Los Trocks, Boplay and Mocen
UNUNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL SPECIAL:
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA by UPI special reporter Lance Modnoc
Prominent Florida Republican and would-be presidential candidate Don ReSantis announced a statewide medical crisis on Wednesday, the result of simultaneous and casually related catastrophes affecting Emergency Departments from Pensacola to Key West.
An as yet undermined number of members of the rightwing Proud Boys, renowned for their public displays of AK-47 rifles and bulletproof vestS (valued for deflecting historically correct thinking and as a placebo cure for LTS - low-testosterone syndrome), have been involved in shoot-themselves-in-the-foot incidents across the state.
Synchronously, members of the disingenuously self-described Mom’s for Liberty have been transported by worried family members to hospitals nationwide with a newly described “frozen brain syndrome,” known in the “Old South” as ‘the vapors.” “They are responding to calls to protest at bookstores everywhere and ‘drinking the Kool-Aide’ about Spare - the new autobiography of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and it’s causing them to hallucinate,” explained Dr. Corpus Callosum, chief of the Brain and Higher Thinking Skills at Stan’s Bar and Teaching Hospital. “They are reading about the Prince’s experience of ‘Frostnip-istan” and believe his self-disclosure will cause boys to ‘turn gay’ through the use of Elizabeth Arden creams.
“They’re demanding that libraries ban the book and calling on the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives to regulate the sale of all ‘gay-converting’ Elizabeth Arden creams nationwide,” explained the neurophysiologist. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
The rash of shootings has been spurred by Proud Boys concerns about scheduled performances in Chicago, New Orleans and South Florida of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlos.
Miami-based trauma surgeon Dr. R. U Kiddinme has reported that, given the number of bones shattered in the lower legs, knees and feet by the self-targeting Proud Boys, he is performing reparative surgeries without the use of anesthetics in “the hope it will teach these guys a lesson. Of course, I make all the damage look beautiful again. But beauty is only skin deep and stupid goes all the way to the bone.”
Established by New York ballet enthusiasts in 1974 and initially performing late-night shows in small, Off-Broadway spaces, the TROCKS present a playful, entertaining view of classical ballet in parody form en travesti. By the early 1980s, the TROCKS were a worldwide phenomenon. The company has performed in 49 states, in over 30 countries and more than 600 cities; it regularly appears in benefits for international AIDS organizations and on behalf of groups assisting LGBTQ and homeless youths.
Almost fifty years after its founding, the original concept of Les Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo has not changed. It remains a company of professional dancers performing the full range of ballet and modern dance repertoire in faithful renditions of classical works.
The laughter comes when the TROCKs exaggerate the foibles, accidents, and underlying incongruities of serious ballet, including The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, The Black Swan and Don Quixote.
Ticket prices for South Florida performances in February range from $61 to $585 and that’s for single tickets.
Wooooops. Did we forget to note that the TROCKS is a small but stalwart all-male corps de ballet that performs in drag? That’s what en travesti means – dressed as the opposite sex. And they can, in fact, dance en pointe, perform jetes and gran jetes and pirouettes without falling flat on their faces. (When was the last time a Proud Boy accomplished that?)
It’s the in drag that has earned the ire of the Proud Boys and their costume wearing band of merry men, who protest that allowing children to attend TROCK performances is sexual abuse.
Founded on the first day of 2021, the anti-COVID restrictions in schools – including masks and vaccine mandates, anti-mention of LGBTQ, anti-teaching critical race theory in grade and high school (something that has never happened because it is an advanced concept originated and taught in law schools), anti-anti-discrimination, Moms for Liberty has specialized in ridding schools and public libraries of books members consider perverse, obscene or, in inexplicable ways, as perverting America’s grade and high school students and turning them ”gay” or “trans” through the power of written word.
Apoplectic Moms were forced to cancel their planned march on the Montecito, California home of the Prince and Megan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, when a series of atmospheric rivers inundated California, causing mudslides and sinkholes.
March, march march, the Moms would have been marching to ban his new autobiography in which Harry admitted to using cocaine for the first time at age 17. He was offered a line at someone’s house and consumed the drug on several other occasions, although he insists media reports suggesting he was a drug addict were false and that he did not enjoy it.
“It wasn’t much fun and it did not make me feel especially happy as it seemed to do to everyone else, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective. I was a 17-year-old boy ready to try anything that altered the pre-established order.”
He also describes losing his virginity – in a field behind a pub - to an older woman who treated him like a “young stallion… an inglorious episode.”
