Stage

RIZZO  by Bruce Graham

directed by Joe Canuso

Theater Exile & Philadelphia Theatre Company

Suzanne Roberts Theatre, extended through Oct. 23

“Love me or hate me… you will never forget me.” So promised legendary Philly mayor Frank Rizzo used at a climatic end line Bruce Graham’s bio-play Rizzo.  Indeed, Rizzo’s rep lives on. At the 2016 Dem Convention in Philadelphia, members of Black Lives Matter placed a KKK hood over the Rizzo statue near City Hall to remind all what Rizzo represented to Philly’s African American population.

Rizzo premiered last year at Theater Exile and the revival with the same cast co-presented at The Roberts Theater by Philadelphia Theater Company.  The Mummers were in the lobby posing with former mayor Ed Rendell, who recounted a few stories about being DA under Rizzo before the play.

As police chief Rizzo was a flashpoint of racial and minority divides and his police state tactics continued when he became mayor.  White majority voters of the time elected him twice to ‘clean up the city’ and shut down crime, despite his own infamous scandals, like his lie-detector stunt which proved he lied, his flagrant cronyism and other abuses of office.

Graham’s explores the dualities of Rizzo’s character as well as the good, bad and ugly of Rizzo’s political life.  RIZZO debuted at Theater Exile last, directed by Joe Canuso and starring Scott Greer as Frank and Damon Bonetti as a political writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer who covered Rizzo’s years in office.

The story is told in flashback as Rizzo is mounting his 3^rd term bid for office. Rizzo tries is muscling a police officer to swear an affidavit that he saw his opponent Ron Castille drunk and out of control. The highs and lows of his career are depicted in flashbacks about his life growing up in South Philly, becoming a beat cop, then police commissioner, and then twice mayor.

‘The showdowns in black neighborhoods, his routine raids on gay bars and hauling in “faggots” in Center City.  He calls on unions to shut down the Philadelphia Inquirer to prevent papers getting out an unflattering story. His enemies list and his publicity stunts to a lie detector test and Rizzo is exposed. Meanwhile, his affability in many neighborhoods and his personal touch out of the public arena, kept him in power.

Graham covers these episodes, many of them ‘told’ rather than ‘shown’, some with more fluency and dramatic fire than others, more consistently interesting is the private man. Graham builds a portrait of Rizzo as not just political myopic, but a man of uncontrolled impulses, private doubts and not to mention an untamable mouth.

One of the strongest scenes is the newly appointed Police commissioner being dressed down by his father, a beat cop, for using bullying tactics, including striking a “hooker” and giving her stitches.   And all too brief scenes with his wife Carmela.  His chess game with the reporter, also in clipped scenes, is eclipsed by big events.  So Graham constructs an erratic theatrical arc. But, they don’t overshadow the play’s many strengths, starting with a great cast.

Director Canuso keeps everything moving with invention and but Graham’s over use of characters describing action, rather than dialogue scenes, but the cast ably glides through some heavy handed monologues.

Damon Bonetti, in a largely narrating role, until the second act, brings wit and naturalism to this old –style nice guy reporter who still keeps digging until he has the real story.   Amanda Schoonover plays all the women’s roles, most impressive in her instant range from the protective Carmela Rizzo to Shelly Yanoff who took Rizzo on by gathering petitions for an election recall of his win.

All of the supporting players Steven Wright, Robert DaPonte, Paul L. Nolan, William Rahill juggling also juggling multiple roles with ensemble ease.  Wright a standout in his wry portrait of black civic leader Cecile B. Moore who goes head to head with Rizzo over the strife he causes in North Philly.

But the night belongs to Scott Greer, a fine musical theater actor, a five time Barrymore Award winner adds another portrait of flawless performances of a complex man.  His Frank accent perfect, without trying to imitate Rizzo, and embodies the image and conveys the inner turmoil of his many masks.

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Stage

Inis Nua Theatre Company

The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning
by Tim Price
directed by Tom Reing

The Proscenium Theatre at The Drake through May 15(photo Kory Aversa)

Private Chelsea Manning is a transgender woman serving a 35 year sentence at Leavenworth Prison for leaking classified military secrets to WikiLeaks in 2010 when she was then army tech specialist Bradley Manning serving in the Iraq War. In the eyes of the military, she is a condemned traitor, but for others who champion whistle blowers, including Sweden’s 2014 nominating Nobel Peace Prize Committee, she is a hero.

