Rick Santorum doesn’t want American kids to go to college. He believes that America has lost its higher education. "Higher education was the first to go, a long time ago," he said. While speaking at the First Baptist Church in Naples, Florida last month, Santorum claimed that the Left uses universities to "indoctrinate" young people for the end purpose of maintaining power. "It's no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college," he added.

Once these good American kids go to college, the candidate explained, left-wing professors teach them to think for themselves, and that is bad for the country. When these young people start thinking for themselves, they no longer swallow the BS that politicians try to feed them. They no long trust good old American institutions like Wall Street. They develop these crazy ideas about equal rights and having the rich pay their fair share of the taxes.

What would the country be like if everyone thought things through instead of taking the truth that people like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh preach to them? It would be a mess, that’s what. We need more ignorant people so we can keep things the way they are.

EXCERPT FROM ELMHURST COMMUNITY THEATRE

The opening night went from one disaster to another, building to a climax at the beginning of act three. Francine’s voice had been getting smaller with each scene. By the third act even the people standing next to her on stage couldn’t hear her. She gave her line: I surrendered my innocence to that beast Black Bart.

Standing in the wings, I could see her lips move, but I wasn’t sure if any sound was coming out.

Mabel looked at her and said, “Francine, you’ll have to speak up. We can’t hear you.”

Francine looked startled, like someone who had been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. Her eyes darted around the stage and then swept out to the audience. She stood motionless for a minute or so, but it seemed like an hour. Thelma was prompting Mabel with her line: That beast must be made to pay for this!

No one on stage was saying anything. Francine looked wildly around one more time and then ran off stage—into my waiting arms.

“Francine,” I said, “it’s okay. You’re doing fine.” I was both trying to calm her down and prevent her from fleeing out of the theatre. I don’t know what made me think it would still be possible to save this awful production. I just acted automatically.

“You’ve got to go back on, Francine,” I said. “That’s the only way we can save the play.”

“Oh, but I can’t. I’m too embarrassed.”

“You have to. You owe it to the rest of the cast who have worked so hard.”

“I can’t!”

I was half pulling and half coaxing Francine toward the door in the back wall. I got her into the doorway and said, “You can do it, Francine,” as I pushed her onto the stage.

In trying to resist, she caught her shoulder on the doorway, and the set started to teeter. I heard someone in the audience yell, “Look out!” And then the set collapsed on stage.

“Close the curtain!” I yelled. “Close the curtain!”

For a moment we were there in the silence of the shambles of our production. Then I heard a few hands clapping. What the hell were they doing, I wondered, applauding because the play was over? The applause grew stronger and rose to a crescendo.

“Open the curtain for a curtain call!” I yelled. The audience was on its feet giving us a standing ovation.

In the morning Polly invited me over for breakfast and the play reviews. I wasn’t particularly interested in reading about my humiliation. “They’re not bad at all,” she said. “Buddy got the papers from Manchester and Nashua.”

“Here’s the Union Leader,” Buddy said, handing me the Manchester paper opened to the review.

BRILLIANT PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA

Elmhurst Community Theatre’s summer production, Flossie Finds Romance, opened Friday night. Elmhurst is fortunate to have the talents of a man like Curtis Booth to bring out the deep Freudian message of the play.

As the show opens, we see two sisters, Flossie and Belle, played by Mabel Brown and Francine O’Reilly, working as pickle slicers in a pickle factory once owned by their father. The father has been unjustly charged with embezzlement and put in jail. The factory is now owned by the evil Black Bart. Curtis Booth plays both roles with the same brilliance he has shown in his long Hollywood career.

The Freudian significance of the play is obvious with the phallic symbol of the pickles along with the castration fantasy of slicing the pickles. The younger sister Belle is suffering from an unresolved Electra complex. She fantasizes about kinky sex with Black Bart, an older man who represents a father figure. Flossie as well as Montague Badnick, played by Nick Reynard, and Rupert Trueheart, played by Walter LeDoux, helps Belle overcome the father fixation and transfer her longings to a more age-appropriate suitor.

The play evokes the three Freudian elements of the personality with Flossie representing the ego, Black Bart representing the id, and Rupert Trueheart representing the superego. At the end of the show, everything collapses around the players as they symbolically return to the womb. The play is riveting from the beginning to the thrill-packed end.

