July 6, 2023 • 54 mins
Please welcome Michael Gene Sullivan, an actor, writer, director, blogger, and teacher committed to developing theatre of social and economic justice, of political self-determination, and musical comedy. Michael is also an alum of the nationally-acclaimed Playwright’s Foundation, a Djerassi Center Artist Fellow, and in 2022 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. An accomplished veteran of Bay Area theater, Michael is also a Collective Member and Resident Director of the Tony and OBIE award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe where he has written, acted in, and/or directed over thirty plays. As a playwright Michael’s work has appeared across the United States as well as in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, The Netherlands, Argentina, Australia, the United Kingdom, Columbia, Hong Kong, Canada, China and Ukraine. He is also the writer of the new musical “BREAKDOWN” which will be performed by the Tony Award-Winning San Francisco Mime Troupe from July 1 - Sept. 4 2023 at various locations.
(Interview Begins in Segment 2 at the 6:14 mark).
Info and Tickets to "BREAKDOWN" with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
------------------------------------- Closing Music by Carly Ozard Contact Ray at Green Room on Air: greenroomonair@gmail.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Green Room on Air.
Green Room on Air, the podcast that you, beyond the and into parts of the Intertainment world.
Hello everybody.
You have reached Green Room on Air, and as always, this is Ray Renata, your host.
Hope you're doing well on this beautiful Thursday afternoon when I'm recording this.
(00:27):
I don't know what time it is where you are, but I hope the sun is shining and that God's love is beating upon your beautiful face.
I have no idea where that came from.
It just came out of my mind somewhere in the corners of my mind.
Yeah.
We have a great guest for you today and I'll get to that in a minute.
(00:49):
His name is Michael Jean Sullivan of the San Francisco Mime Troop.
Not the kind of mimes that you're thinking of, not your Marcel Marcel mime.
They're a different kind of mime, and you'll hear about what they're doing, kind of cool.
His his company, San Francisco m Troop.
(01:12):
It's been quite a week.
What I'm really into right now is the Tour de France.
I love the Tour de France, or as the French said, the.
And people who also speak French correctly, not me, apparently.
It's so dramatic.
I watch it on the television.
The only problem is it's five hours long and I cannot sit there for five hours.
(01:35):
I do have somewhat of a life, so what I do is I watch pieces at the beginning and in the middle, and then I fast forward to the last 10 kilometers, which is where everything happens.
And it's some of the best drama you'll see on the television.
You can watch it on peacock or if you, I think you can get it on a regular NBC Sports channel as well.
(02:00):
I don't know.
I, I have peacock and, and then I also record it on my Hulu Live thing.
TV is complicated now.
When I was a young whipper snapper boy, there were three or four TV channels.
And a couple u HF channels that didn't come in very well.
(02:21):
And that's it.
And then U HF came later and the cable came later, but you had your channel two, you had your channel four, your, your channel five, and your channel seven.
And then if you were an intellectual type, you could watch K Q E D on channel nine.
(02:41):
That was all there was.
And then I was excited when the U H F came along because then I could watch channel 20 and channel 44 and see ultraman and, and speed racer and stuff like that.
All right, why don't we get to our guest.
I'd like you to welcome if you will, Mr.
(03:03):
Michael Gene Sullivan.
He's an actor, writer, director, teacher.
Who's committed to developing theater of social and economic justice of political D, self-determination and musical comedy.
Woo-hoo.
Michael is also an alum of the nationally Acclaimed Playwrights Foundation, a Jussi F Center Artist Fellow.
(03:28):
I looked that up actually.
It's a, I think it's a grant that's given to.
Artists and they, and they go, they live up in the Santa Cruz mountains and do their arts.
It's kind of cool.
And in 2022 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
That's pretty impressive.
Well, the guy is very impressive.
He's one of these people, you wonder if they sleep because they must not in order to do all this stuff.
(03:53):
They do.
Michael is an accomplished veteran of Bay Area Theater.
He's also a collective member and resident director of the Tony Annabi Award-winning Obi Award-winning San Francisco Mind Troop, where he has written, acted in and or directed over 30 plays.
I like to say directed because that's what they say in England, and I went to school there and it makes me feel cool and important to say, directed as a playwright.
(04:22):
Michael's work has appeared across the United States as well as in Germany.
Italy, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, Argentina, Australia, United Kingdom in Colombia, Hong Kong, Canada, China and Ukraine.
(04:43):
Wow.
He's also the writer of the New musical, and this is the ba.
The main thing that we're promoting here today is his new musical called Breakdown.
Which will be performed by the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troop from July 1st, which already happened, but you got plenty of time because it runs until September 4th, 2023 at various locations.
(05:11):
All you have to do is go to the San Francisco Mime Troop website and it's all there and it's all free.
Isn't that cool? Free theater.
Hey, they do good stuff.
I've been going to their shows for years.
I've auditioned there a lot too, but I've never been cast.
But I go to their shows and they're always very thoughtful, very funny political and, but not in a way that is off-putting.
(05:40):
It makes you think and it makes you laugh.
They're, they're just very creative and very professional.
And the music's.
The music's always fun.
So without any, God, I hate saying this, but because it's such a cliche term without any further ado, but I'm gonna say it anyway.
(06:01):
Without any further ado, I bring you Michael Gene Sullivan.
So thanks so much for being here.
Thank you for having me talking to you.
You have, you have a new show for the summer as mine.
(06:22):
True? Yep.
Always does.
It's called breakdown.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I, I read all about it.
What, what inspired you to write this production? Well, we were trying writer.
Yeah.
Right.
We were trying to come up with something I really wanted, I wanted to talk about something that was dealing with the politics in San Francisco right now, but also how the city is being portrayed nationally.
(06:46):
Mm-hmm.
You know, and then the co-writer Marie Cartier, who's also a collective member at the M troop, she wanted to do a show about mental health because she is a social worker.
Her day job is, she's a social worker in San Francisco.
And so she was a lot that there are a lot of issues around her that she felt people didn't understand.
People didn't see it as an issue, a political issue enough.
(07:09):
And so she came to the collective and said, well, can we do a show about mental health and, and the folks living on the streets? And I was like, well, I, yeah.
But I wanna make it about everything.
Mm-hmm.
About that individual's breakdown, but also how our systems are breaking down in terms of our the, how the city takes care of people.
(07:29):
How the bureaucracy has become something that feeds itself and no longer helps people.
How the bureaucracy around housing has become about creating bureaucracy and not actually housing people.
And then the bigger thing about how do you break down a whole country? How do you lead a country to a breakdown by gaslighting them by telling them that the real problem is you know, liberal policies.
(07:53):
The real problem is progressive policies rather than the real problem being the same old trick, trickle down greed that we've always had to deal with.
Yeah.
So there were these three levels of breakdown.
And then that's been putting those together to make it so that the show is really kind of telling a thick description of what happens to this one woman who's living on the streets, the woman who's trying to take care of her, and the social worker who's trying to take care of her.
(08:18):
And the Fox News reporter whose job is to portray San Francisco as a failed progressive experiment.
Great.
I love it.
It's such, it's such a big issue right now and yeah.
Now the, one of the things that I find interesting is homeless or unhoused.
(08:40):
The people are often looked at as animals, I guess.
Mm-hmm.
There, there is a, a channel on YouTube called Soft White Underbelly.
You really might wanna look at this.
He's a guy down in la He's a, he is a former photographer for Apple and he interviews most pe mostly people on Skid Row in LA and in his studio.
(09:06):
And it's so incredibly interesting.
I, these pe most of these people are so amazing.
They have incredible backgrounds in lives.
They're, some of them are super smart.
Yes.
They all have, almost all of them had horrible childhoods, mm-hmm.
And then ended up with drugs and mental illness.
(09:27):
But they're incredible human beings, like amazing stuff.
Yeah.
And that's, that's the thing, like you were saying, the dehumanization of your fellow citizens mm-hmm.
Is the first step.
Towards being able to dismiss their needs and dismiss your responsibility towards them as fellow citizens.
(09:48):
Last time I checked about 70, 75% of the people who are homeless in San Francisco used to pay rent in San Francisco.
Hmm.
People don't know that.
They think, oh, where do they think peop the unhoused come from? They, you say 5%.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wow.
That was the last time I checked.
It was a few years ago.
Yeah.
But that idea that these people spring up like mushrooms on the streets or something, and it's like, no, they paid rent here.
(10:15):
They lived in San Francisco and they've been either priced out.
Then the number one reason that people become homeless is medical bills.
You know? Yeah.
It's not people think, oh, well there's this or that, and it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
The.
Medical bills and our lack of, you know, free universal healthcare in this country has led a lot of people to lose their homes.
(10:38):
But just because they lose their home doesn't mean that they want to leave the city that they're in.
That's where their support system is.
Yeah.
So if you live in San Francisco and you simply lose your, you, you, you know, like someone might have a situation where their husband or wife needs full-time care.
So they leave their job to take care of this person.
(10:58):
They're not just gonna dump them.
Yeah.
But the, but then the medical bills eat up their savings and then they lose their home.
The person passes away and now they're homeless.
And now trying to get back into trying to get a job when you're homeless is extraordinarily difficult, you know? So there are a lot of ways that people can fall through very wide and common cracks.
(11:22):
To fall into homelessness and are being unhoused.
And then we, we blame those people if they have human reactions, you know, if they're drinking, if they end up on drugs, if they're struggling emotionally.
All of those things that are reactions to their desperate situation.
Yeah.
Now some people are there because of prior addictions and, and untreated mental illness, and some people are there because of economic problems and frequently it's just both.
(11:50):
And so when, as long as you see the unhoused as not you, it's easy to distance yourself.
It's easy to look down on folks.
It's easy to just see them as there's circumstances, something they did to themselves without realizing how close you are to that.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and they talk to how many, Americans being only so many paychecks away from being destitute.
(12:15):
Right.
You know, what does that look like? What does it really look like? You know, if you can't move back in with your parents because you're a older person and your parents have passed away, you don't, may not have any children, your children may not be in the area.
We're re you're really pretty close to being in the Great Depression, where homelessness was huge.
(12:38):
And so it has been the job of our corporate government to make sure that we do not see taking care of our fellow citizens as kind of a civic responsibility, It's supposed to be individual philanthropists.
It's, or and if people don't wanna accept that it's their own fault if they're having mental problems, we don't.
