A simple “please remove” would have sufficed but I appreciate your enthusiasm and professionalism for guerrilla theatre.  You have redefined ”spam” as it pertains to promoting a fringe show.  Your message is loud and clear and has been incorporated into my publicity.  Many thanks for informing me that  I had been included in 34st’s Must See list.  No one informed me and it didn’t show up in Google searches for my show and it didn’t come through in our Google Alerts,  so we truly had no clue until your email.

Now how about  coming to see the show? There’ll be a comp ticket waiting for you at the door tonight (seriously).

Many thanks,

Jeff

—– Original Message —–

Dear Jeffrey,

Now we know why they stressed right off the bat that Santa Claus had been “shot in the head.” It’s so they can never be obligated to show clean and clear proof that they actually killed him last week (because anyone can tell you that Santa Claus, if he ever existed, was killed years ago).  And wasn’t he diabetic?  Yet no dialysis machines turned up at the compound.  Strange.  The convenient “shot in the head” excuse was backed up today when the White House also informed us that he was “shot above the left eye” and that part of his skull had been “blown away,” making any facial recognition impossible and precluding the need to release a photo. Except perhaps a snapshot sooner or later where he’s conveniently unrecognizable and we’ll just have to take their word for it.

Perfect. Although there’s a nice photo floating around anyway. Only problem is,  it’s a fake that’s been floating around for months.  No matter; whatever else does get released will also be a fake.

We also learned when the story first broke that “a woman” had been killed.  Compare this to the extensive coverage of the death of Qaddafi’s sons and grandchildren last week — we got names, ages, full journalistic access to the compound. Even the death of Saddam Hussein’s (you know,  Santa Claus’ supposed partner in criminal masterminding) sons deaths were given full coverage and proof. Wouldn’t that also have been inflammatory and encourage retaliation from Santa’s elves?  Ditto the execution of Saddam himself; and note that Saddam was buried in his hometown and, lo and behold, his grave hasn’t become a “shrine for terrorists.”  But Santa Claus is different, I guess.

And if they’re so excited with the “mother lode” of data they brought out of Santa’s compound, why on earth would they instantly kill, rather than apprehend, a high value target like Kris Kringle? Not even a brief trip to a black ops site for a little waterboarding to find out exactly what the criminal genius knew and might have been planning?

But alas, everyone from Fox News to PBS are going straight to the CIA, and only the CIA, to find out what happened. That’s like interviewing the fox to find out what exactly went on in the henhouse.  Then there’s CIA Director Panetta on PBS tonight talking about his access to the “real-time video feed” of the events at Santa’s compound, while Obama in the White House also watched a real-time feed. But –aw, dang– neither of them saw the real-time moment when Père Noël was killed because that part didn’t get transmitted. In other words there are no eyewitnesses available to describe exactly what happened.

Obama 2012 by a landslide. Remember I predicted it here first.

[images via astalo.deviantart.com and prisonplanet.com]

Surely you’ve heard by now that international theatre legend Ellen Stewart died last week on 1/13/11 at the age of 91.  By the time I got to New York in the late 1980s LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, which she founded, was already legendary.

I was thrilled to be a footnote in LaMama’s history years later in 2002 when a short play I wrote, a weak pastiche of a Broadway musical called “The Monkey of Oz,” was performed there as a part of a larger evening.

LaMama; March, 1965. Donald L. Brooks' play "Fly." From left to right top: John Brooks, Joel Thurm (stage manager), playwright Donald L. Brooks, JOEY LONDON (standing in the overcoat). Seated: Anthony Bastiano, Frances Mintz. Brooks generously altered the schedule of his play to allow for the 'Cino at La Mama' season after the Cino fire, canceling "Fly's" final performance to make room for Tom Eyen's Cino production of "Frustrata." La Mama’s site lists “The Fly” as opening Mar. 10th, 1965.

