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VBook Boat by L.J. D avitAll in the Family at the Carter White HouseArt Buchwald is right. It is no longer possible to make jokes about the government of the United States. Harsh reality has short-circuited the national funnybone. The President is a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. His mother is a registered nurse. His brother runs a filling station. One of his sisters rides a motorcycle. Another of his sisters is the faith healer who led Larry Flynt to the Way. His eight year-old daughter wanted a chain saw last Christmas. His favorite cousin owns a worm farm. His chief personal aide has a thing about women%u2019s, er, fronts. A former aide, a man well down the road of life, made the belated discovery that there is no legal distance between writing a check and spending your own money.Meanwhile, over in the halls of Congress, the Senator from Massachusetts has received the astonishing news that banks keep records of loans, and the Senator from Wisconsin suffers from the persistent delusion that he is the Mayor of New York. The former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was discovered in a wading pool with an Argentinian stripper. Nice Mr. Park, the Korean rice tycoon, has been forced to stop giving all those wonderful parties, Wayne Hays fled to Ohio and took sleeping pills because his secretary couldn%u2019t type, and Brooklyn%u2019s 14th Congressional District is represented by the only self-acknowledged sexual experimenter ever elected to national office. Stoically ignoring the example of the Washington Redskins lineman who used to have terrible fights with his coach about wearing nail polish to the game, Representative Fred Richmond has proclaimed himself a sick man. His re-election is being opposed by a fundamentalist minister who appears to believe that the Antichrist has come to earth disguised as the Abraham & Straus Department Store.In other words, everything is back tonormal.Now the First Cousin has written a book explaining how it happened.Actually, it really does explain how it happened. It is probably the weirdest and truest book ever written by a sane author about an incumbent President.YOU CAN%u2019T BLAME HUGHYou really can%u2019t blame Cousin Hugh if his nose is the teeniest bit out of joint, manfully though he struggles against it. I mean, there he was. His worm and cricket farm was doing swell, and he and his daddy had a pretty fair trade going in antiques, too. Life had been rich and full, and unlike Cousin Hotshot, who%u2019d had all the advantages (what the heck did Uncle Earl do for a living, anyway?), Cousin Beedie hadn%u2019t spent a single day%u2019s rent on the public housing project on the other side of town. Why, he%u2019d even been president of his sophomore class at Georgia Southwestern, and when Hot went haring off after the governorship, Beedie kept his state senate seat warm for him. Then when old Hot finally did get to be governor (in Georgia, I gather, being governor is something like sitting on the City Council), Beedie acted as his floor manager and together they passed a lot of legislation that kept Georgia just perfect despite Lester Maddox. If Cousin Hot couldn%u2019t see his way clear to appoint Beedie to Richard Russell%u2019s Senate seat, well, Beedie thinks he would have made a pretty fair Senator but Hot probably had his reasons. You can%u2019t expect anybody raised up by Aunt Lillian to do the right thing every time. Take kids, for example. %u2019Course, you can%u2019t expect every kid to be a wonderboy like young Hugh, Jr., even if never spanking him and giving him a lot of responsibility and making him earn his pocket money did help the boy a bit, and if Hot chose a different way that involved switching and paddling and allowances and then Chip turned out to be a chain smoker and Jackgot dumped by the Navy for smoking pot, th at%u2019s the breaks. Different fathers, different kids.Then dam if Hot didn%u2019t go off and get himself elected President of the United States and meet a lot of big celebrities like Warren Beatty.Okay, okay. Truce. It%u2019s too easy to make stuff like this sound silly. All you have to do is write it down and omit a lot of inconvenient stuff like Beedie and Hot and Aunt Lillian%u2019s open and persistent opposition to racism in a place and at a time when opposing racism was considerably more dangerous than endorsing rape at a NOW convention. It is easy to omit it because Beedie likes most of his neighbors and has to live with the rest of them and