Wicked

There are mornings when a show begins with a dignified intellectual hum, and mornings when it begins with a noise that suggests someone has attempted to gargle a small, haunted tropical fruit. Today’s episode offers both, which seems greedy, but the universe rarely apologizes for excess.

Rabbi Dave arrives positively buoyant, which in this context means “only mildly afflicted by existential dread”, while Friar Rod slumps into the studio radiating the tragic majesty of a man who has returned from Hawaii with nothing but a cold, a lighter wallet, and the distinct impression that paradise charges by the breath. His virus, having clearly missed its true calling as a professional saboteur, has performed the impressive feat of making coffee taste like an IPA, which is a message from the cosmos best categorized as “ominous.”

From this unpromising starting point, the conversation gallops, rather like a startled yak, into the week’s events. There’s the Thanksgiving celebration conducted in a state of mucus-induced delirium, the suspiciously affordable casino dinner (always a trap), and the baffling economics of Hawaii, which appear to have been designed by an accountant with a grudge.

Then the clouds gather. The Washington DC National Guard shooting drifts into the episode like an uninvited philosophical relative who insists on discussing the decline of civilization before dessert. Not because the hosts enjoy tragedy, far from it, but because the world has grown distressingly fond of simple answers to complicated horrors. Was the shooter radicalized abroad? At home? By ideology? By sheer cosmic mischief? No one is asking the right questions, which is exactly why Dave and Rod have no intention of leaving them alone.

Naturally, as all good discussions of modern violence do, this leads to Greek mythology. Dave invokes Orestes, Agamemnon, the Furies, and the Areopagus, proving once again that the ancient Greeks, for all their architectural flourishes, understood the grim arithmetic of rage far better than we do. Anyone can get angry; that’s easy. It’s civilization that insists you do something useful with it besides start another war.

Lest the episode become too sensible, the universe provides relief: the curious tale of a British tourist arrested upon returning home simply for posting a photo of himself firing a gun at an American range. No weapon. No threat. Just a picture, and the unfortunate misfortune of landing at Heathrow, where West Yorkshire police apparently decided to audition for a dystopian satire. If you were wondering about the current state of free speech in the UK, please stop. It’s starting to look shy, nervous, and badly in need of a biscuit.

And then, because this show contains more tonal shifts than a malfunctioning Moog synthesizer, the conversation swerves into Wicked. Rod has seen it. Dave has not. Both wrestle with the modern craving to transform villains into misunderstood antiheroes and heroes into disappointing bureaucrats. Is it art? Is it ideology? Is it merely fashionable moral confusion in a tasteful green palette? Opinions vary. None of them resolve anything. All of them are entertaining.

By the time the microphones click off, Rod is still valiantly losing his battle with the Hawaiian Plague, Dave is still pondering mankind’s perennial inability to tell a straightforward story, and the audience is left suspended somewhere between laughter, discomfort, and the creeping suspicion that the truth is, in fact, hiding behind the curtain, pulling levers, and laughing its head off.

Welcome to What The Frock?, where the coffee tastes wrong, the world is wicked, and absolutely nothing stays in Kansas for long.

The Show Tunes…

What The frock Is Going On Here? (Theme)