Quinn Strassel, a drama teacher at Ann Arbor Community High School has written a music about Betsy DeVos, the arch-for of America’s public schools. The Michigan media took note.
Strassel recruited Diane Hill, his former Ypsilanti High School drama teacher, to take on the role of Betsy DeVos, while he played husband Dick DeVos and brother Erik Prince.
The cast also included some of Strassel’s former students and fellow school teachers and staff.
As the fictitious storyline in the play goes, DeVos makes an appearance at a Grand Rapids charter school, “Future Business Leaders of Tomorrow Academy,” and enlists the help of six students of color in putting on a musical. She promises to personally give them $200,000 to renovate the school theater if they do a good job.
As the musical progresses, things go wrong and DeVos upsets and frightens the children. Guns enter the picture, one student is worried a family member may be deported, and another student has his brains scrambled by “Neurocleanse,” a mockery of the real-life Neurocore, a DeVos-backed, brain-performance company.
Another student complains about his family falling victim to a “pyramid scheme” run by Amway Corp., a DeVos company.
My friend Jennifer Berkshire wrote to tell me about Quinn’s terrific show.
She wrote:
The teacher who wrote the musical is amazing – his name is Quinn Strassel and he teaches drama at Ann Arbor Community High School. The part of Betsy was played by his former theater teacher at Ypsilanti High School, Diane Hill. That acclaimed theater program no longer exists, by the way, a casualty of Michigan’s schools of choice policy that has devastated schools in working class communities like Ypsilanti.
Here’s a bit about him and the show.
The writer, director, and producer Quinn Strassel wrote:
I believe comedy can be a path to change.
As a teacher, I’ve watched as Betsy DeVos has led a movement to defund and dismantle public schools in Michigan. It has been heartbreaking and devastating to witness.
I can’t outspend Betsy but I’m fighting back with what I’ve got: comedy, music, love, support from my community, and years of experience teaching and directing theatre.
I spent this past summer writing “Betsy Devos! The Musical!”
The show is completely ridiculous (with songs like “Jesus Wants Me to be Rich” and “The Best Kind of Teacher is a Teacher with a Gun”). But I’m proud of what it’s become. I think it has substance and heart.
I would like to share this show with you and as many of your friends as you can bring along for the ride. I want us to laugh and to celebrate public schools. I want to win hearts and change lives. https://www.gofundme.com/f/staged-reading-for-betsy-devos-the-musical
Please watch the link to the show, help fund it, and reach out to Quinn Strassel about staging a production in your community.
Art and humor will save us! And this show has both.
Wait, guns but no grizzly bears? Aren’t grizzly bears the reason we need guns?
Did the Theranos investment/loss make the cut for the play? Evidently, the family thought the product had better prospects than further investment in Blackwater (whatever its new name is) and Amway.
Did the play scenery show the DeVos’ lake palace that looks like a book that got wet and ended up with curled, misshapen pages?
Hoping so.
My first thought was that it was called X something.
Like, X(propriate)
Ah, it was called Blackwater USA, then Blacwater Worldwide, then Xe Services, and now Academi, which is part of a larger security firm called Constellis Holdings.
The names become less and less intelligible.
Security for Dummies.
No, But slide 9 shows some silvery high heels.
Does Gates, the villainthropist, have a cameo?
LOL. What a great idea!!!
Ditzy DeVoid
Breaks,
I’ve had a few,
Like whom I knew,
And whom I married.
Fancy yachts,
I’ve worried not,
O’er life’s great storms
I’ve, heedless, ferried.
I’ve learned
To con the pawns
To feed upon
Their dreams was child’s play.
And in my work
I didn’t shirk,
To do it AmWay.
To the tune of “My Way”
I hope the DeVos wardrobe includes the original thigh high skirts. And, I hope the photo op where Betsy is looking at carpet samples, supposedly working, is in the play. Thanks to Mercedes Schneider for that catch.
And, I hope the expensive U.S. Marshalls protection gets covered.
Cast members galore.
.
Final stanza, Bob, perfection!
Old blue eyes is either shaking with laughter or rolling over in his grave. Great job, Bob
Gosh. Thanks, Roy.
AH.. “music to my ears” says she
Art is a great way for oppressed people to express themselves. For the schools in Michigan this play is a cathartic experience after living with all the abusive years from Betsy and Dicky. The Ann Arbor Community School should make DVDs of the play and sell them to benefit the school.
Oh my Lord, the sample dialogue and song in that clip from the news story is just wonderful. Hilarious. Clearly, this fellow Strassel is VERY talented!!!!
BTW, most elite schools have great theatre and speech programs because they know that ability in these–being able to handle yourself in front of a crowd–is a really important skill for managers and leaders. But, ofc, this stuff is for the children of oligarchs, not the children of Proles. The Prole kids can go to a charter school with no theater, no art labs, no science labs, and no gymnasium and learn to sit down, shut up, and do the next inane depersonalized education software exercise on standard 666 from the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list. Excellent training for serving lattes to oligarchs later in life.