“It must take a really sick mind to write this kind of crap,” I said.

“That’s not so bad,” Polly said, refilling my coffee. “More toast?”

“No thanks.” I really didn’t have much appetite.

“Here’s the Nashua paper,” Buddy said, handing it over opened to the review.

RADIANT STORY OF CLASS STRUGGLE

Multi-talented Curtis Booth, known for his roles in dozens of top films, has lent his great gifts to the Elmhurst Community Theatre’s production of Flossie Finds Romance. The play is a gripping tale of the class struggle that occurs when management exploits labor.

Management, represented by Black Bart, played by Booth himself, and abetted by Montague Badnick, played by Nick Reynolds, keeps raising production quotas. The evil pair delights in creating harsh working conditions, such as making the workers in the pickle factory peel onions until their eyes are full of tears.

Not content with the exploitation of wage slavery, Black Bart also tries to seduce Flossie and Belle, played by Mabel Brown and Francine O’Reilly. Rupert Trueheart, played by Walter LeDoux, is a working class hero, who saves the girls from Black Bart’s evil clutches.

The turning point in the play comes when Montague Badnick recognizes the evil of capitalistic exploitation and switches sides. Good triumphs over evil and freedom over wage slavery as the workers prepare to go out on strike.

An especially adept directorial touch comes at the end of the play where the walls collapse around the actors on stage, symbolizing the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of the working class. As the walls fall down, Rupert Trueheart, the working class hero, shouts, “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

Sometimes I think I’m the only sane person left in the world.

Click here to find more about Elmhurst Community Theatre

ELMHURST COMMUNITY THEATRE

Curtis Booth an out-of-work actor is roped into directing an amateur play. He desperately needs the stipend they are paying him. The play is terrible, and the cast is worse. Rehearsals are one disaster after another.

When Booth is not struggling with the play, he is trying to keep away from female admirer whose jealous husband packs a pistol.

At opening night the set collapses onto the actors on stage.

After that, it gets worse.

You can get Elmhurst Community Theatre as an eBook for kindle or a nook reader. You can get a paperback copy from Lulu. You can also read it online as a pdf. Go to carlperrin.com/ to learn more about Elmhurst Community Theatre.

Sweater Vests

Rick Santorum came from behind to tie for first place in the Iowa caucuses. Did you ever notice how often he wears a sweater vest?

Just saying.

TRUMP AND BALDWIN

Donald Trump is threatening to endorse one of the Republican candidates for the presidency. Trump’s endorsement, of course, would be a kiss of death, like an endorsement from Dick Cheney. Anyone endorsed by Trump would soon lose any rational supporters. If Trump thinks he is okay, there must be something with him.

Former candidate Dr. Carl Perrin was considering going back into the race, but Trump’s threat changed his mind. It would be just like the Donald to endorse Perrin so that potential supporters would back away.

Perrin has something else to look forward to, though. Alec Baldwin showed once again what a jerk he is when he got booted off a plane in LA after he refused to turn off his cell phone. Baldwin had done some television ads for Wegman’s Food Markets. After customers complained, the company pulled the Baldwin ads. (He had been hired after stating that his mother was a loyal Wegmans customer.)

Perrin figured that Wegmans must be looking for a actor to do some ads. Perrin has been on stage in lots of amateur plays, and he is the author of Elmhurst Community Theatre (carlperrin.com). Perrin’s mother never shopped at Wegman’s, as far as he knows, but she did loyally shop at Publix Supermarket in Fort Lauderdale. Maybe they could use some ads by a celebrity like Perrin.

THE BEGINNING OF ELMHURST COMMUNITY THEATRE

I’m a prostitute. I don’t mean I sell my body for money. Nothing as interesting as that. I sold my soul for a goddamn theatre. I didn’t even do it for the sake of ART. God no! None of that artistic bullshit for me. I thought I could get an easy living out of the theatre. And what’s a little soul, especially a moth-eaten soul like mine in exchange for an easy living? But I was wrong about the easy living part. I had never been so wrong in a lifetime of wrong turns, wrong decisions, wrong choices, a lifetime strewn with disastrous mistakes of every sort. I never worked so hard in my life as I did for the Elmhurst Community Theatre.

