in our westward expansion.
Then there was the show in Oregon in which a radical gender reassignment of the lead roles made everyone gay as a goose.
It does leave one wondering what's left of the old classic when Jud and Curley run off with each other.
What has become of us? All around there is nothing but disdain for this amazing if flawed legacy we were blessed to inherit as Americans of this era. On the left, there's this gleeful vandalism directed at anything that portrays our national heritage as a good thing.
On the right, there's this mass turning away from the values of inclusiveness and kindness that once defined us as a people. It wasn't all that long ago, at the beginning of my adult life, that you could turn on your FM radio, dial up a country station, and hear Waylon Jennings--not exactly a liberal pansy--sing these words:
My brothers are all black and white
Yellow too
And the red man is right
To expect a little from you
Promise and then follow-through
America.
Hard to imagine that song would get much airplay now, from either side of the aisle.
This atomization of our country can't lead to anything good. We've always been the sum of the lives led here, of individual decisions and values, some good and some bad, and often from very different places in terms of culture and upbringing. But what I always thought held us together in this country was a shared set of ideals that replaced the ethnic ties of other nations, a belief in the value of every person and of giving every individual the opportunity, if not necessarily the right, to "be all you can be," to quote the old Army recruiting ad.
Now, ironically as we have lost our geographic and cultural heterogeneity in favor of chain restaurants and interchangeable neighborhoods of cheaply built stucco houses, that set of shared values has become a subject of derision and scorn hurled from both the woke and the MAGA crowds. Neither seems to care much about this whole democratic experiment so much as about ensuring the other side gets "owned", to drag out the overused verb of the day. So the tone just keeps getting les tolerant on both sides, and we segregate into our enclaves where we don't have to experience the Other.
And occasionally we're confronted with something, like this ill-conceived rendition of Oklahoma, that tests whether we're reliably part of the right camp. If you aren't comfortable with a 250 pound scantily dressed drag queen playing the daughter of settlers in the Sooner state over a century ago, you aren't really one of us, are you?
Well, I reckon not. But I'm not one of Them, either. A stranger in a strange land, a man without a country.
But I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
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