A Tuna Christmas

Saw the wickedly funny satire “A Tuna Christmas” at Valparaiso’s Chicago Street Theater yesterday. First performed 1989, it was the second in a series that included “Greater Tuna,” “Red, White and Tuna,” and “Tuna Does Vegas.” Tuna is a small Texas town, and the wicked satire featured three actors playing over 20 characters, both men and women. Evidently originators Jaston Williams and Joe Sears performed the play as a two-person show and were invited to put it on in front of George and Barbara Bush at the White House. It opens with deejays Arles Struvie and Thurston Wheelis at radio station OKKK announcing that the notorious “Christmas Phantoms” is vandalizing yard displays put up in connection with the annual contest. Other characters include Didi Snavely, who has a used weapons store, and hubby R.R., who claims he has sighted UFOs. Sheriff Givens is nicknamed “Rubber Sheets” because he wet his bed at church camp. Housewife Bertha Bumiller is a member of Smut Snatchers of the New Order. Other characters include two midgets and a gay director, Joe Bob Lipsey. It was quite a hoot. At the Paparazzi Restaurant with the Hagelbergs and Pat Cronin and Tom Eaton, learned that the Bears lost to Green Bay with QB Cutler throwing two more interceptions. Home in time to enjoy the Eagles defeat the hated New York Giants, 45-38 in a real shoot-out. Got in a couple chapters of Gore Vidal's "Burr." Old Aaron tells his young associate that he could have been president in 1800 had he not, unlike Jefferson, been an honorable man. Burr was supposed to be Jefferson's running mate, but the two men received an equal number of electoral votes, throwing the election into the House of Representatives.

Had trouble opening documents from my old computer that had used a 1997 version of Microsoft Word. Strangely, some files opened just fine while others wouldn’t behave. Got help from technicians Jackie Coven and Velate Sullivan. At lunch Alan Lindmark and Neil Goodman started telling jokes. I have almost no repertoire except one that I found in Rolling Stone magazine said to be a favorite of late show host Craig Ferguson. I used it in the "Retirement Journal," and it goes: Salesman knocks on a door, and a ten year-old answers in bra and panties smoking a cigar. Salesman asks, 'Are mommy and daddy home?' Kids says, 'What the f--- do you think?'"

Salem Press mailed me a copy of my review of Clay Risen’s book about the 1968 race riots, "A Nation at War." Here it is:

“We learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong
Less to what flatters us than to what scars.”
Stanley Kunitz, “The Dark and the Fair.”
***
Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz’s epigraph, though composed years earlier, captures the harsh reality of evaporating optimism during the fateful spring of 1968 as events spun out of control in American ghettoes. Journalist Clay Risen recreates such memorable moments as Martin Luther King’s prophetic “I’ve been to the mountaintop” Memphis speech, Robert F. Kennedy’s addressing a stunned African-American crowd in Indianapolis, Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael exhorting followers to take up the gun, the Lyndon B. Johnson White House in crisis mode, and Maryland governor Spiro Agnew egregiously berating black Baltimorean community leaders. This day-by-day account explores not only the diverse causes of the riots but also why certain cities, such as Gary, Indiana, and New York City, did not go up in flames, perhaps in part due to diligence by mayors Richard Gordon Hatcher and John Lindsey. Once sparked, the looting and mayhem were well nigh impossible to stop. For many, rioting was both cathartic and exciting, no matter how counterproductive the long-term consequences. Often the sequence went like this: angry militants smash store windows; youngsters grab what items they can carry off; “professional” looters load commodities into vehicles; arsonists then torch buildings with Molotov cocktails, occasionally incinerating folks still inside.

The white backlash was inevitable. Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon successfully adopted “law and order” as his central campaign theme. By year’s end Bobby Kennedy was long dead and Spiro Agnew vice-president elect. As Risen concludes, “What was once a problem to be solved became a threat to be contained. Security for the suburbs replaced opportunity for blacks as the watchword.” If the inchoate message was, “Pay attention to us,” the opposite sadly proved true. Scars left by the riots still remain in cities across the country.

This just in. The 2010 inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which I visited this past summer and thoroughly enjoyed) include ABBA, Genesis (I'm surprised they aren't in already) and the Iggy Pop's band the Stooges. It's been a great ride recently for ABBA ever since "Momma Mia!" was such a hit, both as a play and then a movie starring Meryl Streep. My favorite group of late, Owl City, reminds me of ABBA.