doesn%u2019t talk about it much.Like I said, normal times. Let us see if we can come closer to the truth.A friend of mine hails from Hawkinsville, Georgia. She was a member of the first Peanut Brigade. Here is her version of the events of that strange fall and winter of 1975.Things were bad in the country, real bad. A lot of people thought Mr. Nixon was going to put a stop to it, and then Mr. Nixon, why, he turned out to be no better than a common crook, so down in Sumpter County a bunch of folks got together and decided they had to do something real quick. They talked it over for a while and then they got in their cars and drove over to see their Sunday school teacher in Plains, and they laid it on the line. Yessir, they sat right down there in his living room, and they laid it on the line. \said. \shape, terrible. You got to run for President.%u201d Well, Jimmy, he thought it over and asked for some time and thought it over some more, and then he called them up and said, \Speaking of funny, you want to know what%u2019s funny? That%u2019s really the way it sortof happened. Sumpter Country, Georgia ran its Sunday school teacher for President of the United States, and he won.Therefore, the only thing that%u2019s wrong with the country in this year of the Lord 1978 is that, for the first time in the longest time, it's being run the way Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson designed it to run. Many citizens are understandably miffed by this. Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson had never heard of newsreels and radio and TV; if they had, no doubt they would have designed the country so it would run like an episode of the Lone Ranger, but they hadn%u2019t, and they didn%u2019t. It isn%u2019t Hot%u2019s fault that everything is back to normal. It%u2019s Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson%u2019s fault. They were born too soOn. If Fran Striker had written the Constitution, everything would have been different.Back in the days when there was no fence around the White House, the usual explanation was that, unlike European potentates, American Presidents were not afraid of their fellow citizens. This is accurate as far as it goes; the President wasn%u2019t afraid of the citizens because the citizens didn%u2019t pay a lot of attention to the President. They figured he was in there trying to do his job and probably screwing it up, but Presidents weren%u2019t very important and the citizens had other things to do, such as run their lives. Now half the people think the President really is the Lone Ranger and the other half thinks the White House has been taken over by Slick Bannon, the unscrupulous rancher; the first half wants him to fix everything and the other half wants to smoke him out. It is in the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies that they finally come true. Slick Bannon showed up, and we%u2019re still cleaning out the mess.Hugh Carter as told to Frances SpatzLeighton. COUSIN BEEDIE ANDCOUSIN HOT. Prentice Hall. 366 pp.$12.50. Photographs. Index.On Theatre by Ted Hoffman%u2018TNT!%u2019 Dog in Manger in StyleI%u2019m back from a bout with \New Theatre Festival bills itself as \Festival.%u201d I appeared as \55 Year Old Structuralist Actor,%u201d with equally mixed results.TNT was a strange kettle of fish, very pig in pokish in its fare, too often dog in manger in style. It is always underfinanced, subject to institutional charity, first at the U. of Michigan, then the U. of Maryland, and now the city of Baltimore, which has picked up a potential controversial PR and Tourist resource, dependent on Mayor William Schaefer, who beamed at the Ralph Lee opening parade, providing dollar clout without asking where the artistic buck should stop, or go.So criticizing a festival is a matter of finance first, art second. TNT%u2019s international groups are not chosen ideally. TNT can contribute only expenses and groups must package their own governments%u2019 support with other American touring. Similarly, a National Endowment for the Arts grant pays for %u2018%u2018quality%u201d (i.e. prestige) American groups, which leaves TNT making what deals it can afford for %u201cquality%u201d groups lacking prestige.NO ONE%u2019S HAPPYThe inevitable result is that major groups feel they sacrifice regular \rates and minor feel discrimination,1------ 1 1------ - a.1---->A %u2014 Miumug XXI. I1VU1 l U%u00bbVJ V* 111 ujuv IMUV uujterms to get \Festival staff, underpaid whatever their competence, spend months doing shit work, get appalled when treated as oppresssive