(12:59):
Look back at the sixties, seventies and eighties when we were shutting down institution, mental institutions.
that was a, an overreaction to a, a previous problem.
And now we're back to the problem where people, there's not enough care for them.
It is again, one of those situations where you should judge, you judge a society by how it treats the most vulnerable, and the unhoused are the most vulnerable.
(13:25):
And so the heartlessness that we are encouraged to have, and the idea that, oh, you're doing something if you, I mean, how many times have any of us heard some civic leader say, well, we're gonna set up a commission.
To examine something, rather than doing something, you set up a commission and you might spend a million dollars on the commission cuz you're paying those commissioners and then they come up with something and then they go, yeah, we can't afford to do that.
(13:51):
It looked like you did something, you spent money, but in the end what did you achieve? You know, we need to and it's not like, in San Francisco they'll always say, well, we wanna have affordable housing.
But even that is a kind of a crap term.
Everything's affordable.
If you have enough money, if they want affordable, hou really affordable housing, why don't they peg it to the minimum wage? Right? You know, just it's minimum wage gig.
(14:20):
But instead they peg it to median income.
Which in San Francisco means you can make over a hundred thousand dollars.
Still, I think it's $104,000 for four person thousand and below that you're in poverty.
Yeah.
And, and that means that someone who's making $104,000 and they've got a spouse for two kids, they can get housing subsidies.
(14:44):
But that means that all of the people who are making $40,000, there are less places for them.
There are fewer places for them.
And what we need to do is stop trying to, when they build, whenever they say they're gonna build affordable housing, it's always gotta take the people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars into consideration.
(15:04):
What about them? But if we just build housing for the minimum wage folks, just, that would bring everything down.
that would bring all the rent down because it would flood the market with stuff with apartments and open up other apartments.
This idea that to basically divide the workers, it's always about dividing the workers, always making somebody in the working class despise someone else.
(15:30):
Somebody who's doing not as well as them to distance themselves from them.
And when it comes to San Francisco right now the city is, you know, I mean, we're openly not run by progressives.
People, you know, are our mayor and other folks, especially the mayor, are very much like, no, no, no.
She's at war with progressive, she's a moderate and she's at war with progressives.
(15:54):
But progressives get blamed for all the problems.
Yeah, lately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, but that, you know, the national press uses that to say, see, and they don't wanna say, oh, well the, the national economy is down There's people who are struggling to have jobs in Wisconsin and Ohio and all over the country.
(16:16):
And that's all because of trade policy.
And, and, George Soros, whatever they wanna blame in all of those situations in in conservative areas, people struggling in conservative areas aren't their, it's not their fault, but if people can struggling in what they see, liberal areas, then it's liberal's fault.
Yeah, yeah.
(16:36):
You know? Exactly.
Hmm.
So now comedy, what do you think is going on in San Francisco? So, like, I've lived here my whole life and I've seen versions of this type of thing over and over again.
It seems that the, the form of government with the supervisors and special interests sort of, At play against one another within super supervisors offices.
(17:09):
It, it leads to nothing being done.
Yeah.
Is is that what it is? I mean, it just seems like they could do something.
They could.
They could do something.
It seems like they're doing nothing.
Yeah.
Other than creating a larger industry to support the homeless through private groups, right.
Who then become, which is a way to just become de that, then those people's incomes become dependent on making sure that they're always still are homeless.
(17:37):
And then you have this endless cycle where nothing's gonna change, is it? Do I have that right? That's what it looks like to me.
Well, I think, or tell me if I'm wrong.
I mean No, no, no.
It's neither right nor wrong.
It's just, but cause I've just been trying to figure it out here.
There's so many, there's so many problems.
I mean, I think that part of it is who runs San Francisco, in my opinion, in my research and the March did a show about this.
(18:00):
It, we are very much run by contractors.
Okay.
That the city is always building stuff, whether we need that stuff or not.
And they're gonna build the things that they can make the most money off of.
So we ended up, when all these corporations, they, there's so many empty offices downtown in San Francisco.
No, but they're still building more.
(18:21):
Oh really? and they make much more money off of high end.
Condos and apartments, and they do off of public housing.
So what contractors will come in and say to the mayor and to the board of supervisors is we promise to build, say 80.
We're gonna build a hundred units.
We're gonna build 'em in different places in the city.
We're gonna build 20 high end units over here and 80 low income or affordable units over here.
(18:47):
We have to build these first, we have to build the high ones first.
They build that one first, and then they say, sorry, we went over budget.
They declare bankruptcy.
They still sell off and make their money off that, and they never get to the other ones.
And it happens over and over and over again.
Or they, and we'll also have situations like the Twitter deal that the previous Mayor Lee made, which was a terrible deal where they, they said Twitter didn't have to pay taxes, city taxes for like, whatever it was, 10, 15 years, something like that.
(19:17):
Oh, anybody with a modicum of business understanding would know that as soon as that deal sunset, Twitter was gonna say, we are either gonna move.
That's just what they were gonna do.
They were always gonna do that.
And they did it.
As soon as it came up time, they said, oh, we're gonna leave, or You have to extend the deal.
(19:37):
And so now we're in this weird limbo, the soup that, that, it was so easy to outsmart everyone with that one.
But, but what is, that, that when you're in a very profit driven capitalist society, people can't figure out how to make money off of the poor.
So they wanna ignore them.
Yeah.
They can't figure out how to make money off of public housing so they don't build it.
(20:01):
It's always, well, where do we profit from this? And San Francisco has become gone from being a somewhat progressive having somewhat progressive leadership in city to basically being the libertarian suburb of Silicon Valley.
I see.
Cause that's what we are now.
(20:21):
The city is, you know, we got Ballards in the streets.
We got, you know, it's, it's like you can't drive here.
You can't drive there.
And the city's mentality is very much of a suburb.
You know, we're people live here, they work elsewhere, and that's not how a city is supposed to function.
You're supposed to work here and live in the city or somewhere else.
(20:42):
Yeah.
So becoming a suburb fight is fighting against.
And what do you not see in suburbs? Homeless people? Diversity.
You know, you don't need many buses because it's, it's too difficult to do buses in the suburb.
All those things that we city dwellers rely on, suburbanites aren't interested in.
They don't want their tax dollars to go to that.
(21:03):
All right.
I think this is a good spot for a break.
Let's listen to the Mime Troops song.
Look in the Eye from the show Breakdown.
Spare change.
Spare change.
So I tell her, I said, Margaret, if you don't sign the lease, I will.
Excuse me.
What kind of fool let's a two bedroom, two and a half bath and burn height slip through their fingers? Spare change.
(21:26):
The value was only gonna go up on all the oh, 10.
It's getting moved out.
Hey lady, it's up on.
Balm.
You see me? I see you see me.
But you walk on by, I just need a couple bucks near the park.
You hear me? I know you hear me, but there's no reply.
(21:48):
I just a couple of quarters.
Beautiful view of the bay.
Every day you see me, do you look me in the eye? You could.
Say hello and let me know you don't want me to die with some change or just a smile or a book or even chat.
Say, sorry, I can't today, and I see you don't look the other way.
(22:19):
So we're in a real culture war in the city.
Which is making it difficult.
We need to make this.
What is the purpose of San Francisco? This is an important question.
Most cities are a port.
They're a trade center, they're a banking center.
They, they make something.
What is San Francisco? We're not a port anymore.
(22:42):
We're not a banking center anymore.
What is the purpose of San Francisco now? For me, it should be culture.
If we can become, we can be a real home of culture.
People should come all over to see our stuff and, and we should be exporting art.
But right now we don't have a, a purpose, and I think that's what kind of the death throes in a way and struggles in the city is do we continue to be a city and grow and have a purpose, or do we lose our purpose and remain a suburb? Mm-hmm.
(23:19):
Well look, I think Covid had a big influence on that especially Yes.
On these empty buildings in the financial district.
Yes.
But they, I mean, we were having problems before that and now cause it's like, I don't know how often you get, have a chance to go to Powell and market quite, quite often.
Yeah.
So if you walk up Powell Yeah.
And all of those empty stores.
(23:40):
Yeah.
That was like solid gold real estate before Covid.
I know.
And it used to be, and now they're just traffic like crazy.
Now you can just, yeah, break through.
Right now it's nothing.
Yeah.
Because again, like, you know, if you, if you don't have workers who need to be around then, then there's no reason for them to go to the stores.
(24:00):
There's no reason for them to shop.
We lose all of that.
But the other reason that someone would go downtown is culture.
You know, you go down to go to the big venues to see a concert, to see a play, to see that singer.
Mm-hmm.
When piano fight was allowed to die.
Yeah.
But you know, you think about if they had just said Twitter had to pay some tax, that would've paid for piano fight 10 years.
(24:23):
Piano fight years was a a, yeah, it was a, was a nexus.
I love that place of artists.
And it was really rebuilding that area.
And the city as somebody wrote in an artist in New York, they were like, yeah, that had been New York.
The city would've stepped in and tried to save them.
Yeah, they would've, they would've bought the building.
Yeah, they would've, they would've signed.
But San Francisco is like, even despite the fact that everybody is always saying, we're so about culture.
(24:45):
That was not that much money.
It was a few thousand dollars a month.
Yeah.
That they were short nothing.
But look at the money we throw at, at, at tax breaks that we throw around.
Yeah.
To make the rich richer.
You know, it is so thoughtless and shortsighted that it's, it's kind of astounding that any of the people who are on the board of supervisors, there are a couple supervisors that that seem to see.
(25:12):
Have a vision of the city that doesn't involve a trickle down economics, but most of, most of the political leaders here really seem to truly believe that if you can just make rich people richer, shine things up and arrest enough people, you will reinvigorate downtown San Francisco.
(25:35):
But those aren't things that's, no, that's still not a reason to go.
You know, and give people, provide jobs, you know? Yeah.
The city used to have factories.
We have no factories anymore.
Right.
You know? Yeah.
We have no waterfront.
All of the stuff that made San Francisco, San Francisco in the last 50 years has been cultural.
What happened to the waterfront and now we're losing that, the waterfront.
(25:58):
Okay.
So the Bay Bridge, you know, remember how the other, the part of the Bay Bridge that, that Became structurally slightly unsound.
And so they decided to replace the entire thing for billions of dollars rather than just fix it.
Yeah.
That part always looked like a train bridge because the Bay Bridge was built as a train bridge.
Yes, I know.
Yeah.
Right.
