Quick Hits – January 12, 2023 – The consequence of not foreseeing the consequences

The world is one great web, and a man dare not touch a single strand lest all the others tremble. – George R. R. Martin

Or, as I’ve frequently declared, “nothing in this existence occurs in a vacuum,” though I personally prefer “This planet is nothing more than a giant whack-a-mole game.” So, let’s examine how, particularly progressives, fail to foresee the kind of consequences that your average sugar-addled ADHD sixth grader would anticipate without h breaking a mental sweat.

Oh! And in an effort to prove my utter lack of partisan bias, conservatives actually do foresee that fallout, but then they go ahead and do the stupid shit anyway. I’m not sure which one’s worse. Moving on…

The woke Nutcracker sucked!

Harkening back to our the December 15 column on the arrogance of ballet company directors who feel the dire need to abridge Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” a member of The First Ward’s crack spy network reported they’d attend the referenced Salt Creek Ballet’s adaptation and it was “ terrible.”

This, of course, begs the recurring question, “What could possibly go wrong with trying to ‘improve’ the work of a master, particularly when you’re not one?”

What I didn’t realize when the original piece ran was that Black Friday is to retailers as “The Nutcracker” is to ballet companies. A local newspaper reported that those pre-Christmas performances are so popular that they pay the bills for the entire year.

I can only imagine the disappointed reactions of patrons who bought tickets to see the original work only to be confronted with something that bears little resemblance to it. Our ADHD sixth grader would likely deduce that, like my reader, they won’t be back next year.

So, because some soulless art director decides she knows what’s best for the rest of us, the company’s bills won’t get paid, and we all know what happens when the bills don’t get paid.

Here’s a thought! Even if you fervently believe that 10 percent of your audience might be offended by a Chinese Dance imagined by a 19th Century composer, then perhaps you might want to encourage those overly sensitive folks NOT TO BUY A FRICKEN’ TICKET. Because if you continue to cater to the minority of perpetually offended progressives and fail to give the audience what they want, there will be no audience, and thus, no ballet company.

ECC’s Blizzard Theater isn’t any better

This cutting off your nose to spite your artistic face dynamic certainly isn’t relegated to suburban ballet companies because Elgin Community College’s Blizzard theater has done everything in their power to put themselves out of business.

To this day, the Blizzard remains my favorite indoor venue, so much so that my wife and I would actively look for shows to attend, particularly if there was a culinary school catered dinner option. But we haven’t been back to ECC since Lewis Black’s March 2020 performance that barely squeaked under the plague progressing in earnest wire.

Why haven’t we been back? Though we’re both multi-vaccinated, having to endure those ECC volunteers/staffers gleefully asking that war movie question, “Papers please,” before you could enter the theater left a really bad taste in our mouths. Worse yet, despite the fact that NO ONE ever caught COVID in a high-ceilinged and well-ventilated venue, those so-sure-of-themselves nanny-stater ECC folks insisted on requiring masks even after Governor Pointless had relented in that regard.

So, we stopped going.

Anyone who’s ever taken Business 101 knows that consumers are creatures of habit and the last thing an entrepreneurial enterprise wants to do is to give them a reason to break a good one. Because once they do, it’s far more difficult to get them back than it was to attract them in the first place. Remember when those preposterous Coca-Cola folks changed their formula? It wasn’t pretty!

To wit, a former ECC trustee told me that, prior to the plague, the Blizzard used to pay for itself and more. But as a result of ECC making those bad and ultimately pointless decisions, now it’s hemorrhaging money. And their response to this self-inflicted wound has been to drastically reduce the number, quality, and materially alter the type of acts which only serves to exacerbate this downward spiral.

When I think of the great acts we’ve seen there:

• Lewis Black
• Who’s Line
• Leo Kottke
• Graham Nash
• Dave Mason
• Roger McGuinn
• Pat Metheny

I still get goosebumps, but this year’s list of shows is surprisingly sparse with just a couple of cover acts (a Carpenters tribute band?) and some “woke” performances that their former core customer base has absolutely no interest in. So, I’m truly beginning to doubt if my wife and I will ever go back to the Blizzard.

And this kind of failure to foresee the most obvious of consequences is particularly egregious when it comes at the hands of a purported institution of higher learning that’s charged with preparing our children for the real world.

Whoa! Apparently this Quicks Hits wasn’t so quick, so we’ll continue with this consequential theme next Tuesday.