Then there’s my Uncle Joey, a wise and aged actor from back in the day who has often spoken to me about being there “at the beginning” as one of Ellen’s regular ensemble of actors who were fixtures there and at its immediate predecessor Caffe Cino.  He also happened by Caffe Cino on the morning of March 30, 1967, the day that Joe Cino had gruesomely hacked himself up with a kitchen knife, and he saw the blood-spattered floor shortly after Joe had been rushed to the hospital.  Joe’s suicide attempt was successful — he died a few days later.  Uncle Joey recounted how two years later in 1969 a play by Donald L. Brooks was produced about Joe Cino called Superfreak: The Death of Joe Cino, which depicted his suicide in all its gore.  This upset some of Cino’s associates and led them to organize a boycott of the show.  Ellen Stewart also joined the boycott and banned Brooks and the entire cast and crew from ever having their work produced at LaMama again. In Uncle Joey’s eyes this was the only black mark in Ellen’s career, because, he says, she never actually went to see Superfreak herself.  He considered it a powerful and meaningful show.  He tried explaining that to Ellen,  but she just smiled and walked away.

Still, he remained a loyal and unshakable Ellen fan.  A few years ago when an article about Ellen winning (yet another) prize appeared in The New York Times, Uncle Joey pulled from his obsessive, personal LaMama archive a similar article written many years earlier.  The articles make terrific companion pieces and nicely sum up LaMama.  I photocopied the two articles onto a single sheet and still use it today as a handout when I include theatre history as a component of my playwriting classes at New York University.

The first article is from the Village Voice, 1969, written by theatre critic Jerry Tallmer, the man who coined the term Off-Off Broadway in a 1960 Voice article.  The Voice also gave the first Obie award in 1965.

The second article is from the Times, 9/21/2007; no author given.

I quote liberally from them now:

Village Voice, 1969 (unsure of month and date)

CLOSEUP column by Jerry Tallmer

And From the Wings…

So now it is eight years and maybe 300 new plays presented by Cafe LaMama, and a new Off-Off-Broadway home at 74A E. 4th St. with two theaters stacked one above the other, the cement still wet on opening night, and Ellen Stewart recognized around the world as mama to a whole new generation of playwrights.

“My biddies,” she calls them, urging that every single one be named so that no feelings are hurt. That being impossible, we will just say she has started on their way “at least 100 playwrights, maybe 150″ of every conceivable variety, some of whom are already up in the big time.

Ellen Stewart doesn’t like much to talk in any detail about herself or the past. These facts do emerge:

She was born in Alexandria, La., “and spent my life in Chicago.” She is a handsome woman of enormous class and style and joy of life, and her speech is geechee – “Zthees is Cafe La Mama, dedicated to zthee playwright” — coming down to her by way of the Negro slaves along the Ogeechee River in Georgia who were her ancestors.

“I didn’t come from a hard-life kind of thing,” says Ellen, whose mother was a schoolteacher.  “I went to Arkansas State College in Pine Bluff, and after college I didn’t even teach school, which is what I was supposed to do. Shall we say, I drifted around, so to speak?  The truth is,” charmingly put — “I was kind of pretty, you know.”

And she became a mother. Her son, Larry Hovell, used to be a teacher and now works in advertising in Chicago. His is the father of her granddaughter, Sorata Ellen, 2.

“Oh,” says Grandmother Ellen. “I can give you one job. I worked in electronics. I went to Western Electric and I was too dumb to do anything in electronics so they put me in school at the Illinois Institute of Technology.”

It was around that time that a doctor told her “that I had some brains and that I would have more trouble, like a stroke, if I didn’t use them.”

So, in 1950, wanting to become a fashion designer, she flipped a coin. “Heads I go to San Francisco, tails to New York. Blacks couldn’t go to fashion school in Chicago.”  It came up tails and New York. She landed a job in the powder room at Saks Fifth; three months later they made her an executive designer. Seven years later she went off into freelance designing, the means by which she still supports herself with lines of playwear for Victor and Joseph Bijou of University Place.

It was in 1961 that she started to fulfill a lifelong dream by opening the first Cafe La Mama in a tiny basement on E. 9th St.  She had in mind for her first playwright her foster-brother Fred Lights, who is today a stage manager for NBC.  Subsequently driven from pillar to post by every form of city and union officialdom, she survived it all, moving, going on, moving, going on, at last receiving a big Rockefeller grant ($65,000) and a bigger Ford grant ($139,000) which have made this last move to E. 4th St. possible.