(26:19):
And when they got rid of the trains off of the Bay Bridge, it killed the Port of San Francisco.
Hmm.
Because why would you unload your ship here? You know, you've gotta Oakland put it on trucks.
Yeah.
Go to Oakland and then you put it on trains.
Yeah.
So once they got rid of that, and, and then it was like 10 years later, they went, oh crap, we need Bart.
But you know, these little shortsighted things, I mean, that was done by I think it was Ford and Firestone bought the train run lines that were on the Bay Bridge and then tore 'em up and said they were gonna replace them and never did.
(26:52):
But the city should never have allowed that.
The city and county should never have allowed that.
So by losing the port, by not having, there's no reason for ships to be here.
Climate change has made it so that Fisherman's Wharf has become less and less about fishing, you know, which was an industry.
Yes.
We are, we're there's no need for us to be a banking hub anymore.
(27:13):
I mean, when B of A and Wells Fargo kinda left and.
You can do that from anywhere now, so you don't need that central tower anymore.
Mm-hmm.
But the thing that can't be moved is live performance.
Yeah.
The thing that can't be really moved is culture.
And we could be, like, London is, is shifting, you know, different cities that are shifting to try to be about things that have to happen there.
(27:40):
But anyway as far as the San Francisco march, it's concerned we're one of those things that have to happen here.
I mean, we'll tour with this show and we'll go around, maybe around Northern California this year because we still don't wanna get too far a field because of covid.
You know, we don't wanna be staying with people or, or, you know, if anybody in this show gets sick, that kind of messes us up.
(28:03):
But but the idea of.
What is a city? How does it take care of the, the most vulnerable and don't believe the, the conservative and libertarian hype about how to solve these problems are issues for every, every town.
Yeah, it's not just San Francisco.
It's it's all over the, the country in, in varying degrees.
(28:27):
And, you know, Oakland.
Yeah.
In, in the Bay Area.
Oakland has huge problems.
San Jose has really bad problems.
San Francisco gets most of the attention because it's, you know, San Francisco, but because it's San Francisco and also it is, like I said, it's a, it's an example.
It it's a, it's the, what San Francisco represents to people.
The rest of the country is progressivism.
(28:48):
And so if they can show progressivism failing, then they can go See, we need to be more like Florida.
Florida has a homeless problem.
You never hear about it.
You know, they have, maybe it's only because they have so many other problems.
You know, they're shooting each other.
The cu, the whole state is sinking.
They, they, they, you know I keep trying to restrict who can vote.
(29:09):
Florida has a lot of problems.
You don't hear as much about their, the unhoused down there.
But.
All of these issues, things that we need to be focusing on in a longer term commitment to make our country a better place.
And what we're getting right now are short-term solutions that simply take that, that problem out of your eye line, you know, is like, well, if we could just get all the unhoused over there and then you'll have more money to be rich.
(29:40):
I mean, right now, the, the idea of civic responsibility and fellow citizenship has been thrown out the window by the conservatives.
Totally, totally.
It is just, if it is, does not profit you personally, then it is worthless.
And if you're not rich, you're a loser.
Exactly.
There's lot over you allity towards those who are suffering.
(30:04):
It's really.
It's really disgusting.
Yeah, I just got that from, I think people get angry if they feel like they can't do anything sometimes.
No, I agree.
I mean, sometimes some people are just sociopaths who are taking advantage of fear and frustration.
I agree.
I don't, they might not be even aware that that's what they're doing, you know? Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I even have family members who, who do, who react that way.
(30:25):
And I know they're the, the ni in their heart, they're the nicest people.
Right.
I, I think they don't realize that they're afraid.
They get, they, they feel helpless.
And so some of the ways that people react if they're not thinking about it, is they blame, they blame, they blame, they blame the person who's suffering.
Mm-hmm.
Often the blood, the person who's suffering.
Yeah.
(30:45):
And yeah, I think if they really sat down and, and were open to thinking about it, they probably wouldn't do that.
It's just, it's just like, it's fear.
Yeah.
And, and, and if you can't do anything right now, you can't do anything.
Yeah.
But don't blame the person who needs the help.
Yeah.
Right.
I'm, I'm curious about the the Marsha Stone character, the FA Fox commentator.
(31:08):
Yeah.
Is she like, like personally a quote unquote bad person, or is she more of a, like a cog in this pro who got stuck in this process? Does she have any conscience, I guess is what I'm asking? And I don't want to you to give away anything in the, in the show.
Well, I think that way I can answer it is You don't wanna make an assumption about what was the thing that made a person the way they are.
(31:33):
Mm-hmm.
You know, you can learn stuff no matter how much you disagree with someone, and it doesn't mean that you like them, but you can find out through what they say and the way they act.
That there might have been something that happened to them in the past, some trigger that turned them into the person they are now.
Okay.
And it doesn't mean that they're forgivable, it doesn't mean that they're suddenly nice or should got get a seat at the table with everybody else.
(31:57):
They still can be a horrible person, but you understand them a little bit better.
And for me, she represents a certain type mm-hmm.
Of you know, folk who feel like the only way this is the best way to get ahead is.
To voice something that seems counterintuitive.
You know, there are people who are just like, well, the, one of the easiest ways to really get on national attention and get a good regular job is to be a black conservative, because the conservative movement will rush towards you.
(32:33):
That's true.
To hire you because they, they want you to be that black guy who always sat behind Trump at every rally.
When he was running the first time.
Yeah.
It was the same guy.
I know.
He was the same guy.
That was that time when he said, where's my black guy? And he turned around, you know? And there he was.
There, he's there, he's, yeah, there.
He's, so if you can be, he love, you know be able to, to, to, to mouth the, you know, like, you know, the libertarian neo, not the talking points well enough and you're not white.
(33:04):
You can get a job.
Because they will, they will.
Don't you people forget, like the guy who ran the Proud Boys.
Yeah.
Who, he's in prison now.
He's not white.
I know.
You know? Yeah.
And yeah.
Is he Hispanic or, yeah.
Yeah.
He's partly Hispanic, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, and the, there's a guy recently, the guy who was beating pe these people at January 6th, who beat one of the police officers with a fire extinguisher or something, not black.
(33:35):
You know, I mean, he's not white.
Sorry.
He is not white.
Yeah.
And so, so there are, you know, you can be celebrated, you know, by and, and be surrounded by people who, under any other circumstance would hate you except for the fact that you're agreeing with them.
And that can give you prestige and a full-time paying job.
(33:56):
You can be a, a pundit somewhere, you know, you can get a gig.
So, Marsha Stone, the, the Fox News commentator, she's a person of color.
Yes, actress.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Interesting.
And so, yeah, that, that, and we, you know, we've used that in different shows every once in a while, but never quite this blatantly.
(34:19):
Right.
You know, sometimes we'll have, you know, we'll have that character who's.
Kinda like for whatever reason, however they were raised or something that happened to them.
Like I said, they seem to be working a against their best interests, but at this time it was just like as I was writing and I was like, oh, we normally would come up with some fun name for Fox or fun name for this, or something that sounded, and I was like, you know what, it's Fox.
(34:42):
I noticed that, you know, that's the first time I can remember you ever doing that, where you, it's like, oh, I know what they're talking about.
You're, but you're just saying it.
This time it's Fox and Rupert Murdoch is a character, you know.
Oh, great.
In the play.
Yeah.
And, and it's not, I mean, those other shows are always fun and it gave us a little more leeway, but this time it's just like, it's just So now Yeah.
(35:03):
That.
You know, I don't wanna even give the audience a chance to kind of go, well, it's, it's fun.
It's not that fun, you know? No, I always get blown away and just amazed and flabbergasted by people like Candace Owens.
You know? It's like, yeah, where is she coming from? Does she really, really, truly believe this stuff? Or is she just hooked on the attention? And the money.
(35:25):
I mean, it's could, it's probably a, a se like I said, the path that you find to success.
Yeah.
And then, you know, some, sometimes it's like it thinking about what's her name? Megan Kelly, and she left Yeah.
Fox.
Mm-hmm.
And she was saying how sexist it was, and it's like, didn't you watch Fox? You know, How ridiculous is it to have somebody, you know, you left Fox, you went to work for them, and now you're gonna complain that they were sexist.
(35:53):
I mean, I'm glad you said something, but I can't believe You're shocked, you're surprised.
You're, oh my goodness.
You know, I'm shocked, shocked that there's gambling going on here, you know? So the same with all of these, these folk who you know, it's like, do you really think that when you leave the room, When Candace Owens leaves the room, some of the comments are gonna be sexist and a bunch of them are gonna be racist because she's dealing with sexist and racists, but she's being well paid for it.
(36:24):
And also she might truly, honestly be that blind to really think, this is the world the way I want it to be.
And it's like, if those people win, you're the first one out the window.
You know, they're not gonna share power with you.
No.
Definitely not.
Yeah.
Not in any real way.
No.
No.
(36:44):
Hmm.
So again, musical comedy.
Well, you guys always, you still always make things funny.
Well, yeah, and that's somebody Kodo Carrero, who's a collective member, and she's the costume designer on this show.
Mm-hmm.
We were talking about that yesterday.
She was doing an interview and they were saying, yeah, well how do you make this all so funny? Every year? These, these very serious issues.
(37:08):
So funny.
And it's, you know, we don't necessarily, we try not to make fun of the working class victims.
You know, of these te of these policies, but, and we don't wanna make the, the oppressors objects of fun, but it's really about how people twist and turn themselves to try to fit into an inhuman machine.
(37:38):
They, you know, the hypocrisy and hyper hyperbolic things that they say and do so that, that they can get to, so that they can try to fit.
And then sometimes they realize they just shouldn't even be trying that.
Mm-hmm.
So the farce is in the attempt? Yeah.
You know, the farce is in trying to live, trying to act.
(37:58):
Basically, if you have sane people in an insane situation, they're trying to make themselves insane to fit in.
Yes.
And then at some point, hopefully they go, I don't wanna be insane.
Fitting in isn't the thing.
That's why, that's why it's funny because I, I, I always feel like there are archetypes that you, that you describe in detail very well, and these people, they're like pegs that somehow by chance or whatever, ended up fitting into those things and they're perpetuating the machine.
(38:27):
And we all see it and you make it funny and it makes us think, but we don't, we don't like end up.
Necessarily hating the characters in your play.
It's, it's more like yeah, I get it.
I get this.
