Mostly Monday Reads: Tableaux and Free to be You and Me

“Vance is a weirdo.  Trump is weird. They make a lovely pair.”  John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I was raised in a city where I never felt I belonged and was a Nerdy Tom Girl bored to tears. Fortunately, my mother loved to travel and always took me to the library.  She also taught me piano starting at age 3.  All I can remember from a lot of that period was what I was told I couldn’t do. I couldn’t wear pants to school–even in a near-blizzard–because whatever. I couldn’t play little league baseball even though I could bat a ball and put it wherever I wanted because whatever. The world of the 1950s and the early 1960s was a world of barriers with the excuses of “just because.”  Books, music, taking my sketchbook on trips to places where no one judged what you did or gave you a speech about what’s not, I found refuges from piety scolds.

J.D. Vance and the deplorable throwbacks that worship Donald want to shove the majority back into a world of barriers.  I looked at the boys with a glare that screamed Broadway Annie Oakley’s song “Anything You Can Do. I can do better; I can do anything better than you.” Then, I worked to prove it at horse camp, on the ski slope, sliding down huge hills in the Missouri River hillsides, or dissecting a pregnant nurse shark after getting my scuba diving license for one of the high school football players because he couldn’t do it.

I was drug into the school psychologist’s office in high school for testing off the walls on ambition, which was considered a male trait on the Bem Sex Role Inventory, BSRI.  They were always testing us for something.  I always found some supportive men. They generally tended to be creative like me, musicians like me, or dreamers of a life beyond boundaries.  Most of these guy friends died in the 1980s.  I was an activist feminist by that time. I was duly working to change the sexual abuse and domestic violence laws in that same boring place.  I also volunteered to go to other states to get the ERA passed.  But, also, at that time, I had to bring meals to these friends, take them to doctor’s appointments, and be prepared to watch them die even as their family turned their backs on them.

I know real misogyny. The faces of misogyny are right there at the top and all over all the Republican tickets.  I know the faces of religious oppression. You can find them in the same place.  I also know the people who can not just let people live and let live but be their authentic selves if that means either wearing a dress or sporting a crew cut when the piety scolds tell you that just isn’t done when you’re you. We all evidently failed the Bem Sex Role test. To hell with defining masculine and feminine traits.

My religion is kindness. I let the local homeless folks use my hose to get water.  They may sit on my porch in the shade of my Magnolia and rest.  I leave fruits from my trees and anything spare I can to feed them. I was taught that for those who have much, much is required by my mother and Nana.  I was also taught to not judge others unless ye be judged yourself. I still believe in many things I was taught in Sunday School. It’s easier, however, to apply them as a Buddhist.  I now have the meditation chops to negate piety scolds.  Piety scolding is not a Buddhist thing.

J.D. Vance better not come to New Orleans.  We’re already planning the protests.  The man who searches for dolphin-on-woman porn, who can’t even defend his wife properly, and who starts the bad performance with “even though she’s not white” better stay out of New Orleans because we will protest and probably too much by his standards. Nothing comes from his mouth, only insults to my neighbors. This is from The Hill.

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice presidential nominee, said this weekend his feelings are not hurt by Democrats labeling him “weird” as past comments he made before being tapped as former President Trump’s running mate are resurfaced.

“No, not at all,” Vance told a Fox News reporter in an interview that aired Sunday. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”

“Look, the price of admission — meaning, the price of getting to serve the people of this country — is the Democrats are going to attack us with everything that they have. I think it’s an honor,” Vance continued.

“As Harry Truman once said, ‘if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen,’” he said.

The brief interview, conducted during a campaign stop, comes nearly two weeks after Trump announced Vance would be his running mate on the GOP presidential ticket.

I personally wonder if Vance has ever seen functional parts of kitchens.  Donald, however, builds it up. This is from Marcie of EmptyWheel. None of us have the power to persecute these people.  First off, the U.S. Constitution lets everyone do their own thing when it comes to Religion.  Second, professors like me, cat ladies like me, and women like me have little to no power.  Just check who the rapists are, the perpetrators of climate change, and the lawmakers who limit our freedom, and you’ll see the demographic that proffers persecution.

The other day, during an address to a Turning Point conference, Trump implored,

Christians, get out to vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians. I love you. I’m [not/a] Christian.You have to get out and vote. In four years, you won’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.

Horse race journalists didn’t care. They found it more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris.

When I first looked at how NYT covered it at 3:37AM ET, this was their headline.

At 8:311AM, this story from Michael Gold was published. It still focused on magnifying the slurs Trump used against Harris.

That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)

Only much later, around noon ET, did Gold figure out that the “not have to vote” stuff was far more newsworthy than Trump calling the Vice President a “bum.”

This mural is at a restaurant in Mayfair, London, called Bacchanalia. It’s artist Gary Myatt’s interpretation of French artist Thomas Couture’s 1847 painting Romans in their Decadence..

Obviously, the media have power.  They can ignore the important stuff and misalign our priorities.

So, it’s no surprise that the Piety Scolds are out on the Tableaux performance art at the opening of the Paris Olympics. Since I spent most of the 40 years of my life reading and getting away from Dodge Street as much as possible, I am fully aware of the role the art form and parlor activity played in suppressed Victorian England and America. It’s not only historical but also in the fiction of the time.  It’s also referred to as melodramatic realism. Children’s books were essential forms of artwork in that style.  Cinema uses it, too.  It’s a form of escape from our rigid piety scolds in many ways. Many paintings of the time were tableau. It’s a really old artform and newly modern Paris was full of tableau performances and caberets with all kinds of acts and audiences.

