Review: "Cinderella", --Broadway Series

    While most Central Ohioans were glued to the Ohio State/Michigan football game, I ventured out to the Ohio Theater to see The Broadway Series current production of “Cinderella”.

   “Cinderella” is another one of those great old musicals that contains some of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most beloved and memorable songs including “Impossible”, “Ten Minutes Ago”, “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” and  “A Lovely Night”.

   Technology, stage magic and a little extra fairy godmother happy dust combine to produce thrilling costuming effects.  Cinderella transforms from a country bumpkin in rags to a beautiful princess, on stage, while she is singing – not once; not twice; but three times -- to gasps and thunderous applause from an appreciative audience. 

    The rest of the costuming, acting, dancing, singing, sets, lighting and sound are well executed as is usually the case with any Broadway Series professional production.

   The audience at the Saturday matinee was filled with little girls dressed as Cinderella-like princesses, escorted by their fawning parents and grandparents.  Most of the children were better-behaved than some of the adults who kept checking the their cell phones for the football score. 

   This 2013 adaptation adds some pleasant songs: "Me, Who Am I?” "Now Is the Time", "The Pursuit", "Loneliness of Evening" and "There's Music in You".  The new book by Douglas Carter Beane injects some additional personality traits for several of the characters including the prince and the stepsisters.  It also adds significant political flavoring to the plot. 

   Several reviewers have praised the new adaptation for its wit and wisdom.  I enjoyed the new songs, lines and actions that give Prince “Topher” added depth.  I found the new attitude of stepsister Charlotte, delightfully funny.  But, at the risk of seeming like some narrow-minded, stuck-in-the-mud traditionalist, I confess I think Beane’s attempts to inoculate this classic fairy tale with his particular brand of social commentary and politics in the characters of Jean-Michel and Lord Pinkleton and sketches such as the ridicule game, are phony, gratuitous and annoying. It left a bad taste for what would otherwise have been a light-hearted, uplifting afternoon of classic musical theater.  

Final Election Analysis

     Liberals who were outraged at Trump's debate refusal to say he would accept election results if Hillary won,  hypocritically whined and exchanged notes with their social media buddies about how to overthrow the electoral college process and coronate Hillary.  As it turned out that movement caused Hillary to lose more electoral votes than Trump.  

    The country’s founders designed the electoral college as a means of insuring America would be a “representative republic” with a nod toward preserving the power and autonomy of the diverse states that make up the country. 

    There have been several Presidents who won a plurality of votes in most of the states but did not receive a majority of the popular vote.  It has happened for both Democrat and Republican Presidents. And it will probably happen again.  

    Abraham Lincoln won election with only 40% of the popular vote.  When I noted this on my Facebook blog, one of my liberal friends argued that Lincoln got more votes than anybody else who was running.  She missed the point.  Lincoln and the Republicans had to govern against the desires of 60% of the country that was deeply divided over slavery.  His election led to the Civil War.

   In the end, it was his Republican party that prevailed in freeing the slaves and giving them the right to vote.  It was the Republicans who sponsored and eventually passed the 19^th amendment, giving women the right to vote, in spite of the Democrats who opposed it and had delayed its passage in Congress for 40 years from the time it was first introduced. 

    Many people don’t know those facts of history, because schools have abandoned any serious attempts to teach real history. The liberal-leaning mainstream media has twisted these truths of history to try to depict the Democrat party in a more favorable light.

     Politics can be an ugly business.  Donald Trump proved to be a crude, nasty bully in the 2016 election process.  He was doing what he had to do to win.

     There were things at stake in the 2016 election that go beyond personalities and the stupid, insensitive, disrespectful, mean-spirited, accusations and misrepresentations that people on all sides are constantly hurling at each other.  

    Playing by the liberal Democrat rules, Trump called the liberals' bluff.  He fought back against their allegations of racism and mistreatment of women and proved that the people calling him out were in fact more racist and more abusive and disrespectful toward women than he had ever been.

