Arts You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Now big-shot lady producers are getting in on the casting couch game. From the Guardian: “Dede Harris, one of the most famous producers in New York [Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Hairspray, et al], has been landed with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit after half the cast of her latest play walked out” because of sexual harrassment.
Alleged victims include Joey McIntyre, America Ferrera, and Gabriel Byrne.
The story is weird enough (there’s even a game of truth or dare), but the description of the aforementioned “latest play” (a rewriting of Charlie Brown and Peanuts) is what got me: “Linus is now a stoned drug user, Lucy is in psychiatric care, and Peppermint Patty and Marcy are alcoholic cheerleaders.”
Good grief.
See, this is wrong on so many levels.
A of all) this is why we have unions.
b of all) Pigpen would be the stoned out drug user; Linus would be the neurotic closeted gay; Peppermint Patty would be the butch dyke, with Marci the sub-bottom; Charlie Brown would be the embittered white-collar company man to Lucy's volunteer obsessed housewife; Snoopy succombed to an aggresive bout of Leukemia in the mid '80's.
Shermy & Freida escaped their deadening suburban adolescence by hopping a flight to Tijuana back in the early '70's. They now live in a palapa in Belize City, where they make trinkets for the tourist trade and SCUBA dive five times a week.
Poor Schroeder of course, committed suicide some time back, leaving six uncompleted symphonies and a rambling note full of bile and vitriol.
Franklin still lives in the same house his parents owned, but now all the kids in the neighborhood just think of him as the "crazy old man" who tries to tell the same stories over and over, but who will always give you a Red Whip if you listen all the way through.
Rerun died in that horrible bicycle-car hit-and-run about twelve year ago. Woodstock was likewise splattered onto the front windscreen of a Hummer back in '97.
Violet just disappeared. Nobody ever heard from her again, and her name was never spoken from that day on.
And you don't even want to know the fate of the little red-haired girl.