Well, it's too easy.
Situation needs to be fixed because it's like, if it wasn't for those individuals, it would probably be somebody else.
(38:48):
You know what I mean? Yeah.
Then it's not that there was a point when When Bush two and Cheney were in office.
Yeah.
And and I ended up using Cheney a lot in shows, mainly because they had, Holmes was at the company and he looked like Dick Cheney.
Yeah.
And he, and he's great.
I mean, how could you get any funnier than Dick Cheney? Right, right, right, right.
But at the same time, I wanted to make sure to always emphasize that it's the system.
(39:12):
You know, it's not chaining like you were saying somebody else would be there.
It's the philosophy of profit over humanity, you know, and that and power and propaganda.
The, the class war there.
Only one side has been fighting people not seeing that just because they, they have a nice apartment.
It doesn't mean they're not in the working class cuz they're still workers.
(39:34):
I got in an argument with the guy on the street cuz that's what I do.
We were talking about, I was saying, you know you know how, how.
The system has to work for us to benefit to benefit more people.
And he was saying, well, is you and me? We got together, we could start a YouTube channel and if we got a million viewers, then we'd be like, cap rich capitalists.
And I didn't stop him.
(39:55):
I feel bad about this.
This was like a month ago and I didn't, I argued some other points, but I never stopped him right there and said, if we're working hard on a YouTube channel, we are not capitalists.
That's not what capitalists do.
Capitalism is your money working for you.
The goal of any capitalist is to not work.
Right? Create as much passive income as possible, right? Your money works for you.
(40:19):
Yeah.
If you, but if you are working and you rely on your income to pay your rent, to have food, to take care of stuff, you're in the working class.
And the great trick that capitalism has done is to make people associate themselves with capitalism, even though they themselves are not capitalists.
They support capitalism.
They'll die for capitalism, but they're workers.
(40:40):
they should be working on socialism, anarchy.
They should be working on, on systems that benefit the workers first, instead of supporting a system that benefits the capitalists first.
The capitalists have money because they're underpaying the workers.
It's so frustrating.
The billionaires.
Yeah.
The billionaires, the Rupert Mur, all these people are, are, yeah.
(41:02):
El Musk.
Keeping Musk our consciousness to not understand that because Yeah, they're the ones who are riffing the job.
We think that they haven't earned that money.
Yeah.
That they, they convinced enough people that, that they themselves have earned all of this money and it's like, no, you are just, I mean, a dollar a week, whatever you are underpaying your workers.
(41:23):
That's where your wealth is coming from is underpaying your workers.
That is how it's created.
It is because the, the, the, the thing you actually need that would, you need for that chair is always gonna cost about the same amount of money, shipping it, doing all that stuff, but shaping it into a chair and how much you pay that worker.
That's the only variable.
(41:44):
And if you can pay them less, you get to keep more.
That's capitalism.
Right.
You know? And so it's just so these people are rich because, so when we're walking around the world going, wow, why are things so bad? Why are there so many poor people? Why do I feel poorer than I did 10 years ago? And then you look at the front page and you go, Elon Musk is shooting a sports car in a space, or somebody's got a super yacht, they are super rich because we are struggling.
(42:11):
Yes.
And we are struggling because they are super rich.
Right.
We don't need more billionaires.
We don't even need more a hundred millionaires.
We need more a hundred thousandaires.
Yeah.
You know? Yeah.
If we were all making enough to live s and they were making significantly less, The world would be a better place.
I was just in Europe and I noticed that that's pretty much what's happening there.
(42:34):
I'm not to say they don't have problems, of course they do, but Oh, they do.
Yeah.
But there are restrictions on how much CEOs can make.
They're yeah, they, they actually do build.
Housing for the poor, and you'll see it in the big cities.
And I, I'm not saying that they've built it attractively or anything like that.
We hopefully can do better, but, you know, you know, 20 story really super ugly apartment buildings and they're all over the place.
(43:00):
But you don't have people living on the street for the most part.
Well, a few, right.
But everyone, yeah.
Who can be housed mostly is housed.
Yeah.
Well there's a, there's a full of billionaire.
No, it's not.
But that's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there's a, I think there's a fundamental philosophical and psychological issue, which is, especially in Europe, but really most places in the world, not as much China, but especially in Europe there, there's a, a focus on no.
(43:32):
Even in Eastern Europe, there's a focus on Yeah, definitely the town.
Yeah.
You know, there's focus on the town is the town.
Yes.
There is no frontier.
No Yourt.
This is how big it is.
Your town is this big.
It's a city state and then it, it's a country, but that's pretty much it.
Portugal is really like that.
Yeah.
But I So was Spain, even under Franco, Spain was like, we've gotta build more houses.
(43:57):
Yeah.
You know, Germany, east Germany, Soviet Union, they were like, these are the towns, you know, England, Scotland, these are the towns and we have to support this town.
Whereas the United States fundamentally has a.
A built into our culture is the idea of an endless frontier.
Yeah.
You can always go west, young man, you know? Right.
(44:18):
There's always more space.
You could always come out west, you could always, you could go to Alaska.
the end of the American frontier didn't, we didn't, it didn't end until like the fifties.
When when Alaska became a state, you know, in late forties, early fifties, that's when the frontier finally ended.
But up until then and built into everything is you can always just pick up and leave and go west.
(44:42):
And so there was no, so the idea of taking care of people on that kind of like we in this town have to have to reflect on how we treat each other.
Is not as fundamental as it would be if you lived in a city that had been under siege, you know, literally under siege before.
Yeah.
Many times.
(45:02):
Yeah.
Right.
That gets baked into your, your thinking.
Yeah.
So I mean that's, that's cuz I'm, you know, I was a history major, so I always think it's like history up to this point.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whenever somebody says to me history doesn't make any difference, I just think that's cuz you're trying to cover something up.
You know, if you say history, that means you're a, you're, you know, you're a holocaust denier or a, a slavery denni you something you parents were, Nazis, something that you're trying to back off of.
(45:31):
So you need is important for you to say history doesn't matter, but history is the only thing.
Everything we did is history.
The future doesn't exist yet and the present doesn't exist.
As soon as you say something, it's history.
Everything is history.
And if you don't study and understand history, you're gonna end up in the same situation.
And that's why it's so important for them to try to keep us from learning history.
(45:55):
Yeah.
Now they're trying to, anyway, ban the book so we learn less about you.
Yeah.
And other things.
So tell us what audiences can expect from breakdown in terms of music, performances, the overall experience.
How long is the show? Is there an intervention? No, the show's a no.
Nope.
We don't, we, yeah.
(46:15):
It's hard to do it.
Never have inter Yeah.
Yeah.
We've had stretches and this show's about 1 25.
Okay.
It's different from some mitro shows in that, you know, we have.
A pure dance, a couple of pure dance numbers in the show.
Mm-hmm.
Which we normally don't do.
It's also a very different cast.
People who've seen a lot of mine from shows won't recognize a bunch of, of these people.
(46:36):
Yeah, I saw that.
I didn't recognize anyone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they're wonderful actors and they're people that we've been wanting to work with for a while.
Yeah.
And a couple of them were, were in.
My show, the Great Con, when it played at SF Playhouse, I really pushed for these two actors cause I wanted to work with them.
Yeah.
And then when we came around to this show Jamella across and Keena Cantor, I really wanted to work with them cuz I thought they, they'd fit our style.
(47:00):
And Jed Presario just hilariously.
Funny actor good character actor, and Alicia mp.
Alicia MP Nelson, who has was in the show last year, the Mind Troop Show last year as Zoe the Teenager.
Oh yeah.
And this year is Sadia the social worker.
Okay.
And then Andrea Morico, who is our, like our most recent collective member at the Mind Troop.
(47:24):
He plays a bunch of Blink looting Rupert Murdoch.
So, Yeah, so people will see the shows and they'll, they, it will be like, this is a whole different group of actors, but we do try to always bring in new people.
Mm-hmm.
To tell stories.
You know, you can't just keep pretending like the world is the same place it was when you were doing things.
(47:45):
You know, saying, you know they're just the show, the characters just get older and older and older with us.
Yeah.
It's like, no, there's shows that have to be mainly focused on younger folks too.
So yeah.
It's a, it's a comedy But it's a harsh comedy, like most mind TRO shows.
Yeah.
And this one is more psychological than some shows in that we're trying to deal with them when he's having mental issues and pt, s d and all of the pressures of living on the street.
(48:15):
And at the same time trying to, like I said, show their circumstance in a way that is meaningful and not mocking.
But still be a comedy.
I mean, that's always the struggle for, for myself and whoever's writing my troop shows.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and when does, when does it open? July? Well, we open in Berkeley this Saturday.
(48:40):
Oh, this Saturday.
Okay.
On the first, this Saturday.
So yeah, I've gotta go back outside and we gotta run through starting in a little while.
Oh, okay.
And then it runs, Yeah, run through.
Yeah.
And then we'll run all summer, we'll do, we'll do Saturday and Sunday, and I think we're in Cedar Rose Park in San Francisco, and then on the 4th of July in San Francisco at Dolores Park.
(49:01):
Great.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Cedar Rose in Berkeley, the first and second, and Dolores Park in San Francisco on the fourth.
And then we'll run all the way to Labor Day weekend.
And if people wanted to find out when we're gonna be in their area, we'll go to Ukiah.
We'll go down to Santa Cruz, play the East Bay.
Go to sft.org
and click the button that says schedule and you'll see when the mine troop will be in your neighborhood.
(49:23):
That's their website, San Francisco mine troop sft.org.
Great.
And I hope, I hope you're gonna be over here at Mitchell Park in Palo Alto again.
I, I believe so.
I should look at the schedule.
It's, it's it's a half mile from my house, so we could be, yeah, we played in that, we played in that semi-circle last year.
That was different for us, but it worked.
(49:45):
So we'll probably do that again.
Yeah, that great.
I really enjoyed it.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well thank you so much for being here again.
Oh, thanks for having me.
Well, there you have it.
My little chat with Michael J.
Sullivan of the San Francisco Mime Troop.
I'll be sure to go check out their show breakdown.
It's going to be playing in venues all over the Bay Area for, gosh, three months, four months through September.
(50:13):
Check it out.
As I said, they always do great stuff.
Hey, thanks so much for listening.
If you enjoy this show, please tell your friends.
I'd really, really appreciate it.
Give me a rating on Apple Podcasts if you could.
