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I haven't blogged since Saturday? Whoops.

Well, over the weekend I saw a really cute troupe of high-schoolers do a production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins. They were ridiculously good for their age and experience levels, although some were a bit too cute for the parts of lunatic president-killers, of course. And I was vaguely disturbed by some of the changes to the script (very slight, mostly just substitution of the word "fuck".) Only one change really bugged me, which occurred in the song "The Ballad of Booth", whence John Wilkes Booth screamed, "How this country can never recover/ from that vulgar, high-and mighty negro-lover..."

Being intimately familiar with both the OCR and 2004 revival recording, I know very well that the word "negro" is a rather ridiculous alteration to the line. Surely we can believe that the man who killed the president - they even showed the kid shooting a cardboard cutout of Lincoln with a very convincing stage gun - would have used, well, "the n word".

I know, it's a disturbing word - it disgusts me to say it and shocks me to hear it, having been so socialized, but it shouldn't bother anyone in the context of a song being sung by John Wilkes Frickin Booth.

The other thing that happened is that I've put in to use two of my PTO days to detox from coffee. Two weeks from now I will be in a self-imposed one-woman Caffeine Rehab.

Labels: betty ford, non-racist showtunes

Why are you in Tavie's head? 7:51 PM | shower me with attention