The Chalk Boy

Last night I saw "The Chalk Boy," a new play by Joshua Conkel, starring Courtney Sale, Jennifer Harder, Mary Catherine Donnelly and Mallery Avidon.

The show is about four girls in a small town where a boy has recently disappeared - soon it becomes clear that he has been abducted. Through this story, we learn that while the middle class and the rich matter, the poor do not. A short scene between a creepy trucker and one of the girls proposes this hypothesis: the boy was kidnapped by a white man because that man has seen everything taken from him by women and minorities, and the boy represents the power of the rich. Later, we learn that the "white trash" girl, Penny, who was in love with the boy, goes on to have an unsuccessful marriage and ends up a supermarket checkout person, while the other three girls go to college and end up in successful relationships.

America is a meritocracy, we're always hearing. But for many poor people, it also seems to be a neverending treadmill. Nickel and Dimed showed this clearly, how hard a person can work and still never get out of the lowest rung of society. There are dozens of counterexamples, of people who worked their way up from nothing and made it big. But society should not function only for the exceptional - there are 300 million people in this country. And maybe twelve self-made billionaires.

Bold Corruption

At this point, there can't be a thinking person alive who doesn't see what a sleazy, corrupt politician we have in George W. Bush. Commuting Scooter Libby's sentence has got to be the last straw.