4:05 AM as I begin to type.
A hot sweltering night. Never below 90F.
I just finished watching the 1998 stage production of Cabaret, which featured Alan Cummings (a treasure) as the MC.
I have, for some reason, gone into a bit of a deep dive into the musical the last day or so.
It was, I think, the first professional stage production I ever saw live. I took Emily, my first love to the show for our first valentines together.
I was not aware that the show was about the slow to sudden rise of the Nazis when I bought the tickets. It was 2004 and I don’t recall off-hand just what authoritarian thing President W. Bush was doing at the time, but it was something.
Enough that the rest of the night was spent with Emily in tears. So worried about the creeping rise of fascism in our own country. I thought her dramatic then. A little too much wine with dinner, perhaps.
I wonder how she would feel had she lived long enough to see the rise of Trump and our current strange reality.
Either way, I don’t think she was being dramatic now.
What’s so striking about Cabaret is how it keeps taking me by surprise, no matter how many times I watch it. This was my first experience with the ’98 revival and it is much more straightforward with its portrayal of queer love. Which made it more striking to watch it become so easily destroyed.
The musical begins with Alan Cummings in a trench coat which he strips off to reveal his revealing clothing. It ends the same way but this time he takes off his coat to reveal a concentration camp uniform with a yellow star and a pink triangle.
Or maybe it stands out to me more tonight because yesterday my state of Oklahoma passed one of the strictest anti-trans bills in the country.
Because so many people I grew up with, so many good Christian folks, are becoming more and more bigoted and hateful online.
Because the voices of gay panic and antisemitism and bold-faced racism are so loud now as to be blaring.
I feel so powerless.
I feel so frozen.
I thought that I could write as a weapon: reason and persuasion and an appeal towards love and universal acceptance.
But all words do is create more words: dumb counter-arguments, cognitive bias, stupid dumb bigoted bullshit.
It’s all so much louder than me.
Apparently more pleasant to the ear, since it is so often repeated.
Am I crazy? Am I just too online? Or is this the way we're headed as a country?
I feel crazy.
I feel hopeless.
So frozen.
What can be done? What do I do?
“What good is permitting
Some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away?
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret.”
Tonight, I beseech the full moon.
I surrender my will to the cosmos.
May peace, may justice, may love and splendor find us all.
May tyranny be toppled
May we find a way to fight and a reason to persevere.
May we all survive the coming storm. However mild or severe it may be
4:45 a.m. - 2023-08-02
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