Most alarmingly for the marching Moms, the Prince, rather indirectly, gave some first aid advice for the frostbitten. Seems that no one had warned the then younger Harry that the clothes he had packed for a trip to the North Pole before his brother’s wedding did not provide sufficient padding/insolation to protect the royal bloodline. As a result, Young Prince Harry suffered – really suffered – frostbite. In his telling,
“My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized. The last place I wanted to be was Frostnip-istan. I had been trying some home remedies, including one recommended by a friend. She urged me to apply Elizabeth Arden cream. My mum used that on her lips. ‘You want me to put that on my togger?’ ‘It works, Harry. Trust me.’ I found a tube and the minute I opened it the smell transported me through time. I felt as though my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and applied it… down there.”
The marching Moms fear that exposing their children to the Prince’s story will turn them into drug-rattled, Elizabeth Arden togger-creamers who might marry a bi-racial person and move across an ocean to God-only-knows-where.
In 1951, an unsigned review in Booklist warned of the “coarse language” of J.D. Salinger’s now classic The Catcher in the Rye, while a writer for the Library Journal warned that it “may be a shock to many parents” and observed that it should be strictly adult reading. The Christian Science Month complained of the “wholly repellent” Catcher’s vulgarity and Catholic World took note of the “excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language” and Times Literary Supplement complained that the “endless stream of blasphemy and obscenity” was over the top after the first chapter.
During the 2021-2022 academic year, more than 1,600 books were banned from school libraries in 138 school districts in 32 states, according to PEB America, an organization dedicated to protecting free expression in literature. More than half-a-century after it hit The New York Times best-seller list, the American Library Association reported that Catcher has consistently been a “favorite of censors since its publication.”
In 2016, Writers House Services listed Catcher as the Most Famous Banned Book of All Times, followed by, among others in the top 10: Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farwell to Arms, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and The Shining by Stephen King.
Wow, it is not farfetched to believe that the marching Moms read almost all of these and survived. Yet, it’s not fantasy to think that – as they insist that the world march to the beat of their moral drummer - they’ll demand that today’s kids not read and today’s libraries not carry Prince Harry’s Spare.
Happily, for the survival of Classic Greek and Shakespearean drama, the Proud Boys and their long guns are a modern phenomenon. In ancient Greek and Shakespearean England theatre, men played the female roles – complete with long dresses, sashaying and (we assume) falsetto voices. In Shakespeare’s 16th Century, rules of the Roman Catholic Church only allowed men to perform on stage. [Yes. By Church decree, Juliet was really Julio.]
In Victorian England (1837-1901), actresses impersonated men and women performed as men. In the United States, actresses like British-born and cigar-smoking Anne Hindle (1847-1904) became famous for playing male characters in variety shows. The Pittsburgh Dispatch reported in 1892 “Miss Hindle has three times been married. Once she was a bride, twice she has been a groom. Once she had a husband, twice she has had a wife.”
Early 20th Century vaudevillian Julian Eltinge sang as femme mimic; audiences believed that she was a genuine actress – until, at the end of a performance, he would remove his wig and reveal his gender to the crowd, often to cries of amazement. By the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1917, he was one of the world’s highest paid actors.
In the States, impersonation of the opposite sex in theatre and films was popular until what was seen as the immorality of men impersonating women was ended by the 1933 Motion Picture Code.
In the early days of television, the immensely popular comedian Milton Berle wore dresses for comedic effect while making no effort to hid the much-speculated-about “python in his pants.” In the 1980s, Black comedian Flip Wilson’s character “Geraldine Jones” was a nationwide hit, famously popularizing the phrase “What you see is what you get.”
Originally, “portmanteau” referred to a suitcase that opened into two sections. In Through A Looking Glass, author Lewis Carroll gave the word new meaning when Humpty Dumpty explained to Allice “You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed into one word.” Thus, breakfast + lunch = brunch; electronic + mail = email; smog + fog = smog.
As the so-called Proud Boys “cosplay” – play-acting in costumes of camouflage, bullet-proof vests and weapons of war – and demand an end to drag shows everywhere, we suggest a new portmanteau – “Boplay.” Boplay – Boys playing macho men.
And, “Mocen” – Moms Censoring Reading and Thinking – for those who would censor just about any and everything they deem dangerous.
A word of caution: Be careful around the cosplaying Boplays and Mocens. As they shoot themselves in the feet, they just might miss and hit you. After all, history has shown that censorship doesn’t work very well.