The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, a bold 2013 play by Welsh playwright Tim Price is in its US premiere by Inis Nua Theater Company in Philadelphia. Inis director Tom Reing orchestrating a visually compelling production at the Drake Theater and directing a uniformly fine ensemble cast. Price’s visceral, sometimes surreal theatrical account of the key events leading up to Manning’s imprisonment, is more impressive as an incisive character study to investigate what made Manning a born rebel with a cause.

Price intriguingly depicts the psychological journey of Manning, without coming to any quick answers and this device proves powerfully eloquent with this cast, all playing multiple roles, including each portraying Manning at different times. The cast- Trevor Fayle, David Glover, Campbell O’Hare, David Pica, Isa St. Clair and Johnny Smith- each bringing out different aspects of Manning’s character. There is a lot of stage business and physical demands as the actors play soldiers, officers, lovers, family members and a formidable theatrical boot camp. David Glover, for instance, is a nail-hard drill sergeant and minutes later equally believable a scene later as Manning going through a humiliating interrogation.

It opens with Bradley being dressed and undressed, literally and figuratively, by his platoon mates while they hurl a torrent of accusations and slurs about Manning exposed the realities of atrocities and raw war footage; data that was data is cited by some as being a catalyst for anti-American sentiments in the Mideast.
The play bounces back and forth in time, jarringly at times, to the year Manning spent in a Welsh high school. Johnny Smith conveys so much of Manning’s inner turmoil in these scenes and Isa St. Clair is great as the outwardly sympathetic Welsh schoolteacher who nonetheless tries to force Manning to rat out other students for their classroom antics.

In his early 20s, Manning is now stateside trying to get into MIT, while working dead-end jobs. He begs his disdainful father to pay his tuition and his father orders him to join the army to get a free education. Manning signs up and is targeted as the weakest link in boot camp and is continually singled out for rough treatment as a perceived gay soldier under the military’s DADT policies. He even joins protests of Prop 8 in California where he meets a grad student and they fall in love.

Manning was targeted and harassed under the military’s draconian DADT policies, except when his expertise in the field was needed. He was forced to pretend his boyfriend in the states was a woman to his officers and comrades. Trevor Fayle and David Pica has instant chemistry in Price’s economic scenes that establish their relationship and how its emotional reality inspires Manning’s convictions.

But the pressures of military life and his delayed career plans continue to weigh on him. He starts rebelling in the military and protest being bullied by fellow soldiers and has a reputation for being difficult and acting out inappropriately, including charges of striking a female officer.

Expected to be dishonorably discharged, his programming skills are deemed too valuable as the wars in the Iraq spirals out of control. He works in intelligence gathering and has clearance in the repository of raw Intel, electronic and video of massive atrocities and questionable missions and cover-ups. Manning turns whistle-blower and releases thousands of pages of documents on the internet, is incarcerated, put on suicide watch and, in Price’s narrative, subject to psychological torture by the military.

Some of Price’s jarring narrative structure, especially the high school scenes border on redundant. Meanwhile, Reing’s physical theater elements, with fight direction by Glover, are consistently inventive. A droning scene of mental torture that keeps hitting the same blunt note is contrasted with an inspired breakout dance denouement to GaGa’s LGBTQ anthem Born This Way.
Gritty set designs by Meghan Jones in tandem with precision video projections (Janelle Kaufmann), sound (Zack McKenna) and lighting design (Shon Causer) all well orchestrated elements. The disturbing sights and sounds of war, admirably, more thought provoking than facilitating mere flashy effects.

Stage

Michael Castillejos in Gentlemen Volunteers (photo Lindsay Browning)

Pig Iron Theater Company is renowned as one of Philly’s most innovative theatrical troupes. They are celebrating their 20th anniversary by restaging their production of Gentlemen Volunteers by Suli Holum who was also one of PITC ‘s founders. First staged by the company in 1998, its powerful antiwar message resonates more that ever. Set in 1916-17 as America was about to enter the WWI, it follows the lives of Red Cross nurses and soon to be US recruits on the front lines in France.

The play is deftly staged at in the rustic brick and iron foundry space at Christ Church Neighborhood House and co-directed by PITC founders Dan Rothenberg, Quinn Bauriedel and Dito van Reigersberg.
The audience is instructed to move around en la ‘promenade’ around these scenes, which leads to some audience scrambling, but this element, playing to the scene, jars the senses.

