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Only One Man May Save Us from Donald Trump

America is in crisis. We are lost. We are hungry. We are hurting. We are ill. These troubles have arrived with the heavy hand of Donald Trump — who has yet to meet a policy, a decision, or a thought that he can’t successfully caress into hatred and bigotry. If we are ever to get out of this muck of a mistake of a President, we need our national elected leaders to lead. We need Republicans to step up to stand up and stand down Trump. With Trump isolated and emolliated, the union just may be salvageable. There is only one man right now who has the capacity, and the power, to save us from the complete destruction of a failed American democracy: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — but one nagging question remains and lingers — how long will he wait to finally do the right thing?

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Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

When I first arrived in Washington, D.C. many years ago as fresh-faced lad freshly graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, one of the first places I was able to feed myself was at Arena Stage reading scripts at $10 a pop for Lloyd Rose and Jerry Manning. Arena Stage is one of the best professional regional theatres in the world — they were one of the first theatres to employ an acting core on a full time basis — and Zelda Fichandler created Arena Stage out of nothing and ran it for 40 years from 1950 to 1990 until she moved to New York University in 1987 to run the graduate school acting program.

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Crying the Blue Sky

Erik Harper, age 11, had a deal with his grandmother.  If Joseph Randolph Mays, the man living with him and his Deaf mother, and his younger brother Dakota, ever tried to really hurt them — it was an open secret in the family that Mays was physically beating all of them — Erik would send her an emergency text message in code: “The Sky is Blue” that meant they were in real danger and she should call 911.

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Obama Inaugural Invitation

Yesterday, I received this presidential inauguration invitation in the mail — is it authentic?

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The Obama Bible and the Danger of Close Associations

Are we getting a little creeped out with Barack Obama’s obsession with linking his presidency to Abraham Lincoln’s?  I get the cultural and racial connection that binds them together in history, but imitating Lincoln’s train ride from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. for Obama’s inauguration seemed a bit much — until it was announced yesterday that Obama would be sworn in with his hand on the Lincoln Bible — and the whole shebang went over the top into silliness.  Here are some images of that Bible with some color correction to compensate for the overly golden tone of the official versions.

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