OUT WITH SCROOGE

posted by James Reel

    Talk about donning gay apparel …

    A gruff, aging man sits alone in front of his television on Christmas Eve. He's too cheap to pay for premium channels, so he flips irritably through the usual offerings: It's a Wonderful Life. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Humbug, all of it.
    The joke is that this man is a 21st-century version of Ebenezer Scrooge, and he inhabits one of the hoariest Christmas tales of all: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Yet we find this "Ben" Scrooge not in Victorian England, but in contemporary America. He's a bitter, self-loathing interior designer. He's gay. And so is nearly every other character in Joe Godfrey's A Queer Carol, being presented by the Alternative Theatre Company.
    Godfrey's treatment of the Dickens story doesn't actually stray too far from the original. True, it's updated and queered, but it remains a serious-minded account of how one man's soul gradually withers but is revived by ghostly visitations on Christmas Eve.

BAD NEWS

posted by James Reel

    NPR News is heavily playing the story of Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota undergoing surgery after an apparent stroke. This is valid national news—control of the Senate hinges on Johnson’s health, because his state’s Republican governor could replace him with a Republican—but to what purpose did NPR play a recording just now of Johnson becoming disoriented when the stroke hit during a conference call? You could call this a number of things; I’d start with “tasteless.” NPR News producers should be ashamed of themselves.