May 3, 2025

Nederland, Colorado, was founded in the late 1800s as a trading post for the Utes and Europeans. Today, it is a perfectly quirky little mountain town filled with great art galleries, microbreweries, and coffee houses.

Along the main road into town is a coffee house that has been cobbled together from three vintage train cars. One of them was once part of Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West show. When I got there, I was already a bit over-caffeinated and jittery. Having done the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun, however, there was no way I wasn’t going to go inside.

I followed an enormous, bald, bearded guy inside. He looked as if he could kill people. In my experience, though, people who look like him, instead of being violent criminals, tend to own Teacup Poodles and have little twink boyfriends named Brad. I realized that I wasn’t in New York. I was in the middle of nowhere in Colorado. I kept my distance.

Decaf is what I should have ordered, but I would never dream of doing that in a place that takes its coffee so seriously. It would be like walking into a saloon in the Old West and ordering a glass of milk. I ordered a small black coffee.

The Barista behind the counter was very friendly. He asked me where I was from. I told him, and he asked me to be more specific. When I gave him my street, he lit up. He had a friend who lived a couple of blocks away. He asked me what I did, and I told him that I was working for Patti and that we had a couple of upcoming concerts in Denver and Fort Collins. I’m not sure he really knew who she was, but he told me that he hoped the shows went well.

Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the exchange, but he wanted to know what else I had done, so I told him about Jersey Boys. I’ve found Jersey Boys to usually be a safe bet almost anywhere I’ve ever been. Even non-theatre-going types have often heard of it. Jersey Boys, he knew. Yadda, yadda, yadda, I finally turned around to wait for my coffee.

The big, bearded guy suddenly stepped up to me. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. He asked me if he could mention a name. I said, of course, not having the slightest idea of who he thought I might know. Shockingly, the name he dropped was my first assistant on Jersey Boys who had gone on to become the PSM when I started supervising. Jake, the big guy in question, had mixed the sound for the final stretch of the show’s run on Broadway.

By the time Jake joined the show, I think that we already had an end date. While I was at the theatre occasionally, most of my attention was focused on productions elsewhere. I’m sure we’d met, but I honestly didn’t remember him. It reminded me of just how much I’d missed by trying to keep so many balls in the air at the same time.

After only a couple of weeks of being back home from my recent spate of traveling, I found myself in a pattern. It was starting to drive me a little crazy. Trying to keep track of the history unfolding around me was getting to be overwhelming. Each new horrible development coming out of Washington was starting to be hard to distinguish from the ones that had preceded it. I found I didn’t want to write about any of it. The reason, I think, is that, in the end, there’s a depressing sameness to it all.

Whether it’s the President, or RFK, Jr., or Musk, or Hegseth, what unites everything they are doing is incompetence and ignorance. Whatever few ideas these guys might have that aren’t awful are lost in a sea of ill-advised, unthought-out, and crisis-causing moves.

Everything that happens is connected. You cannot change one thing without causing ripples. Some of those ripples, if not handled properly, can turn into tsunamis. That’s true in life as well as in governance. That’s why there is a Cabinet, and a Congress, and a Senate, and a Supreme Court. No one person is equipped to run a ship as big as our country. Our President is going it alone.

It takes panels of people who have expertise in their various fields to properly advise a nation’s leader. These people need to argue so that they can decide what the best choice is, knowing that no choice is ever perfect. With a consensus reached, they can then advise the person at the top. The person at the top may ultimately make a different decision, but if they do, it’s with full knowledge of what the repercussions might be. It takes a team to get there.

The Republicans don’t have a team.

Instead of a starting line-up, the Republicans seem only to have a side. They have a bunch of poorly informed people blindly rooting for themselves. They don’t seem to notice that their playing field is empty. There’s only one old Adderall-addicted old man out there limping and lurching through the plays by himself. Their guy doesn’t seem to know where the ball is. Worse, he doesn’t seem to care. With every foul line he hits, he simply careens off into a new direction. Sometimes he’s heading toward the goalposts, and sometimes he’s out there running in a circle. Wherever he goes, the rest of his side just sits there and cheers.

I don’t want to read another article about some new idea that the President has come up with. I don’t even need to know what it is, and yet I know it’s a bad idea. When it goes wrong, as it always does these days, he blames someone else. He never accepts the responsibility for a single misstep. Daily, he’s saying things that are the exact opposite of something he’s said before. He then denies he’s ever said anything different.

As a recent example, he claimed the economic growth we were experiencing before his inauguration was all because of him and the excitement the country felt about having him back in office. He’s now saying that the nose-dive our economy’s currently taking is all President Biden’s fault. I don’t want to read about this. Why would I want to spend the time on an exposé about this when we all know that everything out of the President’s mouth is just a deflection or an outright lie?

Writing about any of this gives it a credibility that it simply doesn’t have. Reading about it makes it all seem consequential.

We’ve experienced a hundred days of this idiocy already. Somebody posted a meme saying that this President’s record for the first hundred days is even worse than William Henry Harrison’s, and Harrison was dead for seventy of his.