   Now the liberals are whining and crying "foul" because Trump  didn’t roll over and cave in as most Republicans usually do.

     Being nice, meek and passive while crossing the aisle to extend the hand of friendship and compromise, hardly ever helps Republicans survive and successfully implement Republican/conservative ideals and principles. 

     In hindsight, I wish Mitt Romney and John McCain had been a little more aggressive when they ran their respective Presidential campaigns.  I wish George W. Bush had stuck by his conservative ideas and principles, gotten tough, and fought back, instead of playing nice and going along to get along when the media and his political adversaries defamed him and undermined his efforts.  If he had been a little stronger, we might have avoided the 2008 economic meltdown and eight years of Obama with all the things that have happened on Obama's watch to de-stabilize America and the rest of the world.  Those were the things that led to the 2016 election featuring two of the most unorthodox Presidential candidates this country has ever witnessed.  
   I believe that Trump is at least ten different kinds of a sinner.  He and his father did discriminate against Blacks and minorities in real estate dealings and property rentals. There is more than a little evidence to indicate that Trump has said and done things that disrespected women and he has been ruthless in some of his business deals.   But I am pretty sure he is not a rapist or someone who defended rapists by persecuting their victims as Hillary has done.  I am pretty sure he has never murdered anybody, as Hillary and Obama did with the four people of our Benghazi Embassy who died in September 2012 when Hillary and Obama failed to provide them with adequate security and military support.  I am certain Trump has never compromised our national security or conducted pay-for-play transactions designed to rob millions of dollars from the American taxpayers and line his own pockets as Hillary and Bill Clinton have done.  

        Most people supporting Hillary were shocked and devastated by the election results because the only sources of information they pay attention to kept saying that Hillary had the election locked up.  They were celebrating her victory before any votes had been counted.  Now they are angry and in mourning, not just because Hillary lost, but also because their sources of information have proven untrustworthy.

    The painful lesson here is that reality isn't always what we want it to be or what others say it ought to be.  
    Every person, group and facet of nature contains some element of truth. 

    Understanding truth requires opening ourselves up to a variety of information sources and differing points of view.    

       Due to my passions for theater and music, I have many friends and acquaintances who are extremely liberal in their social and political preferences, while I am extremely conservative. 

    I like most of my liberal friends, though I disagree with their politics and preferences.  I know them to be pleasant, decent, caring people trying to live their lives as best they can with what they understand.  I appreciate them and their creative skills, experiences and abilities.  I enjoy sharing theater and music with them. Theater is a place where all points of view may be represented and all our stories may be told.  

     I know all my liberal friends are hurting now. I hurt for them.  I wish I could comfort them.  But, I am a conservative who voted for Trump.  Many of my liberal friends have rejected me -- to include unfriending me on Facebook --- because of my "tough love" approach, trying to force them to look at different perspectives.  

    The longer my liberal friends refuse to accept that there is a different point of view from theirs, the longer they will suffer. 

        Schools started abdicating their responsibility to teach students how to think and consider different points of view in the 1950’s with Dr. Spock and the latest social craze in child-rearing that insisted that children were not to be spanked. 

    Soon parents and authority figures were unable/unwilling to impose any discipline or consequences for bad behavior.  Therefore, many children have grown up to be bratty, self-centered, narcissistic, disrespectful adults.  

   All you liberals out there who are devastated at Trump's election have the liberal agenda to blame for allowing our country to deteriorate to the point where schools and society have abandoned respect for individual achievement and teaching the truth about American history and traditional American values, in favor of political correctness.  Liberals accept and embrace diversity as it applies to race, gender, sexual orientation or country of origin—as long as the race is Black or Hispanic, the gender is female, the sexual orientation is gay or transgender and the religion is Islamic or Muslim.  We are told that all these groups and special interests are entitled to be angry because of how unfairly America has treated them in the past.  We may not shut down their protests even when they disrupt traffic, destroy property or hurt other people.  White police officers are not permitted to defend themselves against Black thugs who are trying to kill them.   Christians and other people of faith are not entitled to exercise their beliefs and must kowtow and do the bidding of gay activists, because at one point in our history, stupid bigoted, so-called Christians, persecuted gay people.  