It helps out a lot for me to get more listeners.
And if you wanna get ahold of me, just send an email to Green Room on air gmail.com.
(50:38):
Have a great week.
I'll talk to you soon, and until next time, I'll see you on the boards.
Take care y'all.
I'll leave you today with a track from my dear friend Carly Oard, singing Imagine by John Lennon.
(51:12):
Imagine there's.
It's easy.
(51:39):
All the people.
It isn't to do nothing.
(52:17):
All the.
(52:44):
You join us.
(53:38):
I'm.
Hope someday you'll join us.
Green Room on Air.
Green Room on Air, the podcast that you, beyond the and into parts of the Intertainment world.
Hello everybody.
You have reached Green Room on Air, and as always, this is Ray Renata, your host.
Hope you're doing well on this beautiful Thursday afternoon when I'm recording this.
(00:27):
I don't know what time it is where you are, but I hope the sun is shining and that God's love is beating upon your beautiful face.
I have no idea where that came from.
It just came out of my mind somewhere in the corners of my mind.
Yeah.
We have a great guest for you today and I'll get to that in a minute.
(00:49):
His name is Michael Jean Sullivan of the San Francisco Mime Troop.
Not the kind of mimes that you're thinking of, not your Marcel Marcel mime.
They're a different kind of mime, and you'll hear about what they're doing, kind of cool.
His his company, San Francisco m Troop.
(01:12):
It's been quite a week.
What I'm really into right now is the Tour de France.
I love the Tour de France, or as the French said, the.
And people who also speak French correctly, not me, apparently.
It's so dramatic.
I watch it on the television.
The only problem is it's five hours long and I cannot sit there for five hours.
(01:35):
I do have somewhat of a life, so what I do is I watch pieces at the beginning and in the middle, and then I fast forward to the last 10 kilometers, which is where everything happens.
And it's some of the best drama you'll see on the television.
You can watch it on peacock or if you, I think you can get it on a regular NBC Sports channel as well.
(02:00):
I don't know.
I, I have peacock and, and then I also record it on my Hulu Live thing.
TV is complicated now.
When I was a young whipper snapper boy, there were three or four TV channels.
And a couple u HF channels that didn't come in very well.
(02:21):
And that's it.
And then U HF came later and the cable came later, but you had your channel two, you had your channel four, your, your channel five, and your channel seven.
And then if you were an intellectual type, you could watch K Q E D on channel nine.
(02:41):
That was all there was.
And then I was excited when the U H F came along because then I could watch channel 20 and channel 44 and see ultraman and, and speed racer and stuff like that.
All right, why don't we get to our guest.
I'd like you to welcome if you will, Mr.
(03:03):
Michael Gene Sullivan.
He's an actor, writer, director, teacher.
Who's committed to developing theater of social and economic justice of political D, self-determination and musical comedy.
Woo-hoo.
Michael is also an alum of the nationally Acclaimed Playwrights Foundation, a Jussi F Center Artist Fellow.
(03:28):
I looked that up actually.
It's a, I think it's a grant that's given to.
Artists and they, and they go, they live up in the Santa Cruz mountains and do their arts.
It's kind of cool.
And in 2022 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
That's pretty impressive.
Well, the guy is very impressive.
He's one of these people, you wonder if they sleep because they must not in order to do all this stuff.
(03:53):
They do.
Michael is an accomplished veteran of Bay Area Theater.
He's also a collective member and resident director of the Tony Annabi Award-winning Obi Award-winning San Francisco Mind Troop, where he has written, acted in and or directed over 30 plays.
I like to say directed because that's what they say in England, and I went to school there and it makes me feel cool and important to say, directed as a playwright.
(04:22):
Michael's work has appeared across the United States as well as in Germany.
Italy, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, Argentina, Australia, United Kingdom in Colombia, Hong Kong, Canada, China and Ukraine.
(04:43):
Wow.
He's also the writer of the New musical, and this is the ba.
The main thing that we're promoting here today is his new musical called Breakdown.
Which will be performed by the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troop from July 1st, which already happened, but you got plenty of time because it runs until September 4th, 2023 at various locations.
(05:11):
All you have to do is go to the San Francisco Mime Troop website and it's all there and it's all free.
Isn't that cool? Free theater.
Hey, they do good stuff.
I've been going to their shows for years.
I've auditioned there a lot too, but I've never been cast.
But I go to their shows and they're always very thoughtful, very funny political and, but not in a way that is off-putting.
(05:40):
It makes you think and it makes you laugh.
They're, they're just very creative and very professional.
And the music's.
The music's always fun.
So without any, God, I hate saying this, but because it's such a cliche term without any further ado, but I'm gonna say it anyway.
(06:01):
Without any further ado, I bring you Michael Gene Sullivan.
So thanks so much for being here.
Thank you for having me talking to you.
You have, you have a new show for the summer as mine.
(06:22):
True? Yep.
Always does.
It's called breakdown.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I, I read all about it.
What, what inspired you to write this production? Well, we were trying writer.
Yeah.
Right.
We were trying to come up with something I really wanted, I wanted to talk about something that was dealing with the politics in San Francisco right now, but also how the city is being portrayed nationally.
(06:46):
Mm-hmm.
You know, and then the co-writer Marie Cartier, who's also a collective member at the M troop, she wanted to do a show about mental health because she is a social worker.
Her day job is, she's a social worker in San Francisco.
And so she was a lot that there are a lot of issues around her that she felt people didn't understand.
People didn't see it as an issue, a political issue enough.
(07:09):
And so she came to the collective and said, well, can we do a show about mental health and, and the folks living on the streets? And I was like, well, I, yeah.
But I wanna make it about everything.
Mm-hmm.
About that individual's breakdown, but also how our systems are breaking down in terms of our the, how the city takes care of people.
(07:29):
How the bureaucracy has become something that feeds itself and no longer helps people.
How the bureaucracy around housing has become about creating bureaucracy and not actually housing people.
And then the bigger thing about how do you break down a whole country? How do you lead a country to a breakdown by gaslighting them by telling them that the real problem is you know, liberal policies.
(07:53):
The real problem is progressive policies rather than the real problem being the same old trick, trickle down greed that we've always had to deal with.
Yeah.
So there were these three levels of breakdown.
And then that's been putting those together to make it so that the show is really kind of telling a thick description of what happens to this one woman who's living on the streets, the woman who's trying to take care of her, and the social worker who's trying to take care of her.
(08:18):
And the Fox News reporter whose job is to portray San Francisco as a failed progressive experiment.
Great.
I love it.
It's such, it's such a big issue right now and yeah.
Now the, one of the things that I find interesting is homeless or unhoused.
(08:40):
The people are often looked at as animals, I guess.
Mm-hmm.
There, there is a, a channel on YouTube called Soft White Underbelly.
You really might wanna look at this.
He's a guy down in la He's a, he is a former photographer for Apple and he interviews most pe mostly people on Skid Row in LA and in his studio.
(09:06):
And it's so incredibly interesting.
I, these pe most of these people are so amazing.
They have incredible backgrounds in lives.
They're, some of them are super smart.
Yes.
They all have, almost all of them had horrible childhoods, mm-hmm.
And then ended up with drugs and mental illness.
(09:27):
But they're incredible human beings, like amazing stuff.
Yeah.
And that's, that's the thing, like you were saying, the dehumanization of your fellow citizens mm-hmm.
Is the first step.
Towards being able to dismiss their needs and dismiss your responsibility towards them as fellow citizens.
(09:48):
Last time I checked about 70, 75% of the people who are homeless in San Francisco used to pay rent in San Francisco.
Hmm.
People don't know that.
They think, oh, where do they think peop the unhoused come from? They, you say 5%.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wow.
That was the last time I checked.
It was a few years ago.
Yeah.
But that idea that these people spring up like mushrooms on the streets or something, and it's like, no, they paid rent here.
(10:15):
They lived in San Francisco and they've been either priced out.
Then the number one reason that people become homeless is medical bills.
You know? Yeah.
It's not people think, oh, well there's this or that, and it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
The.
Medical bills and our lack of, you know, free universal healthcare in this country has led a lot of people to lose their homes.
(10:38):
But just because they lose their home doesn't mean that they want to leave the city that they're in.
That's where their support system is.
Yeah.
So if you live in San Francisco and you simply lose your, you, you, you know, like someone might have a situation where their husband or wife needs full-time care.
So they leave their job to take care of this person.
(10:58):
They're not just gonna dump them.
Yeah.
But the, but then the medical bills eat up their savings and then they lose their home.
The person passes away and now they're homeless.
And now trying to get back into trying to get a job when you're homeless is extraordinarily difficult, you know? So there are a lot of ways that people can fall through very wide and common cracks.
(11:22):
To fall into homelessness and are being unhoused.
And then we, we blame those people if they have human reactions, you know, if they're drinking, if they end up on drugs, if they're struggling emotionally.
All of those things that are reactions to their desperate situation.
Yeah.
Now some people are there because of prior addictions and, and untreated mental illness, and some people are there because of economic problems and frequently it's just both.
(11:50):
And so when, as long as you see the unhoused as not you, it's easy to distance yourself.
It's easy to look down on folks.
It's easy to just see them as there's circumstances, something they did to themselves without realizing how close you are to that.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and they talk to how many, Americans being only so many paychecks away from being destitute.
(12:15):
Right.
You know, what does that look like? What does it really look like? You know, if you can't move back in with your parents because you're a older person and your parents have passed away, you don't, may not have any children, your children may not be in the area.
We're re you're really pretty close to being in the Great Depression, where homelessness was huge.
(12:38):
And so it has been the job of our corporate government to make sure that we do not see taking care of our fellow citizens as kind of a civic responsibility, It's supposed to be individual philanthropists.
It's, or and if people don't wanna accept that it's their own fault if they're having mental problems, we don't.
(12:59):
Look back at the sixties, seventies and eighties when we were shutting down institution, mental institutions.
that was a, an overreaction to a, a previous problem.
And now we're back to the problem where people, there's not enough care for them.
It is again, one of those situations where you should judge, you judge a society by how it treats the most vulnerable, and the unhoused are the most vulnerable.
(13:25):
And so the heartlessness that we are encouraged to have, and the idea that, oh, you're doing something if you, I mean, how many times have any of us heard some civic leader say, well, we're gonna set up a commission.