There is a captivating musical prologue as the audience files in the theater as Francoise de la Tour (Melissa Krodman) sings a rousing French cabaret song and if followed by Jean (Michael Castillejos) her accordionist who then sings the saucy Ragtime tune “Everybody’s doing it!”

The story starts on the Yale athletics field where a recruiter is looking for volunteers to assist in France in anticipation of the US entry into the war. Yalies Rich Conwell (Bryant Martin) dreams of learning how to drive a Model T, while Vincent Barrington (Scott Sheppard) a budding poet looking to chronicle his experiences in the service of a good cause.

They head ‘over there’ as drivers and assistants in a Red Cross field hospital near the front where Francoise is head nurse, who runs her unit with steely command. Her English cousin Mary Pinknell (Lauren Ashley Carter) has also just arrived to start as a nurse volunteer. She starts off on the wrong foot, but Francoise gets her up to speed without pause. Mary is attending her first patient, with Rich suddenly at her side, who then faints she attends to a wounded soldier’s wound. The chance meeting turns into something more, but not before Francoise walks in admonishes them “this is not a cabaret.” she barks. Later she tells her nurse corps (aka, the audience) “You are here working between life and death….and don’t you forget it.”

Lauren Ashley Carter & Bryant Martin (photo Lindsay Browning)

But Francoise forgets it and falls into a torrid affair with Vincent, after they get drunk in a bar. Now she doesn’t have time to keep an eye on Mary, who spends every off duty hour in bed with Rich.

The directors devise elements of physical theater, mime and ensemble acting to orchestrate Holum’s gritty, economic, sometimes whimsical dialogue, elegiac meditations about war.

Some of pantomime scenes – in the operating room or operating an ambulance crank-shaft on period vehicles are easy to decipher, but there is also more cryptic mime relating to the senses and emotional motives between the characters, who remain tentative under the stress and trauma of war.

The lover scenes are particularly well handled with tension and tenderness of the circumstances. Francoise and Vincent fall in love and their after hours affairs unravels la Tour’s guarded secrets. When they are separated Vincent writes her passionate letters, but she can’t bring herself to read them. Meanwhile Mary has surprising news for Rich, but he has joined up as a commissioned Doughboy off to fight in Italy. Everybody looses. Vincent articulates the pyrhic victories and vows to write about the realities of war.

In brief flashbacks, Castillejos is a dynamic Jean, revealed as Francoise’s husband, a casualty of war. He also is L’Homme d’ Orchestre, playing a Ravel nocturne on clarinet timpani for various precision battlefield effects. He also performs the original (award winning) sound designs by James Sugg. As in the days of radio they are performed manually with such items as paper, fabric, typewriter, eggbeater, enamel basin, surgical instruments, etc.

As Vincent, Scott Sheppard conveys warmth and humor and a sober drive of a writer witnessing fateful events. As Rich, Bryant Martin has the spunk of an All-American and deftly communicates his growing disillusionment observing the real cost of war. Lauren Ashley Carter is all heart and courage as Mary and has a hilarious mis-en-scene doubling as an snarky cockney war photographer. Melissa Krodman gives nothing less than a tour de force performance as the heroic and tragic Francoise de la Tour.

During the run, there are two scheduled benefit performances performed by the original 1998 cast which included Dito van Reigersberg and Quinn Bauriedel as Rich and Vincent, Cassie Friend as Mary, Emmanuelle Delpech as Francoise and James Sugg as Jean.

Gentlemen Volunteers runs through Dec. 27, 2015 with performances at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American Street, Philadelphia.
http://www.pigiron.org

Political Theater~ GOP doubletalk edition

(LW pic from Philly Pride Parade, June 2014)

Sen. Paul courting gay votes or is it the same two-steppin’ GOP moves?

Earlier this month, at an event in Iowa, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) sent his first gay weather balloon up, sort of regarding his position(s) on marriage equality — he DID support a constitutional amendment defining man/woman only, but if the GOP wanted to win elections they had to have to be more inclusive… that they might, as a party have to at least be willing to agree to disagree.</p>

“I mean, many of these people joined the Republican Party because of these social issues. So I don’t think we can completely flip.” Paul said. Fred Sainz, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign, told MetroWEEKLY that Paul’s comments have proved puzzling. “I can’t decide whether to be disturbed or pleased, so I’ve settled on confused,” he said. Fred is more diplomatic than I am. I’m just pissed at Sen. Paul’s smug ambiguity. His song has been sung with different verses so many times before by politicians of both parties, but the GOP has the worst record on saying they want a ‘bigger tent’ and collapsing that tent once they get in.