If lots of previously unknown people have been helped by Ellen, lots of people have helped her, not least Tom O’Horgan, the director who started with Ellen and who now has contributed $10,000 to LaMama out of his proceeds from “Hair,” and Jules Weiss, a retired builder “who has helped me in everything,” most particularly the renovation at the new building which is an old building going back to when it was put up for a German music society in 1863.

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The New York Times, September 21, 2007

La MaMa Founder Wins Prize

Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director of the LaMama Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village, joined the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meruon as winners yesterday of the $125,000 Praemium Imperiale arts awards…Given by the Japan Arts Association and announced at the Japanese Cultural Center in Paris, the accolades [are] for lifetime achievement in the arts in categories not covered by the Nobel Prizes…In a telephone interview from Italy, where she is working, Ms. Stewart, 87, who created her Off Off Broadway theater club nearly 46 years ago and has been its director ever since, said of the prize: “It caught me by great surprise. Although America doesn’t realize it, we are kind of known just about everywhere in the world.”

[images via caffecino.wordpress.com and playbill.com]

Arizona Shooting: Treating Mental Illness Before it Kills

Let’s Stop It Before It Claims Lives

by Dr. Harold Koplewicz, President, the Child Mind Institute

“In the mass shooting in Arizona Saturday there were heroes who prevented even more bloodshed…But there are others in this story who could have, and I believe would have, been heroes if they had the knowledge and tools they needed to stop Jared Loughner’s descent into mental illness.

“It’s heartbreaking to read the accounts of college students and professors who noticed Loughner’s bizarre and frightening behavior, shared their fears with others, but didn’t see a way to get Loughner effective help…It’s terrible to imagine a student actually sitting by the door of her classroom because she was so afraid of another obviously mentally ill student — and outrageous that it took more than a single day to resolve the situation. In fact, it took three or four weeks before her concerned professor, and others who had Loughner in their classes, were able to have him removed…What his professors didn’t do is acknowledge that he was a risk to both himself and others, and call the police. 

“Schizophrenia, if that’s what this is — or any of the other psychiatric disorders that can lead to psychosis — doesn’t develop overnight. There are warning signs, and those signs didn’t prompt the intervention they should have. ” FULL STORY AT CHILD MIND INSTITUTE>>

But alas, according to the New York Times (see below) the fuzz did visit Loughner’s home, but they can only do so much until a person commits a crime. Cops can’t arrest someone because they read Nietzsche or went to a lame party and decided they’d rather sit alone and read a dictionary, and drop them off at the psych center.  (And I hate when the media in this country do this; ‘he read books so he must be crazy.’  Yes, this guy is a maniac but are they suggesting that reading made him crazy?  Or are they suggesting that he was crazy, therefore he read books? Either way it’s a silly message to send our kids. The Clinton administration did the same thing after Columbine; the Dept. of Ed. sent out a guidebook for teachers to help them spot troubled students, and one of the warning signs was students who spend an inordinate amount of time in the library reading books!   Remember when studiousness and staying out of trouble was a good thing? Now it makes you odd, and dangerous.  I guess if you’re a violent bully on a daily basis then you’re normal.  I’m only saying, look elsewhere for the root of evil or of psychosis. Thankfully there are organizations like the above-mentioned Child Mind Institute that make some sense.)

Regarding Loughner and the fuzz, couldn’t the cops (including the campus cops who were extremely aware of his frightening classroom behavior) have gone to a next of kin, as in Loughner’s mom or dad, to strongly recommend that they have Loughner forcibly committed? Loughner wasn’t just reading intellectual books. He was acting dangerous and seemed to enjoy, and gain a sense of power from, making people afraid of him, like his classmates, former friends, and neighbors.

And now the Times article:

Police Say They Visited Tucson Suspect’s Home Even Before Rampage

By Jo Becker, Kirk Johnson and Serge F. Kovaleski; nytimes.com

“The police were sent to the home where Jared L. Loughner lived with his family on more than one occasion before the attack here on Saturday…The news of police involvement with the Loughners suggests that county sheriff’s deputies were at least familiar with the family, even if the reason for their visits was unclear as of Tuesday night.

