Posts Tagged → disarm
Riverdance 25th Anniversary Show A+
Last night the Princess of Patience and I drove to Reading, PA, to watch the 25th anniversary show of the much celebrated Riverdance show that took western countries by storm 25 years ago. We enjoyed the show very much, especially the tap dancing part, which is the height of dancing talent.
The venue was the historic “Rajah” theater, now the Santander Performing Arts Center, in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania. The theater’s interior is nicely artistic and harkens to an earlier time in American history, when design and materials were stone, stained glass, crafted metalwork, and did not include ubiquitous bright neon and loads of plastic. Parking was abundant, whether on the street or in lots or in nearby parking garages.
Comfortably parking my fat butt in one of the old seats was another matter, and I tried to joke with the tall lady to my right whose elbow kept bumping into my arm. Or maybe my arm kept bumping into her elbow, with the result that each of us watched the show with one arm stretched across our chest to avoid discomfiting the other person. Point being that these are smaller seats and could use a few inches added to either side to comfortably accommodate larger, wider, broader bodied people. If you are pint-sized like the Princess of Patience, then you will be more than just fine. The venue was clean, tidy, well maintained, and had no weird old smells.*
Riverdance is fundamentally about Irish tapdance, or at least it was 25 years ago. Back then people commented that this kind of tap dancing was not really culturally Irish per se, but the fact is that it is its own thing and the people doing it and promoting it are mostly Irish dancing to lots of Irish music. So I call it Irish tap dance, and it is a lot of fun to watch. Beyond the outstanding tap dancing abilities of the individual performers, the audience is also entertained by the choreography and the perfectly executed timing of the performers as a troupe. Add in some Celtic-themed music, with Irish musical instruments like the Uillean pipes and drums, some traditional Irish style clothing, some songs sung in Gaelic, and you have the entire package. Excellent light show and dry ice fog for effect.
My favorite performance was the eight men executing some sort of intensely high energy quasi military exercise, with yelled commands from one to another. It was so perfectly timed and crisply done that the audience roared when they finished. Wow. Impressive!
My least favorite (as there is bound to be in almost every kind of theatrical performance) scenes are the singing. Because of the sound system, I can never tell if this is piped in and mouthed by the performers, or is, in fact, their own world class singing voices. I have my suspicions. The sole acoustical instrument scene was outstanding, but again, like the singing, sometimes it is hard to believe that the world-class fiddling is being done by the leaping nymph in front of me, and that it is not being piped in. No question that the percussion guy is incredibly talented. One request: Someone at some point in the show should wear some woad on his face, like Michael Flatley occasionally did. Show some true Celtic pride.
Probably the most entertaining dance routine was near the end of the show, when the backdrop (digital screen, as is standard now on stages almost everywhere) switched from the Emerald Isle countryside to a Downtown-to-Brooklyn B Train station and Manhattan cityscape, with a Hispanic guy and a black guy each doing their own ethnic styles of tap dance. Then the Irish guys enter in a mock-up of the old West Side Story confrontation, and the two groups have a series of dance-offs against each other using their different styles. And then of course they dance together. Lots of performer humor and mugging for the audience, as well as amazing dance, and the audience enjoyed it a lot.
I counted about thirty dancing performers and six musicians last night, and both the Princess of Patience and I felt like we had experienced a full evening of high talent entertainment. During intermission a bunch of little girls who had come to watch the show did their best Irish tap dance in one of the aisles, to lots of praise and cheering by the audience. And naturally, the entire audience was a sea of shades of green and various family green plaids and the famous Black Watch plaid, including tartan caps, shirts, coats, a kilt and sporran, and more than a few shilleileighs.
Riverdance 25th Anniversary Show is an A+ fun and impressive night out for anyone and any family. You will leave feeling energized and positive. When we first saw Riverdance decades ago, it was a kind of “If you weren’t Irish when you showed up, you will feel Irish when you leave at the end” experience. The updated version is truly a representation of America 2023, with plenty of Ireland’s best along with “culturally updated” themes that are fun.
*A note about the Santander Performing Arts Center: Like almost every other performing arts center I can think of, Santander Performing Arts Center does not allow its patrons to carry any defensive weapons on its premises. This means that patrons must disarm before entering the building, and then we exit into downtown Reading at night unarmed and vulnerable. Downtown Reading, PA, is not a safe place. The streets are dirty, trash is blowing around everywhere, and there are aimless or homeless people walking around, standing around, everywhere. When we entered this venue, we had to go through metal detectors carrying our keys and cell phones with our hands held high as if we were being detained by law enforcement. It is a humiliating experience. When I broached the idea to a security guard at the entrance of having lock boxes available inside the foyer to concealed carry people, he responded “That is an excellent suggestion, but it is never going to happen. With the current management never, it will never happen, I am sorry to say.” Which raises the questions of why these performing arts venues do this, and what responsibility do they have if you are mugged or beaten while approaching their building or after exiting it. Do they really have our safety at heart, if they disarm us and then turn us loose vulnerable on the city streets at night? I do not like being disarmed, especially when I do not see realistic alternatives being provided by the hosting venues.
