Eight years ago when I was at a writing conference in Washington, D.C. I got in touch with a former staff writer of “mine” — when you’re the editor of a newspaper, the vernacular makes it seem as if you own your reporters — who’d gone from the education beat here to actually teaching middle school there. I asked him out to dinner, and he said sure — but that he also had tickets that night for Alvin Ailey at the Kennedy Center, so we could eat first, take the subway to see the greatest dance company in America later.
I don’t know much about dance, but I know who’s good at it. And I was super-excited to get a chance to visit the Kennedy Center, which I’d been hearing about for half a century, but had never been to. What a spectacular performance, in a knockout venue, the beating heart of American culture.
You know who else has never been to the Kennedy Center — not once, despite living in town for four-plus years?
Donald Trump. And yet now he’s installed himself as its chairman of the board.
Though not having darkened its doors himself, he told reporters after he purged the entire board that some shows in the several theaters there “were terrible.”
In a leaked audio of a phone call he made to his new board members, which includes his chief of staff and her stepmother, he laid out his vision: “we’re going to make it hot. And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.”
You know one thing that’s not going to be easy? Getting the famously cheap new board chair to open his own wallet and donate to the institution — which is basically the chair’s entire job. The billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, who Trump purged as chairman, contributed $120 million to the Kennedy Center over 20 years on its board. And he oversaw the development effort to get other Americans to give over $100 million each year to the Kennedy Center, which is not some government department, but an independent nonprofit.
We don’t know much about what kind of theatrical and musical culture Trump is considering for his reign, although it is said he once considered getting into the mug’s game that is Broadway producing, and that he’s a fan of “Cats.”
Of course we also know that he likes country music and The Village People, both of which are great — his boys Kid Rock and Ted Nugent, not so much — but hard to imagine filling the hundreds of Kennedy Center performances a year with.
He did say that in his time as impresario the center is “not going to be ‘woke,’” and wrote on social media: “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”
Among the tens of thousands of performances over the decades, there apparently have been a few drag shows, not up the president’s alley. And the center did produce a children’s musical called “Finn,” the title character described on the Kennedy Center’s website as “a young shark who just wants to be his true self. He loves sparkles and bright colors despite being a shark.” Yeah, its upcoming national tour has been canceled already.
But the Kennedy Center is where Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the opera together. It’s where former Vice President Mike Pence saw “The King and I.” Just perusing at random the recent calendar for the venue: Vasily Petrenko conducts Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. Edgar Moreau plays Saint-Saëns. “Adept as a performer of Baroque and contemporary music,”countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen. “Set today in the ‘Shear Madness’ hairstyling salon, this record-breaking comedy is Washington’s hilarious whodunit.” Riverdance 30 — The New Generation. The New York City Ballet. A festival called Arts Breaking the Sky: “EARTH to SPACE will fill the Center with musicians and astronauts, poets and researchers, visual artists and engineers, actors and environmentalists, architects and astronomers, dancers and scientists, film makers and space designers.”
Oops. Scrolling down to Friday night, we see: “Liberated Muse presents The Soundtrack for Social Justice, a poetic and musical reflection on the ways we can manifest a world of fairness and equity where human rights are recognized and upheld.” Fairness? Too woke for words. The show must not go on.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.