“The account by Mr. Loughner’s friend added some details to the emerging portrait of the suspect and his family. ‘He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos…he was sick in the head,’ said Zane Gutierrez, 21… [Loughner] talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Will To Power and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing.

“He added that Mr. Loughner ‘used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.’ …He also said that Mr. Loughner had increasing trouble interacting in social settings — during one party, for instance, Mr. Loughner retreated upstairs alone to a room and was found reading a dictionary.

“After his arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia in 2007, Mr. Loughner was ordered to attend a diversion program run by the county attorney’s office…But the program is primarily educational, focused on ‘the dangers of drugs and the dangers of substance abuse,’ rather than the kind of in-depth counseling that friends, including Mr. Gutierrez, strongly felt that Mr. Loughner needed.

“‘It got worse over time,’ Mr. Gutierrez said. He said he stopped talking to Mr. Loughner last March, when their interactions grew increasingly unpredictable and troubling….’He started to get really paranoid.’” FULL STORY AT NYTIMES.COM>>

Another update: As I predicted, there were plenty of other symptoms besides what books he read; in fact, there was an avalanche of warning signs right under everyone’s noses, even right under his family’s noses, yet they decided not to have him committed. Why? Why on earth not?  FULL STORY AT NYTIMES.COM>>

[image by me; baby head sculpture by Ron Mueck, Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

Alright. I will blow my own psychic trumpet – if I can reach it.  Here goes…

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Paris Hilton will become increasingly orange, and will be found dead from a cocaine-heroin cocktail overdose in the Malibu home of a close friend.

Martin Scorsese will make a new movie stereotyping Italians.

Robert DeNiro will phone in another comedy performance to keep the bills paid.

Woody Allen will make one more movie whining about the fact that his life is meaningless and his ego too fragile to take it just in case we haven’t been paying attention.  To prove his point, he’ll pull the negationist stunt of divorcing Soon-Yi and marrying one of his other children.

Charlie Sheen’s antics will continue to be hilarious. Oh, his TV show will also stay pretty funny.

Broadway will remain racially segregated, with investors maintaining that Separate But Equal works really well in theatre, so why tinker with it? Tourists will agree with them wholeheartedly.

Off Broadway will continue rolling out redundant domestic dramas about the trials and tribulations of white families, some of whom are struggling exploitatively with their homosexuality, some exploitatively with their children’s homosexuality, others with prescription drug addiction, still others with a general suburban ennui.  Hasn’t the gay community been stereotyped enough?

Off Off Broadway will remain the last bastion of truly cutting edge professional, noncommercially-driven theatre, which unfortunately most tourists either won’t learn about or will be too afraid to take their kids downtown or to Brooklyn  to see, or will continue in their mistaken belief that Off Off is synonymous with amateur.  To combat this, the tired phrase “Off Off Broadway theatre” will finally be dropped by the media and replaced with “independent theatre,” making it appropriately analagous to independent film.

BOOKS
Memoirs by overprivileged yet sheltered white ladies who traveled alone abroad for the first time, and had unlifechanging experiences which they contend were sublime, will finally stop being published.

SPORTS
NFL and SPCA legend Michael Vick, the OJ Simpson of animal abuse, will get caught in another imbroglio involving violent cruelty to a living thing weaker than himself, and it will involve illegal gambling. To help boost his reputation, Vick will open a Vick’s Pet Care pet-sitting service in Philadelphia.

JOURNALISM
“Aks” will become standard English for the proper way to spell “ask.”

The nonsensical “for all intensive purposes” will become an increasingly acceptable idiom, replacing the more traditional and more logical “for all intents and purposes,” which just sounds too old-fashioned even though it actually makes sense.

“Repel” and “repeal” will continue to gain acceptance as synonyms.

The nonexistent word “insiduous” will replace “insidious.”

No one will help us out of this mess, and schools will only reinforce these absurd grammatical changes.

AMERICA’S OBESITY CRISIS
The discredited 1970s’ 4-4-3-2 nutrition plan will be resurrected by the US Department of Agriculture as a normal, healthy diet given that most Americans adhere to it anyway. Did you know that pizza with everything is a healthy meal, containing items from the milk group, meat group, fruits & vegetables group, and breads & cereals group?  So is a Whopper.