Elon Musk has slowly withdrawn himself from the spotlight. He seems to be surprised that the entire world hates him. It’s been reported that Tesla’s board is out searching for a new CEO. Has Musk truly gone, or is he just trying to rule from the kitchen where nobody is watching?

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a story saying that it is unlikely that most of the cuts Musk and his kids identified will ever make it through Congress. Even some Republicans are wary about defunding aspects of the government that are vital to their constituents. The President wants to publish a budget that incorporates them all, but nobody is happy with them all. Every Representative wants to chip away at a different piece.

Slowly, it seems, everybody is beginning to see just how interconnected each aspect of our government is. The laws we are governed by have come into being after a perceived need for them at some time in our history. Few would say that there aren’t any cuts to be made anywhere, but identifying what can be eliminated without causing an even greater problem is not nearly as easy or as straightforward as it might look.

In my own union, Actors’ Equity Association, there are still rules that are left over from generations past. There is a provision that states that a Choir Director must be present at all music audition calls. It’s been decades since any Broadway show has had a choir.

There are other things in the rulebook that, while not applicable anymore, were so hard-won that nobody seems willing to give them up. Once an ensemble member has performed in a show, they cannot be fired. Ever. They can keep their jobs for the entire run of the play. This was something that had been put in place back in the day because Producers were firing chorus people on a whim and replacing them with boyfriends or girlfriends.

At the time, the run-of-play rule made sense. It protected the membership. Now, with shows sometimes lasting for decades, the rule is just not as practical as it once was. Shows didn’t run as long a hundred years ago as they do now. If you have an ensemble of people playing kids, twenty years into the run, those kids now have kids of their own. Because the cost of putting a new person into a production is exorbitant, producers would be far less likely these days to replace a chorus member unless they had a very good reason.

Even suggesting to the Union, however, that maybe a two-year timeframe might be a good idea, is met with a blank stare. That reaction doesn’t make sense to me. Principal roles in musicals are all contracted for a year or less, so why not ensemble roles, too? It doesn’t mean that producers will automatically terminate somebody at the end of the contracted period; it just means that if you want to cast someone else, that is the time you can.

Nobody’s cutting the number of jobs. Throughout the run, it would give more people a shot at the job. It would also keep the union membership learning and moving forward. Nobody ever became an artist of any sort for the work stability.

The Union is so scared of giving even an inch of latitude back to the producers that discussion of altering existing rules is rarely possible.

There are plenty of state and national laws on the books that should probably not be there anymore. Many may have stopped being enforced, but they’re still there. Getting rid of a law is time-consuming and unimaginably complicated. It requires a willingness to fully study what the law does, who and what it affects, and what the consequences of its repeal might be.

Nobody in this administration seems to want to do that work. Because of that, people are seeing that blindly chopping away has consequences. Because of that, the wholesale clearing out of programs and agencies is slowing down. The courts have reinstated some cuts already. Much of what Elon Musk’s DOGE force has tried to do, because of this slow awakening, now has a decent chance of falling by the wayside.

At the protest rally in Denver two days ago on May 1^st, a disheveled guy who seemed to be on something walked through the crowd muttering things like, “F%$king Liberals.” I don’t know what that guy’s story was. By the look of it, his life cannot be an easy one. Doing what he did, though, took some guts. Maybe he just didn’t care and was looking for a fight.

We need to figure out how to create programs that, instead of just being talking points in a press release, will truly help people like this guy improve their lots. We have a government that is meant to be by the people and for the people. It’s long past the time that those goals get reinstated and enforced.

Presidential actions are not laws. They don’t carry any real weight. They are, instead, little more than talking points for that day’s media postings. Lasting change comes from creating hard-won legislation. There’s nothing easy about doing that and nor should there be. Above all, do no harm is the idea that should be guiding us as we plow ahead.

We did our concert in Denver last night, and our next one is tomorrow in Fort Collins. Today is a travel day, but we don’t have that far to go. If we get to Fort Collins too early, we won’t be able to check into our hotel rooms. A bunch of us, I think, are heading back to Nederland today for lunch.

I never did ask Jake what in the world he was doing in Nederland. While I was there the other day, though, I also met an artist in one of the galleries there named Brent Bishop. Brent paints these beautiful Colorado landscapes, and all of them have some sort of architectural element in front of them, obscuring part of the view.

We all create obstacles that keep us from fully seeing whatever it is that we are looking at. We end up seeing the truth through a wall of lies and prejudices that just blocks the full picture. That wall is man-made. It wouldn’t be there, otherwise. If we aren’t looking at the world through a window, we often only see it through our phones.

Talking with both Jake and Brent in Nederland, Colorado, helped chip away at my own wall a bit. Our conversations helped make the town a real place with real people in it living real lives.

I wish that our President could take a moment to realize that that’s all any of us want. The wall that he’s built to keep the view at bay seems monolithic. He’s not seeing any of us. In truth, it feels as if he’s imprisoned behind the structure he’s made.

It’s beyond the time that the rest of us just add an iron gate to what he’s already constructed for himself and swing it shut and lock it. It’s hard enough for all of us to truly see each other without him continuing to make it worse.

We don’t have to stay behind our walls. We can step around them and look out at what is there without anything whatsoever in the way.

Here in Colorado, the view is amazing.