Poll-lite conversation

Stop it with the polls already. I'm talking to you, AP, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, M-O-U-S-E. We just don't believe them. And you're starting to sound pathetic.

Don't you understand that all of us, every single one of us, have already made up our minds? There isn't going to be any real movement, up or down or sideways, for Romney or Obama or Virgil Goode or whoever, at all, of any kind, between now and the election. The election is set. Romney is going to clean Obama's clock.

Pish posh, you snort, our polls say...your polls are wrong. Dead. Wrong. You're simply not talking to the right people. The ones you are talking to are lying. And you are lying to yourselves. And to us.

Need proof? Okay. How many of you predicted Chik-Fil-A Tuesday?

We're done here.

Letter

Dear President Hopeychange,

Ah, so much going on, I don't even know where to start. But here's a good place: you saying on Letterman that you represent the entire country.

 

Dude, you don't. You don't represent me, or any other American, at all.  

There is, as you well know, a big difference between a US citizen and an American. I mean, you're a US citizen, odd birth certificate notwithstanding, but you're definitely not an American. An American believes the individual is more important than the mass, everyone is responsible for his own behavior, all rights are inherent, and the government is, at best, a necessary evil with very restricted powers.

Tell me what, if any of that, do you actually believe?

Seems to me you pretty much hold a completely opposite view on all those points. You are willing to impoverish Joe the Plumber just to give the people behind him a "fair shot." You blame Wall Street and banks for your own party's destruction of the housing market. You want to regulate free speech. And if there's one thing you are definitely into, it's expanding the power and reach of the US government so that it can tell us what to eat, what to think, what to read, and what to say.

From where does such hubris arise?

Well, that's easy to figure out— your Dad and Mom and Frank Davis Marshall filling your young skull with all the tripe of Marxism and collectivism, your drug-addled high school days making everything about you, and your extreme self-righteous college and post-college activism. What truly puzzles me, though, is, in the face of all the evidence, you still believe that crap.

I mean, you have more than enough historical proof that the entire collectivist/centralized approach to societal governance simply doesn't work. It impoverishes, enervates, coarsens, everyone. Heck, the  last three years alone show that all of your policy concepts simply don't work; yet, you remain committed to them.

So, you are either an oblivious moronic pseudo-intellectual masquerading as an open-minded sophisticate, like most Democrats, or...

A hate-filled, arrogant, contemptuous demagouge intent on destroying the Constitution.

Which is it?

Your friend,

Schlub

All's Sort of Well

Schlub had taken a bit of a theatrical hiatus this past year, but went back to it last weekend. I attended Shakespeare Theater's Free For All performance of All's Well That Ends Well.

Not being overly familiar with the play, I didn't have big expectations. There's no memorable soliloquies in it like "St. Crispin's Day" or "All the World's a Stage," at least, not one your average Schlub knows. So, I wasn't prepared to be wowed.

And I wasn't. "Workmanlike" would be a good one-word description. Everyone hit their lines and did their steps and there was even some singing and it was all pretty good. I was laughing throughout the entire thing because there's some funny stuff in there, especially Parolle's attempt to convince Helena that virginity is wrong. But, overall...eh.

Marsha Mason played the Countess of Rossillion. Yes, that Marsha Mason, and, ever since The Goodbye Girl, Schlub is somewhat of a fan. But she played the role like Marsha Mason playing a role: once you've seen her in something, you've seen her in everything. Cameron Folmar played Parolles in a distressingly flamboyant manner that was one mincing step too many. And poor Tony Roach. He was absolutely outstanding in The Liar, but, in Bertram, he's got a character so friggin' nasty there's no saving the guy.

There were some outstanding performances, of course. Miriam Silverman, who I just love, and who was equally outstanding as Lucrece in The Liar, did a great job with Helena. Adam Green, another Liar alumnus (and Miriam Silverman's husband), was hilarious as Lavatch, but had a tendency to overdo it a bit. The best performance, though, was Paxton Whitehead as Lafew. Oh man, he killed it, especially when he and Parolles were going at each other.

So, overall...eh. But a good eh.