No President Left Behind
Yes in one week President George W. Bush will be voted out of office, and tonight I performed what will most likely be my last performance of my play The Re-Education of George W. Bush—No President Left Behind! I can’t imagine anyone wanting to book it after the election even though the play ultimately is not about George W. and much more about us.
I performed the play tonight in Cookeville, TN at Tennessee Tech’s Backdoor Playhouse. I feel bitter sweet about laying this one down. It is one of my most ambition plays, much more complex than Homo No Mo even though it contains many of the same characters (Marvin, Chad, Tex, Rev. Meadows and Vlad). In this play I appear as myself three different times speaking about my mother, her life, her death and her values.
In the play I also get to break out from simply gay issues and provide a series of lessons for the president about skin privilege, male privilege, the environment (and the impact our diets have on it), foreign policy, institutionalized homophobia, and change–the sort of change that needs to happen for those of us raised in a world where we have been programmed to be racist, sexist, homophobic, wasteful and violent.
Marvin Bloom, who now has branched off into his own stuff with YouTube videos and features on podcasts, serves as the host of the play. (Oh and don’t forget to vote for Trans-Ponder podcast at the Podcast Awards.) In the Bush play Marvin is still ex-gay and a strong Bush supporter. Even so he gets to share some of the most important material including the fact that after the American and British allied forces liberated the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, they free all the prisoners EXCEPT the homosexuals. These we sent back to prison to finish their sentence. This deeply moves Marvin who finally squeaks out the statement, “But we’re the good guys.”
Vlad gives a foreign policy lesson letting the audience know where Osama Bin Laden came from, who trained him and brought him to Afghanistan. (That would be U.S.) He then does a Russian Folk Pop Interpretive Dance for Condoleezza Rice.
I will get to use some of the segments elsewhere. Just this weekend at the Our Family Matters conference in Nashville, I perform the scene where Rev. Dr. Meadows speaks about the sin of Sodom. He reminds the audience that the mob of Sodomites wanting to have sex with Lot’s two visitors has “nothing to do with what happens in the happy homes of lesbian and gay couples and much more to do with what happened at say Abu Ghraib prison.”
Tex shares with the audience just how different his life was when he lived for one week as a Black woman. This monologue is based on interviews I conducted with Black women living in the Hartford, CT area. I recently performed this scene as part of a diversity training for a school in Connecticut.
But as a whole play, I think it is over 😦 I may have an audio of it from when I performed it this summer at the Friends General Conference. I doubt I will produce a video of it, although I may publish the script some time.
Through my art I process so much of my life and pain. I worked on the Bush play as my mother slowly died of cancer. After she passed away, I was finally able to finish and only then realized that I needed to include her in the play. The performances served as a means for me to mourn her loss and share her wisdom and light with others. I feel as if I carried her through this play this past 18 months since I premiered The Re-Education of George W. Bush in Portland, OR.
Since then I have performed it in Hartford, CT, Sarasota, FL, Narrowsburg, NY (near where I grew up), Washington, DC, Johnston, PA, Memphis, TN, Providence, RI, Vancouver, BC, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Malta, and Sweden.
My only regret is that I did not get to perform it more in the USA. Sadly many event organizers felts frightened that the play was too political and that they would get into some sort of trouble. To me that indicates that we are ALREADY in trouble, trouble that will take more than one new president to resolve.
I feel bitter sweet. I know I still carry my mother with me. Since her death I have felt a fearlessness that I never knew before. I feel grateful that we will move on from what has been eight years of a descent into political darkness perpetuated by the most corrupt government in my lifetime and perhaps in our entire history. We have deepened our bloody history and have done dreadful things in Afghanistan and Iraq, and today are far less secure in the world than before we launched our wars of revenge.
I’m ready for a new day and to work towards a better future. John McCain says that Senator Obama is not ready to lead, that he is not tested. McCain has already been tested and has failed that test. He knows war. We need something different. We need to emerge from an old America of racism and violence and sexism and waste and homophobia. One man will not lead us out of that mess. We each have a part.
The Re-Education of George W. Bush was never about the president. It is about each one of us who have a George Bush inside of us needing to be educated. He may be out of office soon, but the work remains. In fact, our work only just begins.
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Speaking of Marvin, he appears in a video interview conducted by Robin Hankins for Just as I Am. In classic Marvin fashion he sounds crazy, says some profound things, then insults the host. Gay man or creepy gnome? Marvin reveals all. Check him out.This week we discuss the public perception of LGBT people nationally and globally and particularly in the media. There are a ton of links below that inform our conversation, so check them all out, and of course, enjoy this week’s erotic poem!
Peterson Toscano's A Musing 