To examine something, rather than doing something, you set up a commission and you might spend a million dollars on the commission cuz you're paying those commissioners and then they come up with something and then they go, yeah, we can't afford to do that.
(13:51):
It looked like you did something, you spent money, but in the end what did you achieve? You know, we need to and it's not like, in San Francisco they'll always say, well, we wanna have affordable housing.
But even that is a kind of a crap term.
Everything's affordable.
If you have enough money, if they want affordable, hou really affordable housing, why don't they peg it to the minimum wage? Right? You know, just it's minimum wage gig.
(14:20):
But instead they peg it to median income.
Which in San Francisco means you can make over a hundred thousand dollars.
Still, I think it's $104,000 for four person thousand and below that you're in poverty.
Yeah.
And, and that means that someone who's making $104,000 and they've got a spouse for two kids, they can get housing subsidies.
(14:44):
But that means that all of the people who are making $40,000, there are less places for them.
There are fewer places for them.
And what we need to do is stop trying to, when they build, whenever they say they're gonna build affordable housing, it's always gotta take the people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars into consideration.
(15:04):
What about them? But if we just build housing for the minimum wage folks, just, that would bring everything down.
that would bring all the rent down because it would flood the market with stuff with apartments and open up other apartments.
This idea that to basically divide the workers, it's always about dividing the workers, always making somebody in the working class despise someone else.
(15:30):
Somebody who's doing not as well as them to distance themselves from them.
And when it comes to San Francisco right now the city is, you know, I mean, we're openly not run by progressives.
People, you know, are our mayor and other folks, especially the mayor, are very much like, no, no, no.
She's at war with progressive, she's a moderate and she's at war with progressives.
(15:54):
But progressives get blamed for all the problems.
Yeah, lately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, but that, you know, the national press uses that to say, see, and they don't wanna say, oh, well the, the national economy is down There's people who are struggling to have jobs in Wisconsin and Ohio and all over the country.
(16:16):
And that's all because of trade policy.
And, and, George Soros, whatever they wanna blame in all of those situations in in conservative areas, people struggling in conservative areas aren't their, it's not their fault, but if people can struggling in what they see, liberal areas, then it's liberal's fault.
Yeah, yeah.
(16:36):
You know? Exactly.
Hmm.
So now comedy, what do you think is going on in San Francisco? So, like, I've lived here my whole life and I've seen versions of this type of thing over and over again.
It seems that the, the form of government with the supervisors and special interests sort of, At play against one another within super supervisors offices.
(17:09):
It, it leads to nothing being done.
Yeah.
Is is that what it is? I mean, it just seems like they could do something.
They could.
They could do something.
It seems like they're doing nothing.
Yeah.
Other than creating a larger industry to support the homeless through private groups, right.
Who then become, which is a way to just become de that, then those people's incomes become dependent on making sure that they're always still are homeless.
(17:37):
And then you have this endless cycle where nothing's gonna change, is it? Do I have that right? That's what it looks like to me.
Well, I think, or tell me if I'm wrong.
I mean No, no, no.
It's neither right nor wrong.
It's just, but cause I've just been trying to figure it out here.
There's so many, there's so many problems.
I mean, I think that part of it is who runs San Francisco, in my opinion, in my research and the March did a show about this.
(18:00):
It, we are very much run by contractors.
Okay.
That the city is always building stuff, whether we need that stuff or not.
And they're gonna build the things that they can make the most money off of.
So we ended up, when all these corporations, they, there's so many empty offices downtown in San Francisco.
No, but they're still building more.
(18:21):
Oh really? and they make much more money off of high end.
Condos and apartments, and they do off of public housing.
So what contractors will come in and say to the mayor and to the board of supervisors is we promise to build, say 80.
We're gonna build a hundred units.
We're gonna build 'em in different places in the city.
We're gonna build 20 high end units over here and 80 low income or affordable units over here.
(18:47):
We have to build these first, we have to build the high ones first.
They build that one first, and then they say, sorry, we went over budget.
They declare bankruptcy.
They still sell off and make their money off that, and they never get to the other ones.
And it happens over and over and over again.
Or they, and we'll also have situations like the Twitter deal that the previous Mayor Lee made, which was a terrible deal where they, they said Twitter didn't have to pay taxes, city taxes for like, whatever it was, 10, 15 years, something like that.
(19:17):
Oh, anybody with a modicum of business understanding would know that as soon as that deal sunset, Twitter was gonna say, we are either gonna move.
That's just what they were gonna do.
They were always gonna do that.
And they did it.
As soon as it came up time, they said, oh, we're gonna leave, or You have to extend the deal.
(19:37):
And so now we're in this weird limbo, the soup that, that, it was so easy to outsmart everyone with that one.
But, but what is, that, that when you're in a very profit driven capitalist society, people can't figure out how to make money off of the poor.
So they wanna ignore them.
Yeah.
They can't figure out how to make money off of public housing so they don't build it.
(20:01):
It's always, well, where do we profit from this? And San Francisco has become gone from being a somewhat progressive having somewhat progressive leadership in city to basically being the libertarian suburb of Silicon Valley.
I see.
Cause that's what we are now.
(20:21):
The city is, you know, we got Ballards in the streets.
We got, you know, it's, it's like you can't drive here.
You can't drive there.
And the city's mentality is very much of a suburb.
You know, we're people live here, they work elsewhere, and that's not how a city is supposed to function.
You're supposed to work here and live in the city or somewhere else.
(20:42):
Yeah.
So becoming a suburb fight is fighting against.
And what do you not see in suburbs? Homeless people? Diversity.
You know, you don't need many buses because it's, it's too difficult to do buses in the suburb.
All those things that we city dwellers rely on, suburbanites aren't interested in.
They don't want their tax dollars to go to that.
(21:03):
All right.
I think this is a good spot for a break.
Let's listen to the Mime Troops song.
Look in the Eye from the show Breakdown.
Spare change.
Spare change.
So I tell her, I said, Margaret, if you don't sign the lease, I will.
Excuse me.
What kind of fool let's a two bedroom, two and a half bath and burn height slip through their fingers? Spare change.
(21:26):
The value was only gonna go up on all the oh, 10.
It's getting moved out.
Hey lady, it's up on.
Balm.
You see me? I see you see me.
But you walk on by, I just need a couple bucks near the park.
You hear me? I know you hear me, but there's no reply.
(21:48):
I just a couple of quarters.
Beautiful view of the bay.
Every day you see me, do you look me in the eye? You could.
Say hello and let me know you don't want me to die with some change or just a smile or a book or even chat.
Say, sorry, I can't today, and I see you don't look the other way.
(22:19):
So we're in a real culture war in the city.
Which is making it difficult.
We need to make this.
What is the purpose of San Francisco? This is an important question.
Most cities are a port.
They're a trade center, they're a banking center.
They, they make something.
What is San Francisco? We're not a port anymore.
(22:42):
We're not a banking center anymore.
What is the purpose of San Francisco now? For me, it should be culture.
If we can become, we can be a real home of culture.
People should come all over to see our stuff and, and we should be exporting art.
But right now we don't have a, a purpose, and I think that's what kind of the death throes in a way and struggles in the city is do we continue to be a city and grow and have a purpose, or do we lose our purpose and remain a suburb? Mm-hmm.
(23:19):
Well look, I think Covid had a big influence on that especially Yes.
On these empty buildings in the financial district.
Yes.
But they, I mean, we were having problems before that and now cause it's like, I don't know how often you get, have a chance to go to Powell and market quite, quite often.
Yeah.
So if you walk up Powell Yeah.
And all of those empty stores.
(23:40):
Yeah.
That was like solid gold real estate before Covid.
I know.
And it used to be, and now they're just traffic like crazy.
Now you can just, yeah, break through.
Right now it's nothing.
Yeah.
Because again, like, you know, if you, if you don't have workers who need to be around then, then there's no reason for them to go to the stores.
(24:00):
There's no reason for them to shop.
We lose all of that.
But the other reason that someone would go downtown is culture.
You know, you go down to go to the big venues to see a concert, to see a play, to see that singer.
Mm-hmm.
When piano fight was allowed to die.
Yeah.
But you know, you think about if they had just said Twitter had to pay some tax, that would've paid for piano fight 10 years.
(24:23):
Piano fight years was a a, yeah, it was a, was a nexus.
I love that place of artists.
And it was really rebuilding that area.
And the city as somebody wrote in an artist in New York, they were like, yeah, that had been New York.
The city would've stepped in and tried to save them.
Yeah, they would've, they would've bought the building.
Yeah, they would've, they would've signed.
But San Francisco is like, even despite the fact that everybody is always saying, we're so about culture.
(24:45):
That was not that much money.
It was a few thousand dollars a month.
Yeah.
That they were short nothing.
But look at the money we throw at, at, at tax breaks that we throw around.
Yeah.
To make the rich richer.
You know, it is so thoughtless and shortsighted that it's, it's kind of astounding that any of the people who are on the board of supervisors, there are a couple supervisors that that seem to see.
(25:12):
Have a vision of the city that doesn't involve a trickle down economics, but most of, most of the political leaders here really seem to truly believe that if you can just make rich people richer, shine things up and arrest enough people, you will reinvigorate downtown San Francisco.
(25:35):
But those aren't things that's, no, that's still not a reason to go.
You know, and give people, provide jobs, you know? Yeah.
The city used to have factories.
We have no factories anymore.
Right.
You know? Yeah.
We have no waterfront.
All of the stuff that made San Francisco, San Francisco in the last 50 years has been cultural.
What happened to the waterfront and now we're losing that, the waterfront.
(25:58):
Okay.
So the Bay Bridge, you know, remember how the other, the part of the Bay Bridge that, that Became structurally slightly unsound.
And so they decided to replace the entire thing for billions of dollars rather than just fix it.
Yeah.
That part always looked like a train bridge because the Bay Bridge was built as a train bridge.
Yes, I know.
Yeah.
Right.
(26:19):
And when they got rid of the trains off of the Bay Bridge, it killed the Port of San Francisco.
Hmm.
Because why would you unload your ship here? You know, you've gotta Oakland put it on trucks.
Yeah.
Go to Oakland and then you put it on trains.
Yeah.
So once they got rid of that, and, and then it was like 10 years later, they went, oh crap, we need Bart.
But you know, these little shortsighted things, I mean, that was done by I think it was Ford and Firestone bought the train run lines that were on the Bay Bridge and then tore 'em up and said they were gonna replace them and never did.