    The diversity of Republican or conservative principles and the old-fashioned Judeo-Christian values upon which this country was founded, are forbidden, especially on most college campuses.  

     Instead of trying to lift everybody up to the best they can be, we discourage achievement and try to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator so that nobody should have to feel threatened by individual differences or abilities. 

     Everybody gets a cookie and a trophy just for showing up.  Thus, there is little incentive to do anything other than “show up.”

    In the name of political correctness, liberals champion multiculturalism, reverse-racism and hatred for America's founding principles. 

    The teaching of basic skills in reading, writing, mathematics and real science has been abandoned in favor of political correctness and drilling rote answers to standardized tests.

    For over 60 years, we have been hounded and hammered to believe in man-made climate change -- a myth foisted upon the whole world by liberals as a justification to try to control people's behavior and extort money from people – mostly everyday, ordinary American taxpayers.  This, long-term global-scale brainwashing has marginalized the economy and frightened people into believing that humans are constantly poisoning nature. 

   Man-made climate change is a hoax. It’s junk science.  Mother Nature is tough.  She’s bigger than all of us, and she can take care of herself better than we can with all our superstitions, phobias and false notions about nuclear energy and fossil fuels.  The polar bears and the migrant birds can take care of themselves.  Humanity and nature would be better off if we just let nature take care of itself. That’s the truth.   
   God designed the world such that the treasures and bounties of nature would help provide for the sustenance and support of mankind. That is also the truth.  Except that Liberals keep telling us that God does not exist and believing in God offends people.  
    I am sorry to hurt people's feelings, but God is alive and well.  There is a little piece of God in all of us.  Spirit and our souls believe in us whether or not we believe in them.  Trying to understand more about Spirit would help us in thinking and coping with all of life's challenges. 

     Sadly many of us don't know how to look and listen for truth.  We fear and even hate anything or anybody that might threaten the status quo and force us to reevaluate long-held, emotionally based, cherished beliefs, habits and patterns.

         We depend on the media, government, religion, medicine, unions, teachers, family, friends, our cell phones, computers and our favorite politicians to tell us how to think and what to feel. 

      Despite whatever they may say to the contrary, the media, politicians and unions have their own agendas. 

    The mainstream media is not objective.  

    The government doesn’t care about us. 

    Unions and politicians don’t care about us. 

    We are pawns in their quests for money, power and control. 

   Our dependence on them to think for us has caused us to stray so far from our purpose and design as human beings, that we are at war with each other and with ourselves -- inside ourselves -- fighting against our own nature.  

    We want instant, simple answers that endorse what we already believe. We aren’t looking for truth. 

    We want an easy life that frees us from the hard work of thinking.

     Thinking requires grappling with the unknown.  It requires opening ourselves up to different perspectives and sources of information and then deciding for ourselves.  

    Thinking is too hard and too scary for many of us. Yet we are designed to be thinking creatures.  Trying to separate ourselves and each other from that part of our humanity, only perpetuates ignorance, anger, pain and division.   

    

Healing and Consideration After the Election - Nov 9, 2016

   Editor's note:  I had published some stream-of-consciousness thoughts on the eve of the election.  I have since re-thought, edited and changed some of my comments, so I am re-publishing this with reflections on the election results.

                People on all sides have this fantasy that if their favorite candidates get elected, it will instantly solve all the world’s problems and make everything wonderful without any of us having to do anything other than vote.    

    It won’t.

    The scars and wounds that have been inflicted on the country and mass consciousness by the anger and vitriol of the past 18 months -- the past eight years under Obama's divisive presence in the White House -- will still be there, raw, gaping and in much need of healing.  

