Besides the usual annual celebrations lately endured, The Trying Times wishes to add a new one: Year 61 A.T.V, or sixty six years into the Age of TeleVision. We have calculated that the seminal rise occurred in the year 1955. Statistics put television in 90 percent of homes by 1960. But taking in numerical polls, […]

Sounding on our ongoing theme of travesty, one of the most odious of the emerging travesties is that of liberty itself in the modern age. On that score, The Statue Of Liberty Suite is presented. The piece is from 1990, after the Statue of Liberty had been refurbished. All that effort in redoing a statue […]

Hunkered down on sentinel watch in our bunker, we take regular liberties with Trying Times subheadings sneaked from Tom Paine’s Common Sense— These are the times that try men’s souls— by expanding upon the trying aspects of our times. These are the times that try men’s pockets, try men’s humor, etc. Presently, though, Paine’s original […]

The Great Commotion Opera & Entreaters Society begged me to sit and play. So I sat, and I played to the saga of a plastic collapsible circus, playing to eyes in front and those behind, playing to the dim din in this hall of a skull.   But all I could get was some funny tinny […]