(26:52):
But the city should never have allowed that.
The city and county should never have allowed that.
So by losing the port, by not having, there's no reason for ships to be here.
Climate change has made it so that Fisherman's Wharf has become less and less about fishing, you know, which was an industry.
Yes.
We are, we're there's no need for us to be a banking hub anymore.
(27:13):
I mean, when B of A and Wells Fargo kinda left and.
You can do that from anywhere now, so you don't need that central tower anymore.
Mm-hmm.
But the thing that can't be moved is live performance.
Yeah.
The thing that can't be really moved is culture.
And we could be, like, London is, is shifting, you know, different cities that are shifting to try to be about things that have to happen there.
(27:40):
But anyway as far as the San Francisco march, it's concerned we're one of those things that have to happen here.
I mean, we'll tour with this show and we'll go around, maybe around Northern California this year because we still don't wanna get too far a field because of covid.
You know, we don't wanna be staying with people or, or, you know, if anybody in this show gets sick, that kind of messes us up.
(28:03):
But but the idea of.
What is a city? How does it take care of the, the most vulnerable and don't believe the, the conservative and libertarian hype about how to solve these problems are issues for every, every town.
Yeah, it's not just San Francisco.
It's it's all over the, the country in, in varying degrees.
(28:27):
And, you know, Oakland.
Yeah.
In, in the Bay Area.
Oakland has huge problems.
San Jose has really bad problems.
San Francisco gets most of the attention because it's, you know, San Francisco, but because it's San Francisco and also it is, like I said, it's a, it's an example.
It it's a, it's the, what San Francisco represents to people.
The rest of the country is progressivism.
(28:48):
And so if they can show progressivism failing, then they can go See, we need to be more like Florida.
Florida has a homeless problem.
You never hear about it.
You know, they have, maybe it's only because they have so many other problems.
You know, they're shooting each other.
The cu, the whole state is sinking.
They, they, they, you know I keep trying to restrict who can vote.
(29:09):
Florida has a lot of problems.
You don't hear as much about their, the unhoused down there.
But.
All of these issues, things that we need to be focusing on in a longer term commitment to make our country a better place.
And what we're getting right now are short-term solutions that simply take that, that problem out of your eye line, you know, is like, well, if we could just get all the unhoused over there and then you'll have more money to be rich.
(29:40):
I mean, right now, the, the idea of civic responsibility and fellow citizenship has been thrown out the window by the conservatives.
Totally, totally.
It is just, if it is, does not profit you personally, then it is worthless.
And if you're not rich, you're a loser.
Exactly.
There's lot over you allity towards those who are suffering.
(30:04):
It's really.
It's really disgusting.
Yeah, I just got that from, I think people get angry if they feel like they can't do anything sometimes.
No, I agree.
I mean, sometimes some people are just sociopaths who are taking advantage of fear and frustration.
I agree.
I don't, they might not be even aware that that's what they're doing, you know? Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I even have family members who, who do, who react that way.
(30:25):
And I know they're the, the ni in their heart, they're the nicest people.
Right.
I, I think they don't realize that they're afraid.
They get, they, they feel helpless.
And so some of the ways that people react if they're not thinking about it, is they blame, they blame, they blame, they blame the person who's suffering.
Mm-hmm.
Often the blood, the person who's suffering.
Yeah.
(30:45):
And yeah, I think if they really sat down and, and were open to thinking about it, they probably wouldn't do that.
It's just, it's just like, it's fear.
Yeah.
And, and, and if you can't do anything right now, you can't do anything.
Yeah.
But don't blame the person who needs the help.
Yeah.
Right.
I'm, I'm curious about the the Marsha Stone character, the FA Fox commentator.
(31:08):
Yeah.
Is she like, like personally a quote unquote bad person, or is she more of a, like a cog in this pro who got stuck in this process? Does she have any conscience, I guess is what I'm asking? And I don't want to you to give away anything in the, in the show.
Well, I think that way I can answer it is You don't wanna make an assumption about what was the thing that made a person the way they are.
(31:33):
Mm-hmm.
You know, you can learn stuff no matter how much you disagree with someone, and it doesn't mean that you like them, but you can find out through what they say and the way they act.
That there might have been something that happened to them in the past, some trigger that turned them into the person they are now.
Okay.
And it doesn't mean that they're forgivable, it doesn't mean that they're suddenly nice or should got get a seat at the table with everybody else.
(31:57):
They still can be a horrible person, but you understand them a little bit better.
And for me, she represents a certain type mm-hmm.
Of you know, folk who feel like the only way this is the best way to get ahead is.
To voice something that seems counterintuitive.
You know, there are people who are just like, well, the, one of the easiest ways to really get on national attention and get a good regular job is to be a black conservative, because the conservative movement will rush towards you.
(32:33):
That's true.
To hire you because they, they want you to be that black guy who always sat behind Trump at every rally.
When he was running the first time.
Yeah.
It was the same guy.
I know.
He was the same guy.
That was that time when he said, where's my black guy? And he turned around, you know? And there he was.
There, he's there, he's, yeah, there.
He's, so if you can be, he love, you know be able to, to, to, to mouth the, you know, like, you know, the libertarian neo, not the talking points well enough and you're not white.
(33:04):
You can get a job.
Because they will, they will.
Don't you people forget, like the guy who ran the Proud Boys.
Yeah.
Who, he's in prison now.
He's not white.
I know.
You know? Yeah.
And yeah.
Is he Hispanic or, yeah.
Yeah.
He's partly Hispanic, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, and the, there's a guy recently, the guy who was beating pe these people at January 6th, who beat one of the police officers with a fire extinguisher or something, not black.
(33:35):
You know, I mean, he's not white.
Sorry.
He is not white.
Yeah.
And so, so there are, you know, you can be celebrated, you know, by and, and be surrounded by people who, under any other circumstance would hate you except for the fact that you're agreeing with them.
And that can give you prestige and a full-time paying job.
(33:56):
You can be a, a pundit somewhere, you know, you can get a gig.
So, Marsha Stone, the, the Fox News commentator, she's a person of color.
Yes, actress.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Interesting.
And so, yeah, that, that, and we, you know, we've used that in different shows every once in a while, but never quite this blatantly.
(34:19):
Right.
You know, sometimes we'll have, you know, we'll have that character who's.
Kinda like for whatever reason, however they were raised or something that happened to them.
Like I said, they seem to be working a against their best interests, but at this time it was just like as I was writing and I was like, oh, we normally would come up with some fun name for Fox or fun name for this, or something that sounded, and I was like, you know what, it's Fox.
(34:42):
I noticed that, you know, that's the first time I can remember you ever doing that, where you, it's like, oh, I know what they're talking about.
You're, but you're just saying it.
This time it's Fox and Rupert Murdoch is a character, you know.
Oh, great.
In the play.
Yeah.
And, and it's not, I mean, those other shows are always fun and it gave us a little more leeway, but this time it's just like, it's just So now Yeah.
(35:03):
That.
You know, I don't wanna even give the audience a chance to kind of go, well, it's, it's fun.
It's not that fun, you know? No, I always get blown away and just amazed and flabbergasted by people like Candace Owens.
You know? It's like, yeah, where is she coming from? Does she really, really, truly believe this stuff? Or is she just hooked on the attention? And the money.
(35:25):
I mean, it's could, it's probably a, a se like I said, the path that you find to success.
Yeah.
And then, you know, some, sometimes it's like it thinking about what's her name? Megan Kelly, and she left Yeah.
Fox.
Mm-hmm.
And she was saying how sexist it was, and it's like, didn't you watch Fox? You know, How ridiculous is it to have somebody, you know, you left Fox, you went to work for them, and now you're gonna complain that they were sexist.
(35:53):
I mean, I'm glad you said something, but I can't believe You're shocked, you're surprised.
You're, oh my goodness.
You know, I'm shocked, shocked that there's gambling going on here, you know? So the same with all of these, these folk who you know, it's like, do you really think that when you leave the room, When Candace Owens leaves the room, some of the comments are gonna be sexist and a bunch of them are gonna be racist because she's dealing with sexist and racists, but she's being well paid for it.
(36:24):
And also she might truly, honestly be that blind to really think, this is the world the way I want it to be.
And it's like, if those people win, you're the first one out the window.
You know, they're not gonna share power with you.
No.
Definitely not.
Yeah.
Not in any real way.
No.
No.
(36:44):
Hmm.
So again, musical comedy.
Well, you guys always, you still always make things funny.
Well, yeah, and that's somebody Kodo Carrero, who's a collective member, and she's the costume designer on this show.
Mm-hmm.
We were talking about that yesterday.
She was doing an interview and they were saying, yeah, well how do you make this all so funny? Every year? These, these very serious issues.
(37:08):
So funny.
And it's, you know, we don't necessarily, we try not to make fun of the working class victims.
You know, of these te of these policies, but, and we don't wanna make the, the oppressors objects of fun, but it's really about how people twist and turn themselves to try to fit into an inhuman machine.
(37:38):
They, you know, the hypocrisy and hyper hyperbolic things that they say and do so that, that they can get to, so that they can try to fit.
And then sometimes they realize they just shouldn't even be trying that.
Mm-hmm.
So the farce is in the attempt? Yeah.
You know, the farce is in trying to live, trying to act.
(37:58):
Basically, if you have sane people in an insane situation, they're trying to make themselves insane to fit in.
Yes.
And then at some point, hopefully they go, I don't wanna be insane.
Fitting in isn't the thing.
That's why, that's why it's funny because I, I, I always feel like there are archetypes that you, that you describe in detail very well, and these people, they're like pegs that somehow by chance or whatever, ended up fitting into those things and they're perpetuating the machine.
(38:27):
And we all see it and you make it funny and it makes us think, but we don't, we don't like end up.
Necessarily hating the characters in your play.
It's, it's more like yeah, I get it.
I get this.
Well, it's too easy.
Situation needs to be fixed because it's like, if it wasn't for those individuals, it would probably be somebody else.
(38:48):
You know what I mean? Yeah.
Then it's not that there was a point when When Bush two and Cheney were in office.
Yeah.
And and I ended up using Cheney a lot in shows, mainly because they had, Holmes was at the company and he looked like Dick Cheney.
Yeah.
And he, and he's great.
I mean, how could you get any funnier than Dick Cheney? Right, right, right, right.
But at the same time, I wanted to make sure to always emphasize that it's the system.