    We have not been at war, physically as with the Civil War, but the emotional trauma and sense of divisiveness that has been festering for many years, is real and massive. If we continue to allow, endorse and encourage separatist groups and individuals in their childish narcissism, I predict we soon will find ourselves in a  physical civil war.  There have been and continue to be massive, violent protests across the country over Trump's election.
   Many colleges have instituted grief counseling and campus-wide cry-in's to coddle and soothe students who were "traumatized" by Trump's election.  Why are colleges indulging and supporting this kind of immaturity instead of teaching students how to live in the real world and cope as adults? 

      It is my perception that Hillary Clinton doesn't give a damn about anybody but Hillary. She has a record of dishonesty, meanness, incompetence, greed and graft, stretching back to when she was lawyering with the Rose Law Firm and she and her phony, philandering, rapist husband were in the Arkansas governor's mansion.  
     As far as I'm concerned Hillary and Obama murdered four people from our Benghazi embassy staff in September 2012 by refusing to provide them with appropriate security and military support.  Obama and Hillary murdered them, the same as if they had picked up a gun and pulled the trigger themselves.  Then they lied about it and are still lying about it-- all to maintain the illusion that they have conquered terrorism in that part of the world.   

     Hillary’s and Obama’s failures and lies are not seen by people who live in the echo chamber of liberalism which contains nothing but self-serving, gossip-mongering, fear-promoting sophistry.     

     To me, all the hype and novelty about the first female American President breaking glass ceilings seems a shallow justification to vote for or against anybody.  But, for the sake of discussion, let's turn the Presidential ticket upside down:
      First of all, Hillary would be disqualified because of her questionable email usage, selling access to foreign entities, and the pay-for-play schemes to grift money to the Clinton Foundation, which pretends to be a charity.  
    Now what if Trump had been the Democrat candidate?  (Many of our #neverTrump Republican friends swear that he really is more liberal and Democrat than he is Republican or conservative.)  Let us further imagine that somebody like Carly Fiorina or Sarah Palin was the Republican candidate.    

     Would you be voting for the woman in the name of breaking the glass ceiling, or would you be supporting Trump?  
        I don't expect Trump to fix everything instantly, despite his many boasts.   It has taken us over 60 years to get ourselves into the mess that we are now in  -- especially in the dumbing down of education. Millions of Americans across three, if not four generations, don't know how to think. They have little ability or willingness to objectively consider life from different points of view and come to logical conclusions based on an understanding of history, science, economics, current events, human nature and their own experiences.  

        We don't know how to look and listen for truth.  We fear and even hate anything or anybody that might threaten the status quo and force us to reevaluate long-held cherished beliefs, habits and patterns.     

       In his book “The Art of Selfishness” David Seabury, recalled:  “…A man once threatened to beat me in order to change my mind.  He meant it, too.  But before he started, I said quietly: ‘After we are through fighting, my mind won’t be changed.  You can kill me, you can’t convince me.  You’ll remember this when resting in jail’.  My firmness overcame his rage. We didn’t fight.”

       The dependence on the media, government, religion, medicine, unions, teachers, family, friends, our cell phones, computers and lies from our favorite politicians, has caused us to stray so far from our purpose and design as human beings, that we are at war with ourselves -- inside ourselves -- fighting against our own nature.  

    As a favorite teacher/philosopher friend said: "People want instant, simple answers and easy, carefree living. They don't want enlightenment."  

    In our naiveté we believe that governments making laws will fix all the world's problems and turn life into some magical fairy tale kingdom where there is no strife or stress.  

     Does anybody consider the herculean effort required to enforce all the laws and regulations that are floating around the earth right now? How should we deal with contradicting laws and regulations? What do we do with people who don't care about laws and regulations?

   Thinking requires grappling with the unknown.  It requires opening ourselves up to different perspectives and sources of information and then deciding for ourselves.  

    Thinking is hard work.  For many of us it's too hard and too scary.  Yet we are designed to be thinking creatures.  Trying to separate ourselves and each other from that part of our humanity, only perpetuates ignorance, pain and division.