Lobenthal.com

is what our Aspiring-Dictator-in-Chief dug himself into last night–applauded vociferously by a Majority party that’s gone rogue, gone traitorous, gone Fascist.

FBI head Wry and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein’s visit Monday to the White House–yesterday, as in the day that FBI Deputy Director McCabe was shoved out–needs to be investigated.

There’s a time for explicitness, and the 1960s was an essential liberation: the performing arts needed it as much as society.

But–

Rather than become voyeurs, can we spectators sometimes use our imagination?  Let our brains, our senses, as well as our eyes do some work?

It’s very effective, dramatically speaking.

For example:

London 1926

Tallulah played Pauline Lord’s role in Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. Glenn Anders played the role he’d originated on Broadway.

At the end of the second act they finally cannot resist their mutual attraction.

“Joe doesn’t know,” Anders recalled about his stage character, “it doesn’t dawn on him that the scene is getting hotter. But the audience knows; they can feel it.” [They’re doing their work.]

From time to time Anders laid a reassuring arm on Tallulah’s, until finally she bristled: “Leave me alone, can’t you?” and Joe instantly understood what her agitation was all about.

When Anders put his arm on Tallulah’s, an erotic shiver went through her, and “the entire audience shivered, too,” Cathleen Nesbitt recalls in her 1977 memoirs.

Tallulah bolted out into the garden and Anders ran after her. A man sitting behind Nesbitt said to his friend, “That curtain went down just in time, or we would have seen something!”

Koch-junkie Scott Pruitt goes to the Senate today to be grilled over his evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Senator Whitehouse has already prepared the welcome mat with a speech flaying the way that Pruitt has put the EPA into reverse.

Will the Bros. be there to lend Pruitt moral support?

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos provides an overview of the way that Andrew McCabe was purged from the FBI.

Where does FBI-head Christopher Wray fit in?

We are now deep into a constitutional crisis.

This should be emblazoned, like in skywriting.

A bellwether speech from Arnold Bennett’s 1908 play What the Public Wants, which deconstructs a media mogul and those who appease or challenge him.

“No really new thing ever yet succeeded but what all the blessed wiseacres who know the public best swore would be a rank failure. Let me tell you that in the end you chaps are always wrong. Public taste is always changing. Is it you chaps who change it? Not much, by God! It’s we who change it. But before we can begin to work, we must get past a pack of infernal rotters who say they have their finger on the public pulse. Well, we do get past; that’s one comfort.”

Jackie’s charming little speech in Spanish when she and JFK dropped in unexpectedly to the League of United Latin American Citizens’ fiesta in Houston, the night before Dallas?

Some people sure comported themselves better than some other people do now.

Was Tallulah a racist?

As a Southern woman born in 1902, she had no compunction about dressing up as a Mammy to entertain Stephan Cole, strictly at home in the 1940s.

And yet she was enormously active in the integration movement, and even criticized her Southern relatives for their attitudes.

Robert Hooks, whose memoirs we are awaiting with anticipation, vividly and fondly recalls his conversations about civil rights with her during The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore in 1964.

Alexander C. Kaufman at Huffington Post reports on the big change–and it’s getting bigger–they’re throwing at destroying the environmental movement–thus ending the existence of humans on this planet.

And Bravi!

to those picketing outside the Museum of Natural History this week, wielding placards that say, “Get Rebekah Mercer Out of Our Museum.”

Loved seeing them perform in Central Park in 1980.

But it wasn’t until a decade later that they penned their definitive paean to adolescense:

“We’ll dance in the garden in torn sheets in the rain.”