For managers and leaders and EVERYONE ELSE, of course!!! But there we’re talking about the “d” word that the oligarchs fear so much–democracy.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
A musical about Betsy DeVos with songs like: “Jesus Wants Me to be Rich” and “The Best Kind of Teacher is a Teacher with a Gun”
This musical sounds like something Randy Rainbow and/or John Oliver might be interested in supporting in some way. Does anyone know how to get in touch with Randy or Oliver?
The only way we have to display the insanity that surrounds us all, on this world stage we did not choose, is to see the humor in the behavior. That is why the best voice out there are the comedians like the ones you mention …and of course Jon Stewart or even Trevor Noah.
They do not replace George Carlin, or Sid Caesar or Bob Hope… but they nail the behavior..and as we all know it is ALL about the behavior.
This just in. Take some time in your day today to celebrate American folk customs like these:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hundreds-of-worshipers-gather-at-church-hosting-ceremony-featuring-ar-15s/?fbclid=IwAR3EDE7yLbOn6jcvqQG_ebwhMaGApHq5ZIYS9yCT3j9SckzqQ2XDsSCZyaI
Oh my God. Horrible!
How, Diane, does one write a parody as crazy as the real thing?
It gets harder every day with a moron in the White House, wielding his Sharpie and an itchy Twitter finger.
It sort of makes sense in a crazy way when we realize that most if not all members of the KKK and other violent, hate-filled white supremacist groups claim to be Christians and justify their brutality and with misinterpreted passages from the Bible.
After watching that CBS news piece, my first thought was: This sort of justified Singapore and China limiting religions so cults like this one are not allowed.
When I was a boy, Jesus appeared each night on an old refrigerator near here. He kept coming back. He told us he would. He just didn’t say anything about a worn out refrigerator. I Houston I had heard it all. Now his.
That last sentence was to have read: I thought I had heard it all. Now this. Sometimes I think auto correct has a mind of its own.a
I have been writing little poems based on autocorrect errors in texts with friends:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/autocorrect-poems/
They’re Moonies, e.g. followers of the “church” started by Sun Myng Moon, Sr. They’ve been inside of the GOP network for over half a century thanks to George Bush, Sr.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sun_Myung_Moon
“Writing in October 2000 in Salon, Frederick Clarkson noted that Moon often cultivated close relationships with key conservative figures and was a generous sponsor.” The former President Bush (sometimes accompanied by former first lady Barbara Bush) spoke at a series of Moon-sponsored events in Japan, Argentina and the U.S. after he left the White House. Estimates of how much the couple received for these appearances run between $1 million and $10 million,” he wrote. Though the net appears to have been purged of photos of the Bushes with Moon, here’s one of the Bushes with Mrs. Moon and Moon’s long time right hand man Bo Hi Pak.
Nor were the Bush’s the only beneficiaries. “Former Reagan Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp earned $52,000 from Moon-affiliated groups in the year before becoming Bob Dole’s GOP running mate in 1996,” he wrote. “
The senior Moon started the right wing rag Washington Times during the Reagan years.
In 2002, Arnaud de Borchgrave, now Editor at Large for United Press International, wrote that Moon decided that after the collapse of the Washington Star there remained a need for a conservative paper to challenge the Washington Post. Moon, he said, “concluded that the lack of a robust second newspaper in Washington would jeopardize President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to roll back the Soviet empire and roll up communism.
The Moonies (e.g. Unification Church of Rev Moon) are in the arms business. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1209/S00029/reverend-moon-cult-leader-cia-asset-and-bush-family-friend.htm
“September 4, 2012
The death of Reverend Sun Myung Moon hopefully ends one of the strangest chapters in U.S. security industrial complex history. The self-proclaimed “Messiah” who owned dozens of businesses including Kahr Arms, and who once claimed to have presided over Jesus’ wedding posthumously in order to get the Christian savior into heaven, was ultimately a front in the United States for friends in the CIA like George Herbert Walker Bush.”
The AR-15’s substitute for manhood.
As my personal world dips into the insanity. that comes when someone I have loved for 60 years, disappears before my eyes, the conversation here makes me laugh again.
ON Sept 22 I have the opening of the exhibit of my art (photos printed on metal) at the Pomona Cultural Center. That makes me happy, too.
We all have to stay grounded in what we can do, what we can achieve.. and we have to appreciate the voices in our lives.
I appreciate you bright, funny folks.
Thanks, Diane, for this place!
Congratulations, Susan. You are a gifted photographer.
Susan, do you have an online portfolio? Would love to see your pieces.
We appreciate you, Susan.
Susan, why don’t you post a link to some of your gorgeous photographs?
Could the play about Betsy roll credits following the performance, mentioning men like Sen. Sherrod Brown who begged for $71 mil. from Betsy to expand the education grifters’ paradise in Ohio?