bureaucrats out to frustrate the artist and emerge uppity as frustratedidealists.As a critic, I%u2019m trapped. I found the European groups outdated, the American mostly non-experimental, particularly the solo and small ones. If I didn%u2019t know better, I%u2019d declare that \dull, and nothing is happening.The foreign hit was Japan%u2019s Yoshi and Company is %u201c Arne Tsuchi,%u201d which unites forms of ritual and theatre with martial arts into an astonishing visual and aura! experience that communicates a disturbing history of Japan. Alas, the group dispersed in Baltimore, and aspirants can learn by apprenticing as Shinto priests or serving a few years with Yoshi, who now prefers actors to priests, martial arts masters, etc.L%u2019Atalier Theatre et Musique, professedly radical in politics, seeks a collective connection between gesture and sound, but really plays house with personal domestic objects while privately vocalizing, endlessly if intriguingly. The music concept was fine, the work old hat, and coat.The Warsaw Mime Theatre, technically disciplined and conditioned to body-mag finesse, was ironic nostalgia, the choreography like early Bennington, the style 1923 stud Berlin, the content%u2014man%u2019s apocalypse in the universe%u2014Feiffer cartoony.We had our obligatory Protest-Fringe Show. Bdjuii%u201d %u2019* Lo Phn K, 2 (honA^,,^v^ innocent male group, reminiscent of European jazzists who imitate the records but miss the roots, offered %u201c23 Skidoo,%u201d a grab bag of 60%u2019s confrontation, nudity, mayhem, messages, and gratuitous symbolism in an ambience of raunchy rocktheatrics, redeemed by one effect of flashlights shoved up the orifices of inflated sex dolls which were tossed in the air, until an unsecured flashlight hurtled into the audience.We got \producer A1 Kraiser forced Le Plan K to substitute a less abrasive repertoire item. So Rick Zank of Iowa Theatre Lab (now resident in the Catskills) lost only $17 on a $1000 budget independently producing this anti-climactic Revolution ad hoc in an elegant 12th floor ballroom of the Belveder Apartments.The American shows featured mainly Manhattan. Performance Groups%u2019s %u2018%u2018Rumstick Road%u201d worked beautifully, apparently through its human content, Spalding Grey%u2019s autobiographical experiencee in fathoming his mother%u2019s suicide. But Mabou Mines%u2019 \An Egg,%u201d which has style parallels with %u201c Rumstick%u201d and involves marvelous performance technique, was found boring because audiences didn%u2019t know Colette, could not \accept its complex visual-aural-temporal concept.GIVE US EASYThere%u2019s the rub. Few TNT audiences wanted the unrecognizable, and even they suffered without any shocker like last year%u2019s SQUAT, or the puzzling highlywrought work of Holland%u2019s Scarabee. The! 2 T Q 2 T 5 U d i ? n C ? , W h l ! p n h i l i c f i n pwanted bravura and fun. Even Talking Band%u2019s legible and radical \found turgid.The most popular \Kampe of Redwing, who serially toyed with arcane texts in the clownish-anguishstyle that no longer daringly enhances \that Kampe is greatly talented in a conventional personality way, a potential star if she wants to train in depth or surface, and that%u2019s what young audiences were taken by. A bad omen for any festival.TNT%u2019s financial problems led to groups and participants bad-mouthing the administration, which admittedly was late in organizing and publicizing, uninspiring in conception, and dependent on boxoffice. TNT probably suffered from a mid-week review by the arch local critic, R.H. Gardner, who charged TNT with being %u201cover-hyped%u201d and \fair claim in that he was excluded from one show, even with a ticket.Baltimore, as much as the theatre world, is stuck with considering TNT%u2019s future. As an operational need, TNT was personally incorporated by its %u201c producers%u201d A1 Kraiser, Herbert Blau, and Jack Phippin, who own the business and are as free to respond to the former advisory board, the TNT participants, and the theatre as they choose. How and if TNT gets repackaged will be an interesting if underpublicized theatre story of the year.As for me, the performer: Structuralist Workshop%u2019s %u201c Identity Control%u201d encountered its own festival chaos, drew badly, and was clearly branded one of TNT%u2019s \evpnts N aturally. evervnnp who volunteered an opinion to my face said I was great. That is probably the common perspective of all festival performers everywhere and good reason for ignoring this column.July 13,1978, PHOENIX, Page 19