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A gush of corporate relief fills the airwaves as Super Tuesday becomes history. A progressive wave was not electorally visible as the Democratic status quo consolidated itself behind Joe Biden and won nine or maybe ten states.

I was feeling a lot more hope when Super Tuesday began than I’m feeling a day later, so the need right now is to regroup.

Freelance writer and organizer Kate Aronoff, speaking on a panel of observers at Democracy Now! as the election results unfolded, made an important point in this regard: “The Democratic establishment is going against the future. . . . There is no normal anymore!”

Two years ago Laguna Playhouse hit the jackpot by presenting a stage version of a 1967 screen classic about sex, The Graduate, starring a famous actress, Melanie Griffith, as Mrs. Robinson. Now the venerable SoCal theater is panning for gold in the same river by presenting another theatrical rendering of a 1967 movie about love, featuring this time not one, but two, marquee names. Paul Rodriguez and Rita Rudner, both known as comedians and actors, co-star in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, which opened on Broadway in 1963 with Robert Redford, who four years later joined Jane Fonda for Hollywood’s take on the beloved romantic comedy.

However, Rodriguez and Rudner, who are both in their sixties, do not play the show’s leads. The newlyweds are portrayed by Lily Gibson as Corie, while Nick Tag - who co-starred opposite (or should we say underneath?) Melanie’s Mrs. Robinson in Laguna’s Graduate - graduates from Ben Braddock to Paul Bratter in Barefoot. Rudner portrays the young wife’s mother, Ethel Banks, while Rodriguez essays the role Charles Boyer played in the movie, Victor Velasco.

Writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu’s slyly stylish The Whistlers is one of those productions film buffs relish largely because of their cinematic references. In one scene characters appear in a theater where John Ford’s 1956 classic The Searchers is being screened. But while the 97-minute-long Whistlers’ Romanian characters may very well be searching for something (and/ or someone), the celluloid genre Porumboiu is most emulating isn’t the Western, but rather Film Noir.

There is also a Hitchcockian panache, paying homage to the Master of Suspense’s most famous scene from Psycho, as well as to mattresses, which hold a special place in the iconography of crime movies. Remember in The Godfather when they “go to the mattresses?”

Human Interest Story, playwright/director Stephen Sachs’ remake updating Frank Capra’s 1941 classic movie Met John Doe, has probably the most extensive multi-media stagecraft I’ve ever seen in an intimate theater production. Matthew G. Hill’s bravura video design conjures up the brave new virtual world of cable television, social media and beyond on the diminutive Fountain Theatre’s set, which Hill likewise wrought. One FX is a first: While an actor types on his keyboard the letters appear on an onstage screen.

California’s Super Tuesday primary on March 3 comes amid an atomic struggle whose outcome will hugely impact the nation and world, including the global climate crisis, the Green New Deal and the outcome of the 2020 election.

Ground Zero is Diablo Canyon, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo. Ringed by earthquake faults, the two big atomic reactors there are less than 50 miles west of the infamous San Andreas Fault. Since their mid-1980s opening, the Diablo Canyon reactors have become a symbol of everything the global No Nukes movement opposes, provoking more civil disobedience arrests (over 10,000) than any other U.S. reactor site.

The two reactors are also in the vortex of a revolution in green tech. All other California nukes have since shut down. Meanwhile, new solar and wind installations accounted for some 1,700 megawatts of new green capacity last year alone. That’s nearly three-quarters the total power of the two Diablo nukes combined.

Indies, Inclusivity, Equality

While addressing the press after winning the Best Supporting Male accolade for The Lighthouse Willem Dafoe epitomized the philosophy of the Film Independent Spirit Awards vis-à-vis big budget Hollywood studio productions. In the ceremony’s media tent, when a British reporter seized on the opportunity to ask the quirky actor about superhero flicks - because Lighthouse co-star Robert Pattinson is playing The Batman in the 2021 epic and Dafoe had portrayed the Green Goblin in 2007’s Spider-Man 3 and Vulko in 2018’s Aquaman - the thespian shut the brash Brit down.

What I loved about playwright Willard Manus’ Show Me a Hero is that it introduced me to Greek freedom fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, a significant historical figure I’d never heard of, and brought back to life the legendary journalist Oriana Fallaci, whom I was somewhat familiar with. The UK’s Independent dubbed her “arguably the most extraordinary journalist Italy has ever produced.” The fabled Fallaci (here called Luisa and played with feisty fire by Lisa Robins) joined the Italian anti-Mussolini resistance when she was only 14.

Presumably due to her early participation in the anti-fascist movement when the college dropout became a journalist Fallaci specialized in interviews with controversial political leaders, often revolutionaries like Vietnam’s Giap, Palestine’s Arafat, Libya’s Qaddafi and Cuba’s Fidel. She also interviewed reactionaries, such as mass murderer Henry Kissinger, who later rued their interaction. (Like Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, Kissinger’s existential angst is that he wanted to be a Nazi - but was born a Jew.)

Thursday yet another mass shooting was committed by a military veteran, this one in Milwaukee. Virtually all military veterans are not mass shooters. Many peace activists are veterans. Many everything under the sun are veterans. But mass shooters are very disproportionately military veterans.

Some mass shooters who are not veterans are acting out a pretense of being in the military and/or are using military weapons. Militarism impacts a society in many ways. But one of them is through the violence of veterans, people who have been trained and conditioned to engage in violence but not always guided successfully into nonviolent post-military life.

Among males aged 18-59 in the United States, 15% are veterans.

Among male mass-shooters aged 18-59 in the United States, 36% are veterans.

A mass shooter is well over twice as likely to be a veteran.

“Excuse me, occasionally it might be a good idea to be honest about American foreign policy.”

I don’t think I’ve heard that much honesty from a mainstream-party presidential candidate in virtually half a century. And suddenly this race begins to matter in a way that seems like . . . oh my God, a return of democracy? Suddenly I don’t feel utterly marginalized as a voter, as an American, left with nothing but cynical despair as I wait to learn which “lesser evil” the Dems will serve up for me as a candidate.

The words are those of Bernie Sanders, of course, standing up to the red-baiting the moderators and some of the other candidates were slinging at him during the latest debate, trying their best to bring him down.

Move over Broadway’s recently opened musical adaptation of the 1960s’ wife-swapping movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, which has nothing on LA Opera’s premiere of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Roberto Devereux about the 1600s’ kinky hi-jinks of Bob and Liz and Sara and Duke. To be more specific, I’m referring to the ménage-a-quatre (to coin a phrase?) between the titular character, Roberto Devereux (aka the Earl of Essex), Queen Elizabeth, Sara (the Duchess of Nottingham) and the Duke of Nottingham in Elizabethan England.

Donizetti’s tragedia lirica (tragic opera) with Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto, first produced in 1837 at Naples, is loosely based on at least one play and a publication about actual historical personages. This is one of Donizetti’s works depicting England’s House of Tudor, which include the Italian composer’s operas about Anne Boleyn (King Henry VIII’s doomed wife is alluded to in Roberto as she gave birth to Elizabeth) and Mary, Queen of Scots.