The problem with that is that it kind of runs aground on human nature.

No government official, executive, legislative, judicial, or bureaucratic, is anything but a normal human being with human failings and foibles (or worse). But for just that reason, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. There’s a _reason_ why the captain of a ship shouldn’t be too casual with his officers and men, why officers and enlisted must not be too causal with each other, why everyone is expected to rise when the judge enters the courtroom.

Without that ‘artificial’ layer of respect, the machinery tends to break down on the fact that there’s no _inherent_ reason why one person should pay attention to another person’s decisions.

Brown should not have been acting on Broadway, and Scalia had no real business doing walk ons on TV, either.

Maybe. I’m not fully versed in the details of the whole matter, but I do know that both actors, over many years, including when they were _well_ into adulthood, kept insisting that they were OK with the nude scenes. Maybe there’s more to it than I’m familiar with, but when a position suddenly changes decades later, I’m a little suspicious. I’m open to having my mind changed by more information, but I’m a little doubtful of a late-life suit.

@AesopFan:

I thought Justice Brown’s performance in “And Juliet” was charming. It brings to mind Justice Scalia’s and Justice Ginsberg’s walk on parts as extras in one of their favorite operas.

The legal definition of “a woman” is not always the same as the biological definition. A girl may be considered “a woman” when she turns 14 in some jurisdictions (like Juliet was), while other places say she isn’t “a woman” until she’s 18. Most people would say that a woman has two X chromosomes, but there are some people who have XXY chromosomes are considered women. If a girl loses her virginity, is she any more of a woman than a girl who hasn’t? The issue isn’t black or white, it’s many shades of grey.

That play sounds quite interesting!
More so than the one in which Justice Ketanji Brown recently appeared.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/16/us-news/supreme-court-justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-debuts-in-queer-broadway-musical-knockoff-of-romeo-and-juliet/

One of our sons was tasked with doing some kind of project about the play, not just a “book report” thing, and decided that the Queen Mab speech by Mercutio could be edited to fit to Webber’s “Angel of Music” tune from his “Phantom of the Opera.”

I’m not sure now how he did it, but it worked.

Coincidentally, the Justice played Queen Mab, a character who doesn’t actually appear in Shakespeare’s cast.

“Jackson, who told members of the Senate during her 2022 confirmation that she can’t define what is a woman because she’s not a biologist, portrayed Queen Mab — described as a “she/her” character on a production poster — during her brief Broadway stint on Saturday.”

Funny: I was reminiscing about our teachers with a couple of high school classmates last month–three guys on the sunset side of 65 with all that that implies. One recently moved back to our hometown with his wife; the other was visiting from Seattle, where he has lived for over forty years. I’ve known both of them for 50 and 60 years respectively (Seattle guy and I were in nursery school and kindergarten together). One thing we marveled at was how easy-going and informal things were in the 1970s–the acid after-belch of the 1960s–compared with today. And genuinely tolerant of eccentrics. One of our most beloved HS teachers was an openly–flamboyantly, actually–gay guy who did Mae West and Marlene Dietrich impersonations in class. To liven things up. He was also the respected leader of the HS bicycle club. Nobody cared about his “identity”. Another teacher used to get so excited that he would yell and throw books across the classroom. He was a great teacher even though (make that because) he hadn’t been through a school of ed and didn’t have the credential. Whatever their flaws as people–and having to teach a bunch of grubby adolescents was sure to bring them out–our best teachers had two cardinal virtues: they loved their subjects and they gave a sh*t. They also demanded that we give a sh*t and would call us out publicly if we didn’t. Today they’d be fired, assuming they could get hired in the first place.

She was a majestic on screen presence.