Hamilpence Trumpilton

Editor's Note: In the section below titled "This lawsuit is over," Derek spoke too soon. The Fringe lawsuit is not done. Legalese is, you know, legalistic and not always clear English. We apologize for any misunderstandings our misunderstanding caused. Look for Derek’s column on Tuesday for a corrected interpretation.

Give to the what?

Last Thursday was Give to the Max Day, and you know what that means, Minnesota! It's the day that every nonprofit in the state was fighting tooth and claw for people to give them money; and it was also the day when the good people of Minnesota tried to smother a poor web server with so much generosity that it collapses into a sobbing heap on the floor, hyperventilating and wanting to die. We managed to completely suffocate that poor bastard for most of the day in 2013, but the folks at GiveMN switched service providers the next year, and the big days in both 2014 and 2015 went off rather smoothly. What could go wrong this year?

Well, there was a spot of trouble earlier this year with Kimbia, the service provider for GiveMN, when their services were used to run The Big Give SA, San Antonio's version of Give to the Max. And by "spot of trouble" I mean "massive server failure" that crashed their site and delayed Alamo City's big give for 24 hours. But that lightning wouldn't strike twice, would it? It would be too much of an embarrassment for GiveMN to substantially raise their transaction fee to 6.9% and let those the problems go unaddressed, right?

I guess Kimbia has been marching around in the rain holding up a length of copper pipe under a flagpole, because that lightning sure as hell struck again. The main GiveMN page crashed and burned soon after sunrise. Even though they were able to throw together a rudimentary giving page, it was still plagued with slowdowns, organizations were unable to access their pages to track giving and see who had donated, and the much-touted option for donors to cover the transaction fees for their recipients disappeared into the aether. But I guess that's what you have to put up with when you use a platform that only charges almost twice as much for transaction fees as your average everyday online payment processors.

Despite the problems, though, donors gave over $20 million to Minnesota nonprofits (including you cash-hungry theater companies) in one 24-hour period. That's amazing!

You know what's also amazing? 6.9% of $20 million is $1.38 million, which means that GiveMN should be putting themselves down on their leaderboards as the nonprofit that raked in the most cash that day. Good job, guys!

On behalf of all of us

For theater writers, Hamilton is truly the gift that keeps on giving. From its first inception, when we all got to write articles along the lines of "WHAAA?! A Hip-Hop Musical About Alexander Hamilton!? Hilarious!", to its juggernaut run into the Tony Awards, when we all got to write articles along the lines of "DUH! It's the Most Important Musical Anyone Has Ever Written In the History of Ever! Genius!", the show has filled more column space than any theatrical production since Our American Cousin.

For political writers, Donald Trump is also a the gift that keeps on giving; but it's not really a gift you want. It's like being given a lumpy, poorly wrapped box on Christmas with an odd stain on one side, and you open it up and it's just full of Essence of Pine car deodorizers and some kind of thin, viscous liquid, like industrial lubricant or maybe radiator fluid, but that weird, old uncle of yours who always has bloodshot eyes and smells like stale cigars keeps insisting that there's a prize for you in there somewhere, and you don't understand why the rest of your family is letting him just sit there leering at you, forcing them all to watch as you squirm your hand around in that nauseating, oily box for a present that, even if it's in there, you will never want to keep, and you will never, ever be able to get this smell out of your clothes.

So when these two cultural forces come together in this political climate, you can expect a certain amount of synergy. They go together like peanut butter and cod liver oil.

Here's the story: Vice-President elect Mike Pence and his blindingly white hair went to see Hamilton and the audience booed him vociferously; and to top it off the cast addressed him with a prepared statement during their curtain call. Odds are pretty good you already saw this on your Facebook feed.