(39:12):
You know, it's not chaining like you were saying somebody else would be there.
It's the philosophy of profit over humanity, you know, and that and power and propaganda.
The, the class war there.
Only one side has been fighting people not seeing that just because they, they have a nice apartment.
It doesn't mean they're not in the working class cuz they're still workers.
(39:34):
I got in an argument with the guy on the street cuz that's what I do.
We were talking about, I was saying, you know you know how, how.
The system has to work for us to benefit to benefit more people.
And he was saying, well, is you and me? We got together, we could start a YouTube channel and if we got a million viewers, then we'd be like, cap rich capitalists.
And I didn't stop him.
(39:55):
I feel bad about this.
This was like a month ago and I didn't, I argued some other points, but I never stopped him right there and said, if we're working hard on a YouTube channel, we are not capitalists.
That's not what capitalists do.
Capitalism is your money working for you.
The goal of any capitalist is to not work.
Right? Create as much passive income as possible, right? Your money works for you.
(40:19):
Yeah.
If you, but if you are working and you rely on your income to pay your rent, to have food, to take care of stuff, you're in the working class.
And the great trick that capitalism has done is to make people associate themselves with capitalism, even though they themselves are not capitalists.
They support capitalism.
They'll die for capitalism, but they're workers.
(40:40):
they should be working on socialism, anarchy.
They should be working on, on systems that benefit the workers first, instead of supporting a system that benefits the capitalists first.
The capitalists have money because they're underpaying the workers.
It's so frustrating.
The billionaires.
Yeah.
The billionaires, the Rupert Mur, all these people are, are, yeah.
(41:02):
El Musk.
Keeping Musk our consciousness to not understand that because Yeah, they're the ones who are riffing the job.
We think that they haven't earned that money.
Yeah.
That they, they convinced enough people that, that they themselves have earned all of this money and it's like, no, you are just, I mean, a dollar a week, whatever you are underpaying your workers.
(41:23):
That's where your wealth is coming from is underpaying your workers.
That is how it's created.
It is because the, the, the, the thing you actually need that would, you need for that chair is always gonna cost about the same amount of money, shipping it, doing all that stuff, but shaping it into a chair and how much you pay that worker.
That's the only variable.
(41:44):
And if you can pay them less, you get to keep more.
That's capitalism.
Right.
You know? And so it's just so these people are rich because, so when we're walking around the world going, wow, why are things so bad? Why are there so many poor people? Why do I feel poorer than I did 10 years ago? And then you look at the front page and you go, Elon Musk is shooting a sports car in a space, or somebody's got a super yacht, they are super rich because we are struggling.
(42:11):
Yes.
And we are struggling because they are super rich.
Right.
We don't need more billionaires.
We don't even need more a hundred millionaires.
We need more a hundred thousandaires.
Yeah.
You know? Yeah.
If we were all making enough to live s and they were making significantly less, The world would be a better place.
I was just in Europe and I noticed that that's pretty much what's happening there.
(42:34):
I'm not to say they don't have problems, of course they do, but Oh, they do.
Yeah.
But there are restrictions on how much CEOs can make.
They're yeah, they, they actually do build.
Housing for the poor, and you'll see it in the big cities.
And I, I'm not saying that they've built it attractively or anything like that.
We hopefully can do better, but, you know, you know, 20 story really super ugly apartment buildings and they're all over the place.
(43:00):
But you don't have people living on the street for the most part.
Well, a few, right.
But everyone, yeah.
Who can be housed mostly is housed.
Yeah.
Well there's a, there's a full of billionaire.
No, it's not.
But that's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there's a, I think there's a fundamental philosophical and psychological issue, which is, especially in Europe, but really most places in the world, not as much China, but especially in Europe there, there's a, a focus on no.
(43:32):
Even in Eastern Europe, there's a focus on Yeah, definitely the town.
Yeah.
You know, there's focus on the town is the town.
Yes.
There is no frontier.
No Yourt.
This is how big it is.
Your town is this big.
It's a city state and then it, it's a country, but that's pretty much it.
Portugal is really like that.
Yeah.
But I So was Spain, even under Franco, Spain was like, we've gotta build more houses.
(43:57):
Yeah.
You know, Germany, east Germany, Soviet Union, they were like, these are the towns, you know, England, Scotland, these are the towns and we have to support this town.
Whereas the United States fundamentally has a.
A built into our culture is the idea of an endless frontier.
Yeah.
You can always go west, young man, you know? Right.
(44:18):
There's always more space.
You could always come out west, you could always, you could go to Alaska.
the end of the American frontier didn't, we didn't, it didn't end until like the fifties.
When when Alaska became a state, you know, in late forties, early fifties, that's when the frontier finally ended.
But up until then and built into everything is you can always just pick up and leave and go west.
(44:42):
And so there was no, so the idea of taking care of people on that kind of like we in this town have to have to reflect on how we treat each other.
Is not as fundamental as it would be if you lived in a city that had been under siege, you know, literally under siege before.
Yeah.
Many times.
(45:02):
Yeah.
Right.
That gets baked into your, your thinking.
Yeah.
So I mean that's, that's cuz I'm, you know, I was a history major, so I always think it's like history up to this point.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whenever somebody says to me history doesn't make any difference, I just think that's cuz you're trying to cover something up.
You know, if you say history, that means you're a, you're, you know, you're a holocaust denier or a, a slavery denni you something you parents were, Nazis, something that you're trying to back off of.
(45:31):
So you need is important for you to say history doesn't matter, but history is the only thing.
Everything we did is history.
The future doesn't exist yet and the present doesn't exist.
As soon as you say something, it's history.
Everything is history.
And if you don't study and understand history, you're gonna end up in the same situation.
And that's why it's so important for them to try to keep us from learning history.
(45:55):
Yeah.
Now they're trying to, anyway, ban the book so we learn less about you.
Yeah.
And other things.
So tell us what audiences can expect from breakdown in terms of music, performances, the overall experience.
How long is the show? Is there an intervention? No, the show's a no.
Nope.
We don't, we, yeah.
(46:15):
It's hard to do it.
Never have inter Yeah.
Yeah.
We've had stretches and this show's about 1 25.
Okay.
It's different from some mitro shows in that, you know, we have.
A pure dance, a couple of pure dance numbers in the show.
Mm-hmm.
Which we normally don't do.
It's also a very different cast.
People who've seen a lot of mine from shows won't recognize a bunch of, of these people.
(46:36):
Yeah, I saw that.
I didn't recognize anyone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they're wonderful actors and they're people that we've been wanting to work with for a while.
Yeah.
And a couple of them were, were in.
My show, the Great Con, when it played at SF Playhouse, I really pushed for these two actors cause I wanted to work with them.
Yeah.
And then when we came around to this show Jamella across and Keena Cantor, I really wanted to work with them cuz I thought they, they'd fit our style.
(47:00):
And Jed Presario just hilariously.
Funny actor good character actor, and Alicia mp.
Alicia MP Nelson, who has was in the show last year, the Mind Troop Show last year as Zoe the Teenager.
Oh yeah.
And this year is Sadia the social worker.
Okay.
And then Andrea Morico, who is our, like our most recent collective member at the Mind Troop.
(47:24):
He plays a bunch of Blink looting Rupert Murdoch.
So, Yeah, so people will see the shows and they'll, they, it will be like, this is a whole different group of actors, but we do try to always bring in new people.
Mm-hmm.
To tell stories.
You know, you can't just keep pretending like the world is the same place it was when you were doing things.
(47:45):
You know, saying, you know they're just the show, the characters just get older and older and older with us.
Yeah.
It's like, no, there's shows that have to be mainly focused on younger folks too.
So yeah.
It's a, it's a comedy But it's a harsh comedy, like most mind TRO shows.
Yeah.
And this one is more psychological than some shows in that we're trying to deal with them when he's having mental issues and pt, s d and all of the pressures of living on the street.
(48:15):
And at the same time trying to, like I said, show their circumstance in a way that is meaningful and not mocking.
But still be a comedy.
I mean, that's always the struggle for, for myself and whoever's writing my troop shows.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and when does, when does it open? July? Well, we open in Berkeley this Saturday.
(48:40):
Oh, this Saturday.
Okay.
On the first, this Saturday.
So yeah, I've gotta go back outside and we gotta run through starting in a little while.
Oh, okay.
And then it runs, Yeah, run through.
Yeah.
And then we'll run all summer, we'll do, we'll do Saturday and Sunday, and I think we're in Cedar Rose Park in San Francisco, and then on the 4th of July in San Francisco at Dolores Park.
(49:01):
Great.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Cedar Rose in Berkeley, the first and second, and Dolores Park in San Francisco on the fourth.
And then we'll run all the way to Labor Day weekend.
And if people wanted to find out when we're gonna be in their area, we'll go to Ukiah.
We'll go down to Santa Cruz, play the East Bay.
Go to sft.org
and click the button that says schedule and you'll see when the mine troop will be in your neighborhood.
(49:23):
That's their website, San Francisco mine troop sft.org.
Great.
And I hope, I hope you're gonna be over here at Mitchell Park in Palo Alto again.
I, I believe so.
I should look at the schedule.
It's, it's it's a half mile from my house, so we could be, yeah, we played in that, we played in that semi-circle last year.
That was different for us, but it worked.
(49:45):
So we'll probably do that again.
Yeah, that great.
I really enjoyed it.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well thank you so much for being here again.
Oh, thanks for having me.
Well, there you have it.
My little chat with Michael J.
Sullivan of the San Francisco Mime Troop.
I'll be sure to go check out their show breakdown.
It's going to be playing in venues all over the Bay Area for, gosh, three months, four months through September.
(50:13):
Check it out.
As I said, they always do great stuff.
Hey, thanks so much for listening.
If you enjoy this show, please tell your friends.
I'd really, really appreciate it.
Give me a rating on Apple Podcasts if you could.
It helps out a lot for me to get more listeners.
And if you wanna get ahold of me, just send an email to Green Room on air gmail.com.
(50:38):
Have a great week.
I'll talk to you soon, and until next time, I'll see you on the boards.
Take care y'all.
I'll leave you today with a track from my dear friend Carly Oard, singing Imagine by John Lennon.
(51:12):
Imagine there's.
It's easy.
(51:39):
All the people.
It isn't to do nothing.
(52:17):
All the.
(52:44):
You join us.
(53:38):
I'm.
Hope someday you'll join us.
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