Waiting for Godot to Leave

For those of you who know me from EWTN, the Society of GK Chesterton, the Prairie Troubadours or The St. Austin Review, I am no longer affiliated with any of those groups. "The truth will set you free" ( John 8:32 ) "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." ( John 18:37 ) If we deny the truth, we are bad Christians and bad human beings. If we put our faith in a lie - including a Big Lie - we are bad Christians and bad human beings. If we endorse vulgarity, violence, bullying, gaslighting, fraud, irrational conspiracy theories, sedition and hate, we are bad Christians and bad human beings. Since March of 2020, I have felt like a character in the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco.  In that play, the bestial inhumanity of rhinoceroses becomes a fad and people start turning into them - willingly discarding reason and free will and mocking others who don...

... from The St. Louis Review ... August 8, 2008 ‘Journey of St. Paul’ to bring apostle to life on local stage by Jennifer Brinker, Review Staff Writer -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SAINTLY PRODUCTION - Theater of the Word founder Kevin O'Brien portrays St. Paul in upcoming performances of 'The Journey of St. Paul.' Want to learn more about St. Paul the Apostle? Theater of the Word, a local Catholic theater production company, is offering to archdiocesan parishes performances of "The Journey of St. Paul," to coincide with the Year of St. Paul designated by Pope Benedict XVI. Presentations will be offered to parishes for free, with donations accepted, said Theater of the Word founder Kevin O’Brien. "Our main focus is to evangelize, to share the word of St. Paul and to let people know who we are," he said. Theater of the Word launched its inaugural season last year at the Cardinal Rigali Center in Shrewsb...

By popular demand, here is an article I wrote for my Upstage Productions Murder Mystery Newsletter in May of 2000. I am not making it up. As I’ve boasted in previous newsletters, we were invited to perform for what I was told were a group of “top HBO producers” at the Belhurst Castle in Geneva, New York in April. The HBO folks wanted me to do a parody of “The Sopranos”, their fascinating, violent, vulgar, and addictive hit drama series, which features what we kindly call the “F word” as a mainstay adjective. And so I set to work writing a parody of the show and faxed it off to HBO. They called me in March. “We really are happy to be working with you on this project,” they told me, “but we feel your script is a little … vulgar.” This is because in the first act, Tony introduces Uncle Junior, his 87 year old uncle, and Uncle Junior uses the “F word” literally 17 times in his first speech. To which Tony replies, “Uncle Junior, ever since you got cable, you been a real pain in the ass...

Last week my actors and I had a great time in Evansville, Indiana with Bill Baer, creative writing professor at the University of Evansville and founder of The Southwell Institute (Bill is third from left in the photo below.) I told Bill about my latest post re. HBO and The Sopranos and he told me the story of how his brother helped create and develop The Sopranos , but was never paid for it, and eventually sued the producer of the series. This made me tell the story of how I'm pretty sure I helped create The Simpsons , TV's longest running cartoon situation comedy. This is all true and I am not making any of it up. The story begins in the late 1970's, when I began writing and drawing a comic strip about a real-life St. Louis family that I knew as acquaintances. I turned them, in my strip, into a horrifically dysfunctional group of people, giving them bizarre and vulgar adventures in the rich St. Louis suburbs. The family consisted of a father named Homer, whom I made b...

A reader of Mark Shea's blog tells of a priest who was tortured to death via "the water cure". He links to an article in the New York Times from 1903, in which some great things stand out in a quote attributed to Judge Advocate General George B. Davis, who said, (107 years ago) ... " No modern State , which is a party to international law, can sanction either expressly or by a silence, which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view of obtaining confessions as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the 'water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smoldering fire; shall he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet? Shall he be beaten with rods? Shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed? For all these, and more, have been done during the Spanish domination in the Philippine Islands, a...

This morning I noticed three unauthorized charges had gone through our home banking account within the last twenty-four hours via our debit card, totaling just under $50. The payments were made to Skype, the internet telephone service. Now I knew I had signed up for Skype, but I signed up for the free service, not the paid service, and I never would have given them our debit card number even if I had agreed to pay them anything. In addition, we’ve never even used Skype. The program languishes on our upstairs computer. But when you visit Skype’s website, they make it impossible for you to cancel your account (especially when you haven’t paid), and they give you no opportunity to contact them directly. The company seems to be based out of Luxembourg, and they provide no phone number for customer service or for billing errors. A quick Google of “Skype billing fraud” turns up over 70,000 sites, and the top of the list is Skype’s own forum, where users have been complaining about what I...