There are many good reasons why Mike Pence should be booed at a Broadway show, but, to his credit, Pence displayed a good amount of graciousness in the whole affair. He is a practiced politician who had to know that he was, more or less, marching into the lion's den that night. (After all, this is a man whose policies as governor of Indiana directly contributed to a large HIV outbreak coming to see a show whose current lead actor is HIV-positive, not to mention that Broadway has been very active in raising funds and awareness to fight the spread of AIDS.) And the statement from the stage was rather respectful, too. No name calling, anger, or accusations; just a reiteration of what the musical is essentially about, and a call to the newly-elected veep to remember that promise to represent all of the citizens of this nation. If anything, it was the grumbling groundlings in the audience who were the real jerks. 

It could have been a trifling news story, but, darn it, if there's one thing future president Trump is good at, it's making everything more stupid than it needs to be. So, of course, he took to Twitter to demand an apology from the cast, and it all snowballed into dumb from there. Now there are calls from people who never intended to watch the show anyway to boycott it, as if it were actually possible to boycott a show that is essentially sold out well into the next century. Then there were the witty rejoinders from the theater community. Then there was the poor, misguided Trump supporter who dropped the money to go see the Chicago production of Hamilton and angrily interrupted it, without seeming to realize that it was the cast of the New York production that had the friendly confrontation with Pence.

Once again, Donald Trump displayed his one and only superpower: the ability to reduce everyone around him into opinionated shouting so that he can cloak himself in the cacophony. Not only are his alt-right supporters and the artsy liberal theater-lovers now embroiled in a pointless Twitter war with each other, but now the left and its army of think-piece producers are sparring with each other over what this means! (Never bothering to think-piece their way to, "This means nothing!")

For every writer saying this is nothing more than a distraction from all the seriously awful, embarrassing, corrupt and downright incompetent shit going on in Trumpland, there is another one saying that this is exactly the kind of conversation we need to be having. For every one that says this was a bold, blunt stance against the coming kleptocracy, there is another saying that this is all weak sauce compared to the actual message of the show itself.

I wish I could say with confidence what, if anything, this says about America. Plenty of other people seem to be doing that just fine, but I just can't. Of course a bunch of liberal theater people are going to write some kind of protest against the hypocritical conservative high mucky-mucks, and of course a bunch of conservatives are going to get frothing mad at those highfalutin' dandies on the stage. In other shocking news, gravity continues to pull downward with an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second, and scientists still seem to find water on the bottom of the ocean.

I think we can all agree, though, that if this incident illuminates anything, it's that there's nothing this country can't disagree on; and in the next four years, there's going to be plenty to disagree on. So be careful about how you spend your ire. Donald Trump's main tactic in life is to simply overwhelm and exhaust his opponents with an avalanche of idiocy. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and we can't afford to expend all our energy on every stupid fight he tries to pick, or we won't be ready when the literal Nazis riding his coattails roll into D.C.

This lawsuit is over

Speaking of stupid fight, remember that lawsuit against the Minnesota Fringe Festival? Remember how angry and disagreeable a bunch of you were? You should know that a judge took a look at the complaint, then read the Fringe Festival's full response to the complaint, and decided last week to rule in favor of the Fringe.

I wish I could link you to the judge's ruling, but I can't find that document anywhere on the internet yet. If you don't want to take my word for it, you can go to the Minnesota Judicial Branch's Access Case Records. Click on "I Accept The Above Terms & Conditions", then "Civil, Family & Probate Case Records". Search for Case Number 27-CV-16-11003, and be rewarded with a Register of Actions that ends on 11/17/2016 with "Order Denying Motion". It's spectacularly bland in the way that only a summary of court documents can be. If you really, really have to read the whole order for yourself, you can either beg one of the parties involved to release their copy or wade through a case record request on your own.

In a civil society, this is how disputes should end; and, yes, it is very boring. Now, can we get on with the business of applying for the 2017 Fringe Festival?

It's just science

Hey, all you dancers out there! Listen up! You're now officially athletes!

Sure, you already knew that you expended a great amount of energy, focus and determination to bring your bodies to peak physical form in pursuit of entertainment based on the motion of the human body; but now ESPN has legitimized you as athletes.

Take that, dad from Billy Elliot!