And So It Goes

Today is Sunday, April 6, 2025. Yesterday I missed my space here because I participated – along with millions of other disaffected Americans – in April 5 demonstrations against this horrible administration in New York. Afterward, I made the miscalculation of meeting Elliot at 4 by the Olive Garden at 47th Street, opposite the TKTS booth, whereupon we entered a line to see a Broadway play. We got tickets to see Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. How was I to know that the play’s length would be quite tortuous: 2 hours and 45 minutes? Of course, I should have checked beforehand, but I didn’t. I just wanted to see Calista Flockhart and Christian Slater perform in a production together. Thus it would have been more plausible to have dinner with Elliot in Manhattan and then take the subway home instead of getting out of a theater on West 42nd Street close to 10. We didn’t get home until about 11.

The true number of protesters who took to the streets yesterday is pegged in the millions by online The Verge in an article entitled “‘Millions’ may have protested Trump and Musk yesterday” by Wes Davis. More of that later.

The rally was called for 1 and I left the house at 11:45 a.m. I believed I was meeting two members of my “Defenders of Democracy” group around 12:45, so I left in enough time to be able to meet them. Naturally, I got to the area early, so I ducked into a Blue Bottle on 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue to have one of their overpriced brews. It didn’t taste as good as the coffee I’ve had at their Williamsburg location for some reason

It was getting late, so I finished my cup of coffee and walked to the rendezvous point: Cha Cha Matcha. The weather was iffy; it threatened to rain at any time. I had my trusty umbrella, plus several signs I printed off the Hands Off website. I also had an original sign that read, “Slash DOGE, not jobs.” When I got to the place, I met people from the Workers’ Circle massing around. When I spied a woman sitting in Cha Cha Matcha with the sign reading “Resist the Turd Reich,” I gave her the thumbs-up. I thought this was a great sign!

I waited needlessly until about 12:55 and no one approached me asking if I were Ron. So I just waded into the massive crowd gathering by the Forty-Second Library and thus began the protest. Before long, this huge crowd began walking en masse down to Madison Square Park, which was the terminus of the demonstration. Even though I walked with no one from my group, I occupied myself – it started to drizzle as we made our way downtown – by talking to various people in the street. The energy and passion were evident in all of those protesters and I loved every minute of it. One of the best chants repeated throughout the walk to the park was this one: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go!” I got into the mood very easily.

There were so many people marching in that crowd that I believed we wouldn’t get to Madison Square Park by the close of the protest, which was 3. I was in error! We managed to somehow reach our destination by that time and that marked the end! I had expected speakers throughout the demonstration exhorting the crowd, but I didn’t see anyone. Even at the end, there were no speakers or politicians shouting through a bullhorn. I wondered why.

But that represented the end of part of the day. I then took the subway with my put-away signs up to 42nd Street where I met Elliot across from the TKTS ticket booth at the Olive Garden Restaurant. Now we crossed the street to wait on line to purchase tickets. I had wanted to see only the play I mentioned earlier and it was available. We waited only about 40 minutes or so and we succeeded in getting two tickets to this play on West 42nd Street.

In the article, it is activist group MoveOn that has estimated “millions of attendees” went to the 1,300-plus scheduled events, with more than 100,000 turning out for the Washington, D.C., protest.

More than 150 groups were represented in the nationwide demonstrations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, and labor unions like the AFL-CIO and those representing federal workers, such as the National Treasury Employees Union.

In a statement reported by Common Dreams, MoveOn said that “at virtually every single event, the crowds eclipsed our estimates.” The group added, “This is the largest day of protest since Trump retook office. And in many small towns and cities, activists are reporting the biggest protests their communities have ever seen as everyday people send a clear, unmistakable message to Trump and Musk: Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy.”

As for the numbers in New York, Axios reports that more than 100,000 people demonstrated in New York. More than 30,000 showed up in Chicago and over 45,000 people gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina.

From the accounts of 50501, one of the most prominent protest movements that have sprung up in the wake of Muskrat’s ruinous actions as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the group posted late yesterday that “over 3 million people across the country stood up to say HANDS OFF our democracy.”

Now to the play, written by Sam Shepard in 1977, Curse of the Starving Class is a bleak, black comedy revolving around the tumbledown fortunes of the Tate family who live in a rundown farm house in the California Central Valley. Here the wife of Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart, plays the family matriarch, Ella, who is the disenchanted, sullen wife of Weston Tate, played drunkenly by Christian Slater. Weston is the boozing, violent paterfamilias to Wesley (Cooper Hoffman) – son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman – and Emma (Stella Marcus). Before the evening begins, it’s Weston who kicks out the glass in the kitchen’s sliding doors in a fit of rage directed toward Ella who calls the cops on him. The setting of the two-act play is the family’s cruddy kitchen. It’s in here that a live lamb is brought in from the outside because she has maggots. The use of the lamb certainly evokes “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience.

Even with the caliber of this high-powered cast, the play wallows in long monologues and verbal tics employed by the cast. But this is a Shepard play and that’s his oeuvre: the world of drunken louts and embittered dreams and dreams denied like the ones denied to the Tate family. There is a lot of talk about selling the farm and moving to Europe, which is Ella’s dream. Emma dreams of becoming an auto mechanic and living on her own. Weston dreams of selling a patch of dry, desert land sold him by a con man who later turns up as Ella’s supposed lawyer who convinces her to sign on the dotted line to sell the farm without Weston’s knowledge. It is brooding, inert Wesley who seems to have abandoned any dreams of escaping the Tate curse.

The play is pretty long, as I’ve already indicated, and this is when my prior participation at the demonstration caught up with me. I started to get a little sleepy, but I managed to stay awake for the whole production.

ll in all, I would say this is a flawed production, but if you’re mesmerized by names such as Flockhart, Hoffman, and Slater, go “baa” to the New Group and see this adaptation of a very early Sam Shepard play. Oops, according to Google, the end date for the play is today, April 6. I’m not sure if it has been extended.

Have a good week.

And so it went!