I still have shits and giggles that some folks don’t know about the 19th-century Bacchanalia art and celebrations during the original Olympics. They even don’t know about Marie Antoinette or the goddess of the Seine River, Sequana.

We had a mythology semester for English in 5th grade and world religions studies in social studies. It was the first time I determined Buddhism was the only sensible religion. Also, my neighbor and friend and I used to play goddesses. She was a year ahead of me, so I got advanced lessons from the book. We’d drag white sheets out of the dirty laundry, make them cloudlike, and play Athena and Aphrodite.

I later named my consulting firm The Minerva Group in the mid-80s! Imagine spending your life thinking people persecute you because your education is sorely lacking!  But one can always make up for that.

Bourdon Sebastien mid 17th Century, Bacchanalia

It’s not surprising that a French choreographer would study these art forms and use them first to represent the Original Olympics with its Dionysian Bachannals combined with the artistry at the time. We’ve also since discovered that the much older DaVinci Last Supper was also used for one of the scenes. A Bacchus/ Dionysus performer crashed the scene.  Now, Piety Scolds are taking everything to task and even Mislabelling the Goddess of the Seine Sequana as one of the riders of the apocalypse.  Okay, it’s the Washington Post. I get it. “Paris Olympics organizers sorry for Last Supper at Opening Ceremonies. The tableau included a woman in the role of Jesus, drag queens, and gay icons as disciples. It was crashed by a man in blue as Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry.”

Organizers of the Paris Olympics apologized on Sunday for a performance during Friday’s Opening Ceremonies that featured an apparent reenactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” amid mixed messages about the piece’s intent.

The tableau included a woman with a halo-like crown in the role of Jesus as well as drag queens and gay icons as disciples; it was crashed by a scantily clad blue man wearing a headdress of fruit — Dionysus, the Greek god of fertility, wine and revelry.

Church leaders and some conservative politicians condemned the performance as a perversion of the scene, recounted in the Bible, on the eve of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Saturday called the performance a “mockery [that] was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world.” A U.S. telecommunications firm, C Spire, said it was pulling its advertising from the Summer Games. The French Conference of Catholic Bishops also objected.

My life as the musical director of a drag show, DJ, chorus, and band (piano). We were prime time on Bourbon Street for a few years. The worst patrons were Brides and Bridesmaids who would make everything all about them. Respect a queen because it’s the one time she can display a vital part of herself.

I wonder what upset them more: the woman as Jesus or the dragqueens?  I understand a movement within the Catholic religion is trying to reposition Marie Antoinette as a Christian hero.  So look who is upset about all of these.  The White Men in power deny the rest of us our humanity and identity.  What’s worse is the Olympic Committee is sanitizing the videos of the various legs of the tableaux. So, let’s look at this.  Some of my women friends like wearing men’s clothing and having crew cuts. They wear tuxedos, and I have never seen them in any dress.

I have friends who are now dead because of Ronald Reagan’s response to AIDS who loved to play dress up and dolls with me when we were kids.  They do so because they were never allowed to express themselves as they truly felt they were. They were not allowed their feminine sides, and men like J.D. Vance were the ones who oppressed everything feminine.

This is Miss Jessica DeLorean, who has a killer voice. She’s got big hair because she comes from Texas. My favorite part of our performance was when she sang songs like “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” or “I Say a Little Prayer For You,” which I introduced to her and arranged especially for her.  She frequently flirted with men. I would watch many of them with crawling skin and think yeah, now you know what it’s like.  Many of them I bet are still confused about why women take the bear. Most of my gay friends have a drag queen outfit in their closet somewhere because it’s the time they are allowed to play dress up with the little girls in their neighborhood. Something that they were not allowed as kids.  It’s why performance artists like Cher and Dolly Parton are flattered to be featured in shows where the purpose is to highlight their talent and their status as gay icons.  Neither is a Piety Scold, and they don’t misunderstand the art form.

My WiFi carries the name Queens of Poland Avenue because Women and Gays were primary on my block. We prefer that because you know it’s been a rough life, and you need someone who just loves you for who you are. This time of year, my outfit is usually men’s jockey shorts and the kind of t-shirts made famous by Marlon Brando, who, like many men in the creative arts, had to pretend to be something he wasn’t. One day, I will go to the FQ and join the show to shout Stella!  It won’t be because I like the character, but I want to do the drag performance to show my favorite Dead of Summer couture.  Women do drag.

That’s what freedom should mean. Free to be you and Me.  That is the name of the album my oldest daughter listened to constantly as a kid. It was a gift from one of my friends in NOW.  They had a baby shower for me. Free to love any other consenting adult.  Free to be ambitious and not particularly care about marriage. But free to marry if that’s what you want.  This country is about Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Justice.  That can’t happen without respect being granted to those just living their lives and doing no harm to others.

This blog is a safe space.  Given Donald and J.D. Vance and the thralls, we have enough to deal with daily in the news cycle. We understand different views but do not think it creates a positive environment to attack others and their lifestyle choices. Please respect this.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?