Part of Twelfth Night Set

Last weekend, I was bicycling in the park and came upon the under construction set for this year’s Shakespeare Festival. The play will be Twelfth Night. What will likely be the most striking aspect of this set had already been erected, a giant full moon. Preparation for the Shakespeare Festival is a tangible sign that summer is rushing fast upon us. The festival officially begins next weekend, Memorial Day weekend, and runs until the day before the Muny season begins, a summer long season of song and dance.

Anne finished her month-long stint supporting leave no child untested last week. This week she quickly found herself booked until the end of the school year, which is as soon as next week. How many more days to go, Anne?

School’s out forever
School’s out for summer
School’s out with fever
School’s out completely
– Alice Cooper

What would summer in Saint Louis be without some summer heat? To that end, Mother Nature flipped on her furnace yesterday and we set a record high for Tuesday. Hopefully, this won’t be one of many like last year. Otherwise, here we go, back to global warming temperatures and global warming denials.

This leads me to another undesirable aspect of the looming summer season. No, I’m not speaking about those hot summer days. I know a lot of people who actually revel in this hothouse season. Although, these same people usually have a Body Mass Index of zero. Nor am I speaking of that perennial summertime pest, the mosquito. I am speaking of that most awful aspect of summer, Washington politics. In days of yore, when I lived in DC, summer was a quiet time of truce between the warring parties. This was because like Saint Louis, Washington has the most atrocious summer weather, both too hot and too humid. Politicians wisely fled town, in order to spend more time with their constituents. At least that is what they told us. Then with the advent of central air, Washington politics went 365/24/7.

Last summer’s hubbub was all about the budget, full of debt ceiling standoffs. This year’s summer is shaping up to be a multitude of administration scandals. We’ve got Benghazi, that IRS/Tea Party thing and the latest, an AP/phone records dustup. Dealing with the last one first, all I can say is, you don’t get the Patriot Act that you want; you get the Patriot Act that was enacted. If you didn’t want the government to snoop on you, then you shouldn’t have made it the law in the first place. People who surrender their freedom for security end up with neither. What I really don’t understand about this summer’s political agenda is why are we going to waste time on the Benghazi/IRS/Tea Party scandals. Would not Congress’s time be much better wasted trying to repeal Obamacare again?