Trigger warning: this one takes a turn.

Say, you may have noticed that the frequency of my posts and the quality of said posts have diminished signific--huh? You haven't noticed? Huh...not sure how I should take that. Anyway, the reason is this:

Move over Death of a Salesman.

We even made the local paper!
Yup, live theatre and print media,
we are on the cutting edge!

Bikini Werewolf Massacre! The Musical. I am, if I haven't mentioned this before, a fan of theatre and even go so far as to spell it with an "re" instead of an "er" to really drive home the pretentiousness. And BWMTM (acronym!) is the show I've been working on. Well worked on. Tonight's closing--what? Like I said, I've been busy. I know it's hard to tell from the image above, the title, or the fact that I'm writing this blog and not say, writing professionally, but it's actually an entirely amateur production. Like, super amateur. You won't believe how aggressively amateur we are, but that's the part of the appeal.

Click here for tickets. What? Don't
look at me like that...in twelve years I've
shilled for something once. Once. 

Don't worry, I'm not going to plug my show, or go on a l'art pour l'art tear, although, for real, art for art's sake. Also, if we, as a civilization funded the arts like we should, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we do. What I'm saying is that kids who pick up paint brushes or do theatre or play the piccolo don't storm Capitols. Yeah, I know, Hitler was a painter, but need I remind you that he was a shitty painter. My point is, on Thursday I had to have a serious conversation with my co-director about cancelling the show. Yup, this just took a turn, but stay with me.

There's no funny photo or caption I can come
up with for this one, so here're some puppies.

So I live in Santa Cruz, California, and on Thursday morning while at work, we got word that there was an active shooter at the local high school. The entire district went on lockdown, and rumors circulated about students having been shot, and people with kids were frantically calling and texting hoping to find out if they were ok. It was awful, but the good news is that this was a false alarm. Evidently a hoax or a prank or something. But the fact of the matter remains that for a full two hours the entire town was waiting to hear if we were the next Uvalde. 

And this is no way to live, you know? Sure, nobody was hurt and a community theatre production is far down the list of things to worry about, but ours is a show about a high school beset by werewolves and it includes a scene where a character hands the protagonist a gun full of silver bullets. There's a satirical line about how handing a gun to a highschooler is a bad look. Ha ha. 

But handing guns out to your family for a
Christmas Card is responsible gun ownership.

We have an actual military now, and
professional law enforcement (in theory anyway),
so yeah, at this point gun ownership is a hobby.

And it's not unreasonable to ask if this line or the show in general hit too close to home just thirty six hours after our scare. And yeah, it does. I'm not a parent, but yeah, it absolutely does. But the thought occurs that jokes about how easy it is for kids to get their hands on guns is less of a problem than how easy it is for kids, and really anyone, to get their hands on guns. So shy should we call off our show or cut a line because a minority of Americans with outsized political influence care more about their gross hobby than people's lives? 

That line isn't the reason ten thousand kids had to hide under their desks waiting to see if a Second Amendment enthusiast would burst in to their classroom. The good news is, nobody stormed out of our show, which I'm taking as a good sign.

Fine, one guy stormed out. God, people are so sensitive these days...