Man’s Folly: The Musical

Perhaps the only musical I'd ever be eager to see.

Dating requires a lot of give and take in any normal non-abusive relationship. The male of the species will find himself doing things he wouldn’t normally do, while the female of the species generally (sometimes) does the same in order to make the other partner happy. This is especially true when it comes to watching movies. I like to think that I don’t subject my girlfriends to too horrible of a selection of movies, although I never have fully recovered from the debacle of taking a date to Battlefield Earth… I think there’s a special circle of hell reserved for me in that case. More recently, I indulged in a little give and take by agreeing to watch… a musical. Now the deal was struck that if I watched Chicago my girlfriend would watch the 80’s sci-fi epic Dune in the near future. Finding this agreement mutually beneficial, the contracts were signed and the film was viewed.

The strange thing about the whole musical genre is that it is almost universally despised by straight men. If you are a straight man what’s the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the word musical? Whatever it is, I bet it’s probably Freudian in some respect. You’d think there wouldn’t be any effect on the male ego from watching musicals since Chicago features plenty of scantily clad women. Normally, I enjoy a good round of scantily clad women. The problem was that my masculinity was put into question by the very act of watching the musical genre for me to even notice most of the sexy female singer/dancers. Is it the singing? Is it the dancing? I know that it didn’t help that Richard Gere was one of the leads. If there’s any actor to cause a guy to question if he’s watching something that he shouldn’t be watching, it’s Richard Gere.

Why are most straight guys’ brains drawn to things like spaceships, ninjas, and football when many females and gay men enjoy singing and dancing extravaganzas? This question will perhaps remain a murky mystery, however new evidence has surfaced indicating that the musical may have been invented by Hitler’s disembodied brain as a way to incapacitate most of the males in enemy nations while his zombie Nazi hordes invaded the world from underground bases in South America. I’ve gone over this scenario in RISK (the game of world conquest) and it works. Fortunately, after the creation of Oklahoma the A.D.D. riddled former furor’s brain moved on to a new dastardly plan: the creation of a neutron bomb for cats. While the full plan to use musicals as a weapon was never put into place, the musical took off as a valid form of entertainment.  

Where am I going with this? I don’t know, I think something happened during the viewing of Chicago. All I know for sure is that I’ll enjoy watching Baron Vladimir Harkonnen pulling the heart plug out of the weird kid with my woman close by my side.

 - Paul - 08/13/05