In 2000, for instance, at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, at a press event hosted by the Log Cabin Republicans ostensibly to congratulate itself on the headway it had made courting the GOP, who in turn was starting to count gay votes for George W. Bush. David Greer, then head of the PA Log Cabins who I interviewed for an oped piece in the Advocate (Who’s Afraid of Gay Republicans?) told me that a Bush campaign would welcome qualified personnel who happened to be gay into the “highest echelons of the administration.” Meanwhile, across town on the convention center floor the party was scrubbing an suggestion of pro-gay civil rights language from their platform. Even the loyal and deluded Log Cabin Republicans have given up on believing GOP’s lies about acceptance and tolerance.

Sen. Paul may think he courting a more moderate voting bloc, but, it is in the most cynical way and gay America knows it. If he really feels non-condemning toward gays why isn’t he railing against the 63 Texas GOP legislators who just endorsed “conversion therapy” methods to de-gay youth. Bet they still have those electro-shock kits from the ’50s stashed away.

The GOP makes much fodder out of Barack Obama’s “evolution” on gay marriage, to cover any charges that their party alone is homophobic. The president has turned his page big time and has done more to advance GLBTQ civil-rights initiatives starting with the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a host of other gay rights initiative. Yet in 2014 we have to hear from the crazed right wing of your party theories about the ruination of straight marriage, indeed, the collapse of America if marriage equality goes national . Wait, I just remembered, I thought that was supposed to happen with the repeal of D*A*D*T*?

Paul’s two-stepping is bad enough, but the soon to be retired, rabidly antigay Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) isn’t so cautious anymore. In an interview with a Christian radio station she proclaimed that the gay “agenda” is to do away with consent laws and that we will promote pedophilia. For this statement alone, Bachmann should be answering to the American people on the floor of Congress. But, because she is viewed as a religious conservative, she gets a pass from her colleagues of both parties.

I wonder if Bachmann or even Paul ever heard of decorated Marine Eric Alva, the first soldier wounded in Iraq, or would care that he is gay and fought for their freedoms on the front line? I wonder if they know that before Edith Windsor won her DOMA case, she took care of her lover Thea, who had progressive multiple sclerosis for 30 years. Windsor had to sue to keep the assets that they had earned together because they were not recognized at the time as a couple in New York.

Course, Bachmann and Paul don’t want to talk about any achievements contributions of GLBTQ artists, writers, scholars, lawyers, doctors, teachers, community leaders, police, senators or even their own colleagues in a respectful way. GLBTQ American citizen who contribute inestimably every day while bigoted ‘preachers’ and politicians are feverishly working to marginalize us.

What would Bachmann have to say face to face to Sgt. Alva? Would she be just as condemning as when she is spouting hate speech from a radio booth wrapped in her barbed – wire flag, bible in hand? And what nerve for you Sen. Rand Paul to think you can politically frame a civil-rights movement that started over 50 years ago? Can you tell us what you have ever put forward that expressed any truth about GLBTQ Americans that you should expect even one vote from us

Booksbooksbooks

Dan Savage’s latest

Columnist Dan Savage, the gay author, activist and relationship guru to a large straight readership via his syndicated column Savage Love, is also a media hottie, seen frequently on CNN and HuffPost.

He is, happily, anathema to the religious right and the GOP hacks, who want to diminish his clout. They are wasting their sanctimonious breath. He is after all the perpetrator of the infamous cyber bomb that will forever, link politician Rick Santorum to…a byproduct of…well you know the rest. He weighed in on many of the words and deeds of all of the toxic spawn of the GOP primaries and he is more popular than ever.

Savage pulls few punches on a whole range of issues in his new book American Savage, a collection of essays about sex, politics, religion, media, gay-parenting, social-networking, realpolitik and homophobia. The book is also a snapshot memoir of Savage’s 17 year marriage with his husband Terry and their 15 year old son DJ, who they adopted at birth. His essays are witty, personal and economic in detangling complex social issues past buzzwords or media scenarios.

Whatever methods Savage uses to expose hypocrisies, he is in fact never more eloquent, lacerating or witty when he goes after anti-gay politicians with facts, history and logic that eviscerates the anti-gay myths, lies and aspersions leveled toward gays and minorities.

