"It's All Over But The Crying"

Sorry I've been a little out of it lately & not getting around the blogsphere much to comment on any of your sites.
I had a big project to do for the theater and along with my other duties it was like a second job. It has kept me at the office 10 or more hours a day & weekends for the last month.

Instead of being involved in the theater as an actor, this year, I opted to be the PR person & also, "build" (newspaper jargon) the local theater's program that we hand out to our patrons. Putting together the whole program myself involved taking head shots of about 100 people, putting together bios for about 40 of them, building the 30 sponsors ads & everything else it takes to fill up a 24 page program.

I ran into a glitch on press night when I was taking head shot photos with my fancy new camera. I had prepared myself with two full battery packs & a large memory card, I also had a new macro lens I was itching to try out... Unfortunately, I didn't take into consideration how much the USM AF motor in the macro lens would suck the life out of my batteries or how quickly my memory card would fill up. The line of people waiting to be photographed was still pretty long when both my batteries gave out. Luckily, there were a couple of people with small digital cameras & someone actually had a memory card like mine that they let me use. Of course, that created hours of extra work for me in photo shop, but all's well that ends well, as they say.
Today my daughter & I picked up all 7,000 programs at the printers. I'm very pleased with how well they look. Although, I haven't heard from the actors, dancers, & other theater folks yet... personally I've only tallied 3 minor mistakes (annoying aesthetic ones) & one involving an ad (wrong phone #) that I'll have to make right somehow, (already figured out how to do that).
The thing is, in newspapers... as my editor is so fond of pointing out, "One mistake is not only one, but however many publications you put out"
So far it's only 28,000 minor mistakes....Well, OK, getting a phone # wrong on some ones AD is not minor to them, but like I said, I've got that covered.

That is why when we put a newspaper to bed (newspaper jargon for sending it to the printer & finally getting to go home) we say, "It's All Over But The Crying".

A number of people blogged about the riot police videos taken at a tea party protest in Quincy Ill. a couple of weeks ago & there are half a dozen different videos on youtube recording the incident. This is my favorite, because it captures the party mood of the crowd. Tea party rallies have all the ingredients to make for a successful afternoon outing.

But, the Tea Party protests and rallies are being compared to the Vietnam war protests in the 1960's & 70's.
I compare it to my own recent stint with anti-war protesting in the last Bush years, standing on the street corner with my liberal anti-war friends for an hour on Wednesday afternoon's or going up to the state capitol for a day 's rally.
In fact, if my left leaning friends were in the same situation as the above video & I would guarantee the same level of taunts & jeers of righteous indignation, the same feelings of persecution, and the skewed perspective that this Teaparty lady has.
The above link makes me chuckle because, I know a mother and daughter just like them, but on the liberal side of the fence, that I could imagine acting in exactly the same way!

I had a conversation with a friend about the effectiveness of protesting & other public expressions of dissatisfaction with our government.
She claimed to "have been there & done that" & say's that this sort of thing is a phase & politically minded people will protest , jump up & down & let off steam until they realize it doesn't get them anywhere. She said she was in College during the Vietnam War & ate lots of tear gas, but it never stopped anything from happening. She reasoned for the most part the protesters back then were dismissed as rebellious, counterculture , & too young to know any better.
I'm not sure I agree wholly with that, for one thing during the Vietnam war years, the protest was more then just demonstration against a perceived threat. After all many of the war protesters had a lot to lose, we were involved in a serious bloody war in another country & being shipped off to Vietnam held a pretty good possibility of not coming back. It was a real threat that sustained those protests & many people dedicated themselves to the anti-war movement .
As I see it, the Tea Party protesters, don't have that kind of real & present danger to keep them motivated, their protests have no edge or force behind them.
Standing on a street corner for a couple of hours with your friends, waving at traffic is mostly a lark, an afternoon's entertainment.
That being said, I am curious to see how the Tea Party movement progresses. I'm as fascinated by the politics of it as much as I'm repelled by some of the people in it.
I'm also very interested in other people's opinions.
*hint*