Democrat Party 100% owns Uvalde school shooting
The mass shooting in yet another school, this time in Uvalde, Texas, is like all the others: It was preventable and is 100% the result of the Democrat Party and its subsidiary, the teacher’s unions, who control government schools with an iron fist.
As we have seen over the past year, the Biden Administration’s DOJ and FBI have been treating justifiably angry parents of school children as “domestic terrorists.” Relying on the First Amendment, these parents formally object through long established democratic processes to the hijacking of their taxpayer-owned schools by anti-America indoctrinators posing as teachers and school administrators.
But because the Democrat Party is using the power of government to try to silence its political critics, and to protect the government school system from being taken back by the taxpayer citizens, they have teamed up with various private anti-America groups like the National School Board Association and the National Education Association to “inform” the DOJ and FBI on who to illegally target. While this behavior is obviously un-democratic and a grotesque misuse of government power and authority, it is in and of itself not the focus of today’s essay.
What the forgoing means is that government-run “public schools” are just another captured outpost of the Democrat Party and its anti-America, bizarro sexual and cultural groomers who must be defended at all costs from the peaceful citizens who actually own the schools and underwrite them via hard-paid taxes out of their pockets. It means that public schools are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democrat Party and its primary educational arm, the National Education Association teacher’s union and its affiliates. And what this means is that pretty much everything that happens inside public school grounds is either OK’d or enabled by the teacher’s unions and the Democrat Party.
Including school shootings.
Believe me, if the Democrat Party and its teacher’s unions did not want racist Critical Race Theory taught in public schools, it wouldn’t be. If they didn’t want school shootings, there would not be any. Teachers’ unions have an absolute lock on public schools, and so whatever happens in these schools happens because of careful decisions the Democrat Party and the teacher’s unions have made. They own all of these things.
One conscious decision they have made over and over is to leave public schools as purposefully soft targets, easily accessed by murderous criminals who wreak mayhem and bloodshed in school buildings almost at will. In the wake of previous school shootings, Democrats in Congress have voted to prevent armed police from being in schools. Just the other day, Democrat Party US Senator Chuck Schumer blocked legislation that would make public schools a thousand times safer by allowing administrators and teachers to be armed.
Why would there be a constant effort by the Democrat Party to keep public schools as soft targets, their school children, staff and employees disarmed and sitting ducks? Because the Democrat Party is addicted to bloodshed and crises, at any cost. Nothing moves the political ball down the field like a scary crisis with tons of innocent blood spilled, and so the Democrat Party and its teachers’ unions have cultivated the kinds of circumstances that allow these shootings to easily occur. Such is the Left’s desire for full control over America that no sacrifice is too big, there are never enough dead children and blood soaked headlines. Anything to gain control.
The Uvalde massacre shows once again that the Democrat Party is both arsonist and then fireman.
I know this might sound nuts, but given how much official skullduggery we have already seen aimed at illegally expanding the federal surveillance state against law abiding American citizens, I would not be surprised if we learn that some of these school shooters were paid to commit their crimes.
In the Uvalde massacre, the shooter (possibly an illegal alien) Salvador Ramos, 18, posted direct online threats that no one acted on, murdered his grandmother, then drove to the school and easily overcame an armed but untrained School Resource Officer. The police on scene did not enter the school to stop the shooting out of fear for their own safety, and a mother on the scene who did try to enter the school to help was arrested and handcuffed by one of the useless cowards carrying a gun and a badge there.
There are a lot of failures at Uvalde, and not one of them has to do with lawful, law-abiding gun owners anywhere in America. But as we have seen, the Democrat Party and its media establishment is hijacking this latest massacre that they created in order to generate the next crisis that can be leveraged into more anti-constitutional behavior by the federal government, namely gun-grabbing from law-abiding Americans who form the only real bulwark against federal government lawlessness and control. And we see that the Biden Administration is 100% all-out for full control of all of us through online media, controlling our bank accounts, etc.
And so we just have to ask this logical question: If the FBI, DOJ, National Association of School Boards, and the teachers’ unions are willing to repeatedly sacrifice innocent school children on their altar of disarming and completely controlling America, then what do they really have planned for the rest of us after they take our guns?
Probably a lot more bloodshed, and all for the Leftist cause.