For GLBTQ Americans, Savage is no less than a hero, for his most inspired It Gets Better Project, his anti-bullying campaign. His and Terry’s outreach to GLBTQ teens who live in oppressive or abusive circumstances or are struggling with their sexual identity. Everyone from President Obama to the San Francisco ball team have made IGB videos.

In one of the book’s most poignant pieces My Son Comes Out, Savage turns his son’s announcement that he is straight into a snapshot of how normal such a scene now is. A normal a scene as a Norman Rockwell painting. Meanwhile, it is also routine for MJ to get dropped on his grandparents so his parents can attend the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco for a day in the sun for s&m carnivale.

Savage is an absolutist about safe, consensual sex, no matter what kink is explored. He has given tutorials to many a straight young man on the location of the clitoris. Savage writes about sex not only in healthy, practical and clinical terms, but as a vital pursuit of remaining a happy, healthy and fulfilled human being.

His uninhibited scholarship of sex education spills over into politics. Savage, is nonetheless, just as frank in exposing right wing political machinations as they apply to issues not only about gay civil rights, but about physician assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In his essay ‘Extended Stay’ he writes movingly about his mother’s right to die with dignity and her stated desire to be kept out of pain. “It wasn’t a choice that the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, or Joel Connelly had a right to make for her.” he writes.

In ‘Bigot Christmas’ recounts Savage’s now infamous ‘dinner table’ debate with Brian Brown, head of the antigay group YouTube debate with Savage faces down the antigay dragon with logic and a money shot provided not by Savage this time, but his husband Terry, who had had enough of suffering fools gladly (even for the famous husband) Terry asked Brown “Do you think our son should be taken away from us?” Let’s just say that the bigot’s answer did not sit well with the gay father, husband and homeowner. Huh… cue Jaws music.

Political theater

Rick, get a gay clue

After he triumphed in a razor-close victory in the Iowa caucus, former PA Senator Rick Santorum is close to the top of the GOP heap and his campaign is $1 millions richer overnight. The next day, Santorum was singing his same old songs to students at the College Convention in Concord, NH, he faced boos and hisses when a young woman asked him how he could be against same-sex marriage and for individual freedoms, he so cherishes as put forth in the US Constitution.

In Rick Santorum’s world, the question of the legitimacy of gay relationships is put in his own hypothetical meat grinder that if you are talking about two men or two women getting married than why not 6 men, four cats, siblings, polygamists and in fact whole communities of people who love to watch reruns of All in the Family.

As soon as the young woman asked, he was countered by the response “we’re not talking about polygamy’ that’s not what we’re talking about’ he shut down the Socratic session ‘I ask the questions and I call on you,” he said, obviously miffed. (Just for the record Rick, Socrates was gay.)

Of course, Santorum was infamous when he was PA Senator, for his homophobic views and his antigay agenda, more than anything else he did. Although he is claiming to have brought a $1 billion in urban renewal revenue to the blighted Chester, Pa., which bears repeating if it is in fact, true. He’s been singing this marriage equality threatens real straight marriage as a logical dictum to anyone who will listen.

But now I feel like it can’t be dismissed as morbid stupidity. Santorum is obviously a mouthpiece for the ultra-conservative, evangelicals who get rich demonizing gays. What Santorum does in effect is not address the fact that you can’t win elections by demonizing a class of people in 2012.

Rick, do you really think that millions of GLBT identified, tax paying, law-abiding Americans are going to stand by and let you trash them with hackneyed myths and lies about their lives in a national presidential campaign? Who does he think he is going to be facing on stump speeches in New York City, San Francisco and other gay populated metropolis? He also completely ignores their thriving communities, locally, statewide, nationally and internationally.

No matter how hard you try Rick, the world if full of people with same sex attractions and they are going to live their lives. The closet will exist only in tyrannical, oppressive regimes, not in ostensibly free societies. You forget, even in the queer baiting 50s and 60s, of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, when gays were summarily rounded up and thrown in jail (a right of passage for gays, lesbians and drag queens of a certain age) the sub-culture thrived and grew into the political force it is today. No one is talking about marriage to their pets, or multi-partners ala old-time Mormonism, they are talking about committed consenting adults, who in some cases have been together for decades.

Marriage equality will not lead to the disintegration of the institution of heterosexual marriage. Straights will still be able to get weekend arranged Elvis officiated weddings in Vegas in between Barry Manilow shows. Marriage equality is a reality that is happening all over the globe.

