Q: How soon is now? What difference does it make? Was it really nothing, William?

A: Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant are making a Broadway musical based on the music of Morrissey and the Smiths. Yes, Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant of The State and Reno 911. [via Marah]

Lennon & Garant: They were looking for a job and then they found a job, and heaven knows they're musical now.

Lennon and Garant also wrote Taxi and The Pacifier, but shhhhhh.

Hopefully this means my close personal friend David Wain will help me realize my lifelong dream of bringing my Kinks musical to Broadway. Call me, Davey.

Q: Are you in Chicago, going to be in Chicago, or a fan of the Chicago Cubs?

A: Two completely unrelated notes on the Windy City:

• Playwright Tracy Letts (Killer Joe) recently premiered a new show, August: Osage County, at Steppenwolf, and Chainsaw Calligraphy's Marisa Wegryzn says Wow. Wegryzn applauds Letts for thinking grandly in an era of theatrical minimalism, and says a bunch of other things that make me excited to check the production out when I'm in Chicago later this month.¹ Check it out, Chicagoans.
  
  
• Chicago Cubs' GM Jim Hendry is easily one of the worst executives in baseball, but donating $6 million and two prospects to Billy Beane in exchange for a catcher with an OBP of .261 and a SLG of .281 is impressively moronic even for him. The Cubs are actually decent this year (they've got a one in three shot at the playoffs), but until they fire Hendry, they deserve nothing but excruciating misery. Sorry.
  
  UPDATE: Now that the deal's cash considerations have been revealed (the Cubs will only end up paying around $850K for Kendall, with the A's and Pirates covering the rest), I'd like to downgrade this deal from "impressively moronic" to merely "dumb and pointless."
  

¹ And if you live in Chicago and have connections at Steppenwolf and your name is Brant and you're reading this, MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Q: I can has musical theater?

A: This LOLcats thing is really getting out of hand.


Man, and I thought the Billy Joel musical was dumbing down Broadway!

Q: What's the matter with Boston?

A: First it was the desperately wanting to believe terrorists cared about them, even if it meant hysterically screaming about cartoon characters and Christmas lights; then it was the mayor banning great blogs for silly reasons.

Daisey: Spurned by a bunch of dim bulbs

The latest incident in Boston's increasing fear of everything occurred last week, during a performance of Mike Daisey's Invincible Summer at the A.R.T. Daisey is an acclaimed monologuist, whose talent for improvised storytelling has earned comparisons to the work of Spalding Grey and David Sedaris; last Thursday, 87 members of a Christian group stormed out, mid-performance, in reaction to Daisey's use of the word "fucking" (specifically "fucking Paris Hilton").

One purported "Christian," on his way out the door, took the liberty of pouring out a bottle of water on the handwritten outline Daisey uses to mold each night's show — "a kind of anti-baptism," as Daisey writes in his blog.

I sat behind the table, looking up in his face with shock. My job onstage is to be as open as possible, to weave the show without a script as it comes, and this leaves me very emotionally available — and vulnerable, if an audience chooses to abuse that trust. I doubt I will ever forget the look in his face as he defaced the only original of the handwritten show outline — it was a look of hatred, and disgust, and utter and consuming pride.

It is a face I have seen in Riefenstahl's work, and in my dreams, but never on another human face, never an arm's length from me — never directed at me, hating me, hating my words and the story that I've chosen to tell. That face is not Christian, by any definition Christ would be proud to call his own — its naked righteousness and contempt have nothing to do with the godhead, and everything to do with pathetic human pride at its very worst.

The whole bizarre event, and Daisey's reaction, was captured on video. Bostonians, please be warned: The following involves about ten seconds of course language. And several minutes of distorted Christianity.



The good news for Daisey — and bad news for those who would have him silenced — is that the incident raised his profile much more than even a Times profile ever could. The video is among YouTube's most viewed this week (70,000+ views, as of yesterday), after earning the coveted designation of "popular" on Digg. Not bad for a theatrical event with a seating capacity of 300. [original story via Gregg Henry @ TKC]

BREAKING: Daisey has confronted the people responsible. I'm just reading it now (Digg it here!)...