WORLD
There will be continued violence in the Middle East. There will be continued violence in Africa. The sky will continue to be blue, the trees green.

European anarchist groups will continue to work together with increasingly sophisticated coordination, destroying the economic system, plunging us into their much hoped for post-apocalyptic, feudalistic society.  They will declare the date to be Year Zero. Farms will be seized and “collectivized,” after which mass starvation and gang violence will rule the day. Frazzled anarchist leaders will then call upon the police and military to restore order, and then they will request loans from multinational banks to rebuild all the roads, trains and hospitals they destroyed in order to liberate all of us.

POLITICS
Millions of working Americans will begin to feel and appreciate the benefits of Obama’s healthcare plan but will continue to complain that socialist Obama has screwed up the country.  Obama, unfazed, will prepare for a 2012 landslide reelection.  I also predict that I will be one of those voting for him again.

A major world leader will announce not only a cutesy belief in the possibility of extraterrestrials, but will insist with all seriousness during a press conference that he has seen ETs himself. The Vatican will immediately back him up. This will all be part of preparing us for 2012 when things are really gonna get all alieny up in here.

SCIENCE
Bigfoot sightings will become increasingly fashionable. A theoretical link between Bigfoots and the newly announced ETs (see above) will gain ground among top scientists.

Happy New Year, everybody. God bless us, every one.

[image via psychic-junkie.com]

Oh well, MTV Desi has me pegged.  They’re exactly right about me but at least they acknowledge that I also acknowledge that I am one more gawking American.

And I can’t complain about being named an honorary Desi, sort of.

New York Press Delves Into the Paan Game
by Abdullah

When I first saw the headline “Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater” on the cover of this week’s New York Press, naturally, I grabbed a copy and asked myself the question you’re asking yourself right now; What the hell is the New York Press?   Well, it’s a paper that’s running a cover story about something inherently Desi that’s breaking into mainstream culture. And why not? It didn’t take long for Americans to adopt the more… CONT’D AT MTVDESI.COM>> 

The Asia Society also commented and was a tad less snarky than MTV (but who am I to complain about being snarky in a blog post from time to time, eh?).

A Paean to Paan
by Aliya Sabharwal

…From describing his initiation into the practice of paan-chewing to drawing interesting comparisons to the tobacco-dipping culture of his Appalachian relatives, Stanley seems to have seriously and diligently researched this “local” practice. But the result is a riot for those familiar with paan chewing or chewers, if only for the novelty of reading an eloquent homage to the substance.  CONT’D AT ASIASOCIETY.ORG>>

Well, now it’s just too much. My paan habit has also made the celebrity gossip page of India Abroad, the major newspaper for Indian expats around the world, getting top billing over Tom Cruise’s tweets to Anil Kapoor (see p. 6).  I’m truly honored and humbled.

Jeffrey Stanley is Addicted to Paan…CONT’D AT INDIA ABROAD>>

[images via mtvdesi.com, asiasociety.org, and indiaabroad-digital.com]

I heart paan

I bought tobacco paan from this walla near the Belur Math monastery along the banks of the Ganges in West Bengal, India.

This week’s New York Press, ”New York’s Plummy Weekly Newspaper,” cover story is my monologue thinly disguised as an essay, ‘Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater’, the title a loose parody of Thomas de Quincey’s scandalous 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Enjoy the article, go to your nearest Indian grocer and enjoy some meeta paan, and if you’re craving more dope on the delicacy here’s a short clip of me ordering it from a paan walla just across from the ancient Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa in eastern India, this past January (footage courtesy of documentary filmmaker David Gaynes).

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And the article…

Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater

JEFFREY STANLEY is addicted to what may arguably be India’s most disgusting export

I pull my hat low as I pound the rain-slicked sidewalks of Curry Hill around noon on a frigid November weekday. I look about furtively as I walk up Lexington, stopping outside of a DVD shop before I dart inside. There I meet my sugar man, a Punjabi who only goes by the nom de commerce Arora.  By now I know his real name, but he likes to go by the one-word moniker.  I’m happy to…CONT’D AT NYPRESS.COM>>

[IHeartPaan logo, paan walla photo and video are property of me. Logo via nypress.com]