But, Rick, politically, if you want to advance, you are being too stupid to be an idiot. Even Michele Bachmanm, the other hysterical homophobe among the candidates, immediately started to pull out of her previous antigay statements, because she knew that even though that queer baiting money got her where she was, it would cost her on the national political stage.

Yes, Rick, even if you do end up at the bottom of a Romney ticket you still have to accept that there are radical, lesbian, feminist Americans who have a power base now. The military didn’t fall apart when DADT was repealed and when there is marriage equality everyone who is in a healthy heterosexual marriage is going to continue on. That Rush Limbaugh even paid the biggest queen in the world $2 million to sing “Your Song” at his wedding.

You have survived in your homophobic, no contraceptive bubble for so long that you refuse to accept certain facts. If you want to continue your campaign, seek therapy for your homophobic tendencies, it is not normal to harbor such negative views about individuals that you obviously know nothing about.

Boyle&Palin Schticking Points

In vaudeville, everyone got a chance, even an untested act. Course that is one of the reasons vaudeville died, but everyone loves that backstage story. If someone is a big success and get too big, they have to be knocked down. Everybody loves that story too, but it doesn’t always play out like that, which brings me to the meteoric careers of Sarah Palin and Susan Boyle.

Boyle burst on the scene belting out ’I Dreamed a Dream’ from Les Miz which went viral on the internet overnight and propelled her to international stardom. Unused to instant success and pressured to repeat it, she instantly suffered a backlash from overexposure and her voice started cracking, and her make-over looked draggy from the kleiglights.

Boyle did the only thing a diva in training should do at that point– she had a public nervous breakdown and used the time to become media savvy enough to make such a comeback that it made her star shine even brighter. The fact that she sings everything the same way, with dodgy range to boot is beside the point. People love her story.

More improbable than Boyle’s international success is the iconic political status Sarah Palin achieved in one election cycle. She was a cynical VP pick by a desperate John McCain who cared about nothing but winning and when he saw that was impossible, deflected the attention to someone who would recharge his campaign. McCain was jaded enough to know that she would become an instant media star, however untested. Maybe the only credential she could show as a future Veep.

After the election Palin didn’t shrink back to Alaska after the election. She proved transformational enough to broker big money and influence in back of her for staying power no matter how vaporous her politics. People loved her story and she was able to walk on all of the political quicksand that was engulfing Republicans and Democrats alike. She cast herself as the antiObama and saw an opening for his job. She stalked away from her governorship to lay the groundwork for the presidency.

Her premature retirement may have been the first real ripple in the tide turning against her. Even people who thought Katie Couric was ’out to get her’ because she pressed Palin on what magazines she read, didn’t like it when Palin walked away from an elected position. Still, she endured as the economy got worse. People didn’t seem bothered that she made up facts to attack the Obama presidency. They hung on her every word.

They weren’t disturbed by her incendiary creative rhetoric or that the only death panel was the one in her head. They listened to her vaporous speeches and didn’t demand that she articulate what she was advocating. She never gave policy speeches. Her calling card was to attack, ridicule and tear anyone on the left apart.

People also didn’t seem bothered that when there was a pushback, even in the form of a policy rebuttal Fox News would report that Palin was being attacked. Her ‘you betchas’ and ‘lame-stream media’ shtick stuck.

But earlier this year there started to be reports of fickle fans tired of her same old record and the fact that she was being paid big bucks to lip-sync it all over the US. She didn’t offer any solutions, just hits and runs against Obama and homilies about taking back the ‘real America.’

Her Tea Party picks did very well and just weeks ago Palin studiously told Barbara Walters that she would run for president if the people wanted her. If there were a void. She filled that void for two years as the voice of the conservative movement. Her conclusion to Walters was that she could beat Obama.

That was so two weeks ago. That was before the American public saw the Congress and the Senate actually working. In the year end polls, Palin’s backlash is starting to take hold. Of the most compressive CNN and PPP end year polls tracking her chances for a 2012 Presidential bid, she clocked only a 33 percent approval in her home state Alaska. She would be the loser, by large margins, in every state. So you have to wonder if the public is thinking that Palin just sings the same old song. Is her reality show being canceled or optioned? In politics one never knows, do one.

My prediction is that Palin will end up on American Idol in 2012. Boyle should be a judge by then. Maybe Susan can lend her the sheet music.