I wouldn’t have gone as far as I did if it had not been for Lance Braddock. He was the Mephistopheles that tempted me and led me to ignore all reason and common sense when

I smelled the chance of an easy living. But I shouldn’t have mentioned Braddock yet because I didn’t meet him until several months after this story begins.

My name is Curtis Booth. I know you don’t recognize the name. It doesn’t even ring a bell, does it? And yet you’ve seen me dozens of times, hundreds of times. If you’ve ever gone to the movies, you’ve seen me. I’ve lost track of the number of films I’ve been in, even a few pretty good ones. But I might have appeared in a scene or two, have half a dozen lines in each scene, and that was it. I never played a memorable role, was in a memorable scene, or spoke a memorable line.

I never graduated to meatier roles, but I spent a lot of years in Hollywood. I was in Song of the West. You saw that, didn’t you? Everyone saw it. It was very popular. Do you remember me now? I was one of the villain’s henchmen. I had a big bushy mustache in that film. You still don’t remember me? I’m not surprised. No one does. No one except the people in the hick town where I spent my summers, Elmhurst, New Hampshire. They all think I’m famous, the local boy who made good, who became a movie star.

Well, I may not be famous, but I know my way around Hollywood. I paid my dues. Yes sir, I paid my dues, and I deserve a goddamn break. I had gained a little weight. I was showing my age, and it got so I wasn’t even getting those crummy roles any more. I was even auditioning for radio commercials! And I wasn’t getting callbacks for those! I was becoming a career waiter in a rundown Italian restaurant. Then I got fired from that job.

I was suspicious when I got a call from a lawyer in Manchester, New Hampshire. He had the kind of voice that oozed false friendliness. But you knew he was just waiting for a chance to stab you in the back. I figured one of my ex-wives was trying to collect back alimony. I was ready to say, “Hey, Buddy, you can’t get blood out of a turnip,” although the two of them had sure as hell tried. But it turned out that the lawyer had good news for me—sort of.

He said his name was Grant Billings, and then he asked, “Am I talking to Ishmael Schmidt?”

I thought, Jesus Christ, no one had called me by that name for over twenty years. Can you imagine giving a kid a name like that in this day and age? I don’t know whether the name was from the Bible or from Melville’s classic work. I’ve never forgiven my parents for sticking me with that name. I had red hair when I was a kid, and everyone called me “Red.” I never liked that name either, but it was a hell of a lot better than Ishmael, or Ishy, the name some kids called me when they wanted to get me going.

Hesitantly I told the lawyer that I was Ishmael Schmidt.

“Did you have an uncle named Frederick Schmidt?” he asked.

Uncle Freddie had died almost a year before that. I hadn’t been able to go back East for the funeral. I always liked Uncle Freddy. When I was a kid, I used to spend summers on his farm in New Hampshire. I would have gone back, but I was involved in a film at the time. My role was so small that they would have been glad to let me go, but then I would have lost the part. Even so, I hadn’t had a role since then.

Billings said, “Well, you are Frederick Schmidt’s sole heir.”

I was surprised. I didn’t know that Uncle Freddy had anything to leave. As it turned out, all he had to leave was the farm itself. Oh Goodie, I thought. I can go back to the farm and shovel cow shit for the rest of my life. But the fact is, I was just about out of money, and the landlord was getting ready to evict me from my apartment. I had no place else to go.

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A COOL MILLION

Right-wing radio host Michael Savage has offered Newt Gingrich a million dollars. All he has to do is drop out of the presidential race. Savage has nothing against Newt. He just doesn’t think the former Speaker of the House can defeat Obama. Also he is a fat, old, white man.

The offer got former candidate Dr. Carl Perrin thinking. Although Perrin, a bald, old, white man, was never a candidate for the Republican nomination, he ran for a while as an Independent, on the cheap beer ticket. He withdrew from the race when he realized he didn’t have a chance of winning. Nevertheless his presence as an Independent candidate could draw some of the votes for the crazies who supported some of those “are-you-kidding?” candidates. If enough of these voters cast a ballot for Perrin rather than the Republican candidate, it could throw the race to Obama.

Here’s Perrin’s offer to Michael Savage or anyone else who wants to take the challenge: For a hundred thousand Perrin will stay out of the race, and that will help the eventual Republican candidate, whoever he or she is.