Once again the New York Times is better late than never on reporting human rights abuses.  It took them nearly a decade to start reporting on rogue US soldiers killing civilians for sport in Iraq and Afghanistan. I call your attention to the Winter Soldier testimonies of 2008 which were ignored by the mainstream media — New York Times, LA Times, et al; even the Washington Post only covered it briefly in their local edition — apparently because to report on civilian atrocities during Bush made you a traitor. You had to go to a noncorporate show like Democracy Now to even be aware of such crimes.  We’ve also got paramilitaries there operating freely above the law, which only got acknowledged in the New York Times this year due to Wikileaks forcing the Times‘ hand. Thankfully, now that Obama’s in power the mainstream media seems to feel freer to at least tentatively discuss such matters as they relate to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m not sure what their excuse is for waiting 39 years to let us in on this 1971 nightmare that wasn’t deemed particularly newsworthy at the time it was happening, when something could perhaps have been done to stop it.  I know, I know, there are many such horrors during wars around the world all the time, I get it.  Welp, here’s one more.  Maybe it’s not too late to bring some of the war criminals responsible for it to justice. It’s the least these women and their families deserve.

Bangladesh War’s Toll on Women Still Undiscussed

By NILANJANA S. ROY
Published: August 24, 2010

NEW DELHI — The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.

The American feminist Susan Brownmiller, quoting all three sets of statistics in her 1975 book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” compared the rapes of Bangladesh with the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers at Nanjing in 1937-38.

Accepting even the lowest set of figures for Bangladesh forces a horrifying comparison — the 1992-95 Bosnian war saw one-tenth the number of rapes as did the Bangladesh war. The rapes of Bosnian women forced the world to recognize rape as “an instrument of terror,” as a crime against humanity. But so far no one has been held to account for the sexual violence against Bangladeshi women in 1971.

As the 40th anniversary of the 1971 war approaches, the Bangladeshi government has set up an International Crimes Tribunal to investigate the atrocities of that era. But human rights advocates and lawyers fear CONT’D AT NEW YORK TIMES>>

“Hi Gangters of Plein Sud Guess What!! We are not moving from this spot.”

I stumbled upon some real-life street theatre in Tribeca this summer and wrote about it for the New York Press, “New York’s Bellicose Weekly Newspaper.” It’s this week’s cover story, To Kebab and  Conquer, about a street fight between a scrappy halal cart vendor and a highbrow restaurateur.

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 Here’s the online version.  Enjoy.

New York Magazine weighs in.

How Serge Becker treats his neighbors and customers.

Gawker writer Brian Moylan trashes Vogue editor Anna Wintour for trying to run Serge Becker out of town on a rail and for saying of him, rightfully (and I speak from first-hand experience), “I know the kind of places he’s involved in and the kind of people that he brings.”  Like I said, she’s exactly right, and he’s been getting away with it and will continue to do so for years.  Follow the [bribe] money.  Becker has a long history of utter disregard and contempt for his neighbors and a pattern providing employment opportunities and hangouts for unrepentant drug addicts and hoodlums. His establishments are little more than glammed up crack houses.  Don’t take my word for it, do your own homework.  

I hate it when a jackass hipster posing as a journalist describes the residents of a neighborhood as “pesky” for not wanting their blocks turned into eternal street parties and crack dens for his over-privileged moron friends.    Damn you, pesky citizens, for not rolling over and playing dead so coke-addled, pretentious suburban kids can live out their NYC glam fantasies and turn your residential block into a shithole.  

Wintour’s dead right about Becker and the crowd he runs with — convicted drug dealers, thugs, crackheads, crooks  – and that’s just the front-of-house staff.  Becker hand picks scum like this to be the public face of La Esquina, then wonders why no one wants him in their neighborhood? Gee Serge, what gives?   Wintour and her Greenwich Village neighbors might be “tony” but that doesn’t mean everyone who wants Becker’s slime pits shut down is in her same income bracket, so stop making sweeping generalizations.  Maybe she just doesn’t want to see her neighbors beaten, dragged, manhandled and have lit cigarettes tossed in their faces. 

Where do you live, Moylan? Please tell us so we can come by and party Becker-style outside your place, ‘k? No complaints, now, junior, or we’ll brand you a NIMBY.