As predicted hereabouts by astute locals, the supposedly beloved live performance arts scene is officially the first to close and the last to open in this region of bizarre BC during the warlike pandemic. Due to persistently low-vaxx rates in the Nelsonian realm of a police state thatʼs hoarding vaccines, our event venues and beleaguered theatres are still only allowed to host half-capacity audiences in the fall of 2021 while the rest of the provinceʼs automatons blithely go about their epidemic business. 

Twenty-one percent of Kootenay businesses are reporting that they are “in poor shape”, according to the BC Crypt of Commerceʼs “pulse check”, and the most affected sectors are predictably tourism, grub & bevvies, live performance arts & theatres. Live performance theatre artists have the dubious distinction of being impacted by the calculated devastation in each and every one of these overlapping stricken sectors at once. Hurrah for the people who struggle daily in an ancient profession which began as veritable prostitution and continues to be the recipient of both standing ovations and bare-minimum funding, if that; let alone political subsidies akin to those forked over to the fossilized fossil-fuel industry, for a start. Is it possible to cash a standing ovation into cold hard money when the incessant groceries are needed on the universal table? Or, do you have to submit to getting screwed backstage and have nobody care about your damages while the devious clerks pretend “everything is going so well”, despite the fact you just got screwed backstage for depression-era dollars with a similarly harsh outlook for the bleak future of our dissipated theatre scene? 

Bad Old Rusty Baldwin and the Windy City Bleckhawks are emblematic of what happens when irreverent pricks make a lot of dirty money off the poor players who are left at the back of the line with the rest of the dispossessed when the pucks hit the fan and the rich clutch their gilded pockets while serving the werewolf within adrift in their own desperate selfishness. On that bitter note, when asked by a concerned councillor from Shitty Hall about a festive civic event for fun to combat our depressed community’s enforced social isolation, Wormtongue of the Crypt of Consumerism bemoaned his own challenges failing to put on a moneymaking show-biz event and replied as such, “There was too much uncertainty and limits were still pretty restrictive and it just wasnʼt quite right to be able to do it,ʼ he said about the gala. ʻItʼs really tricky trying to plan an event right now because you plan and do all of the work and you donʼt know if you are going to get shut down, or something else happens.” 

Even though he and many other Ghoulie gangsters wrongfully blame the individual Covid support programs for their latest incessant economic ails due to their own financial shortsightedness, while blindly insisting that their precious businesses still receive the same equivalent supports, event planners and producers in town are thankful for Wormtongueʼs unconscious understanding of their current plight and the harsh realities of their past two no-show years and counting. At least artists and their fellow not-haves havenʼt been irrationally transformed into villains somehow by their former allies like our super-heroic healthcare workers who never dreamt society would turn on them to the degree it has for merely trying to do their jobs and save some bloody lives. Still, every dang time someone does anything untoward these trying days, itʼs always “bad actors” getting blamed, just like dramatists always seem to be persecuted unfairly when they dare to speak out about the backstage abuses being committed and covered up by successive theatrical regimes and boring boards against their corporeal bodies themselves. 

So now here we are again in the recent future and artists are being cut off from their essential aid once more when they still canʼt feasibly produce or perform their full capacity shows in such restrictive times, as succinctly summed up by Wormtongue himself; even though the demonic champion was only speaking on behalf of himself and his vested interests when he unknowingly gave the presently screwed artistic folks an unintentional assist in a backwoods rink where only 78% of our eligible candidates have a first-dose vaccination. Add in the kids weʼre sacrificing to the unvaccinated ranks, and thatʼs a whole whack of our populace which we have to protect at all costs. As a result yet again, the thespians, the in-house musicians, the servers, the guides & their unprivileged ilk get screwed by the protected set of our landed gentry who occupy the front-of-house like an invasive army paying tribute to their obedient victims in the spotlight with deafening applause before they royally screw them backstage by divine imperial right, amen! 

What will the boneheaded CoN and the depraved political Manmorons do about this backwater health regionʼs vaccination stagnation and its subsequent drag on the Koots Roots economy? Seemingly absolutely nothing, of course; because as Councillor Woody himself finally figured out in his finite wisdom, all Wormtongue and King Ghoulie of Nelsan can ever do is wait and see and hope and pray that things get back to a normal that will never exist again in their wildest nightmares. Make plans for an ʻuncertainʼ future? Nah, they say, we just want to go back to how it was when everyone bowed down to us and thought we were great! 

#forstmedia #opinion #goldenheron