As for what's the matter with one of my favorite cities, I have no idea. What happened to Boston as a hotbed of crazy liberals and drunken coeds!? Has winning the World Series driven them mad? Someone needs to start pumping Prozac into the city's water supply or something, so its people can get back to what they're good at, scamming casinos and wasting my tax dollars on municipal highway projects.

EARLIER IN MASSHOLES: Damn you, Click and Clack!

Q: How did Ted Haggard un-catch gay?

A: In case you missed yesterday's fabulous, fabulous news, the Rev. Ted Haggard has been totally de-gayified, after an "intensive" three-week program in Arizona. From the Denver Post:

[The Rev. Tim] Ralph said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

The Rev. Ted Haggard: 'I'm gonna wash that gay right outta my hair...'

Now, you might be confused by this process of "acting-out situations where things took place." Like you, I originally took it to mean Haggard was forcibly blown by meth dealers until they were able to suck the gay right out of him. Which struck me as unconventional, at best; in all the reading I've done on the subject (e.g., in the revered medical journal Gayectomy Monthly), I'd never come across a theory for curing homosexuality that involved such rampant homosexuality.

Well, I made some calls to my network of mountain reverends and undisclosed Arizona treatment centers, and it turns out I misunderstood. When Ralph referred to "acting-out situations," he meant acting in the literal sense. As in, community theater.

Remember: Last summer, Brokeback Mountain was irrefutably linked to having turned everyone gay (as reported by some of our nation's finest news sources, and Fleshbot). But if that's true, which it is, doesn't it stand to reason that watching Brokeback Mountain in reverse would turn everyone straight? The only logical answer is yes.

It was a similar stroke of brilliance that led Haggard's doctors to test out a revolutionary and more powerful new treatment: First, to have a group of gay men watch Brokeback backwards repeatedly; and then, to give them three weeks to adapt it to the stage, and mount it as part of the renowned Tempe Experimental Christian Theater Festival.

As you probably guessed, the project proved to be an unqualified success -- theologically, medically, artistically and most of all, heterosexually.

Haggard, left, prepares for the confusing backwards tent scene.

Not only did Kcabekorb Niatnuom sweep the festival's audience awards (including an honor for Haggard himself in the category "Least Homoerotic Performance by a Male Reverend"), but it also turned the entire cast completely straight. Which is good news for them, because otherwise, they wouldn't have been allowed to go home.

Unfortunately, because the recovery process involved community theater, Haggard is still considered gay by the U.S. military. All in all, though, the man can only feel encouraged by his progress. Consider that many people struggle with addiction for decades -- hell, Barack Obama can barely quit smoking. And yet it took Haggard just three weeks to kick one of the world's most powerful addictions, that of having sex with men who aren't your wife.

At this rate, Ted should be able to get off the meth in, oh, five days, tops.

---

RELATED: Andrew Sullivan remains skeptical, not to mention aroused. But c'mon, what does Sullivan know about being gay that xenophobic Midwestern evangelicals don't?

PLUS: Did Brokeback turn you gay? | Meth humor, cont.

Q: Will working too hard (with large breasts) give you a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack?

Good luck movin' up cuz you're... bustin' out

A: You ought to know by now...

You ought to, that is, if you happen to be Alice Alyse, the actress/dancer/model/ crazy person who is suing the folks behind Movin' Out, the Billy Joel musical, for $100 million after they made fun of her large breasts.

On a related note, three million people just googled Alice Alyse.

Alyse, a former member of the Movin' Out ensemble who says she was wrongly fired from the show in February, is also angry with the show's managers for accusing her of faking her fake toe injury.

If she wins the $100 million suit, Alyse will reportedly be trading in her Chevy for a Cadillac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac.

Actually, this might be the most brilliant lawsuit of the modern age. It's a win-win situation; even if she loses, she will still have brought attention to her enormous breasts, which in the world of acting/modeling is known as "networking."

This case also gives us an answer to the question of whether the craziness inherent in being an actress/model/dancer is cancelled out by the craziness that comes with having huge tees. It turns out that, no, the crazy just gets multiplied.

Alas, the producers of Movin' Out probably should have taken the advice of Sergeant O'Leary, the policeman/bartender who works at Mr. Caccitore's down on Sullivan Street, across from the medical center.

As O'Leary once famously pointed out, "You should never argue with a crazy mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mind."

By the way, if you're not a Billy Joel fan, you missing out on some solid gold jokes here.