Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Edutainment
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2005 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I'm going to Will Franken's one-man show Good Luck With It tomorrow, and you should too (if you can). Tomorrow's performance includes an optional epilogue about Tookie Williams. I've confirmed with Will that Good Luck With It repeats on Sat., Dec. 10 and Sat., Dec. 17 at The Marsh.
Yesterday night, thanks to a severely overworked video clerk and John's kind lending of his laptop, a bunch of us watched the wonderful 1962 classic The Music Man. Along with The Producers and Chicago, The Music Man has a huckster as its primary character and has the social construction of reality as a very strong theme. When I think about the suspension of disbelief necessary in watching musicals, and the kangaroo court scene in Oklahoma!, I wonder whether the social construction of consensus reality is the subtext of all musials, especially since so many of them have show business as a plot or subplot (viz, Showboat, Kiss Me, Kate, 42nd Street, Bye Bye Birdie, A Chorus Line, Sunset Boulevard, Cabaret, Phantom of the Opera, etc., etc.). But I figure that, even so, Chicago and The Music Man concentrate especially hard on mass delusion for satiric effect.
"The Sadder But Wiser Girl For Me" is a fantastic song and I can't believe I've never heard it before. The term "Shipoopi" and this business of using the evening star to say good night to someone you love are absolutely not elements of my universe. And the ending is almost as apt and deadly as the ending of Urinetown.
Joe and I saw Dr. Phil Zimbardo and a Polish filmmaker speak at the California Academy of Arts and Crafts this week. We got Zimbarded! Joe's account is quite adequate and I direct you to it, as well as to my other previous musings on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
