rat-a-tat-thud

(originally posted 6/17/2014)

In the Sunday newspaper they ran a big story about a tap dancer who lost a leg and is still trying to be a tap dancer. Obviously I couldn’t wait to read it. It sounded like a hilarious premise but as I started to get into the story it appeared that it wasn’t going to be funny at all and that this hack was seriously trying to turn it into some kind of heroic profile in courage.

Is this guy out of his fucking mind?

A one-legged tap dancer? That’s a profile in fucktardery.

It’s amazing what people these days will try and get the public to swallow. Nobody wants to pay money to see a one-legged dancer. If you’re a beautiful singer who gets throat cancer and has to have a voice box put in, you’re not going to be able to be a singer anymore. That’s just life. That’s just the way it goes sometime. Them’s the breaks, kid.

Is there nobody in this dancer’s life that can sit down with him and say “You’re going to have to get a job now. How do you feel about banking or insurance?”

But no, not in these touchy-feely retarded times. We’re going to get an empty-headed write-up about what an amazing journey Mr. One Sock Too Many has been on. Nowhere in the article does it come close to asking if there is anyone on the planet that would be able to sit through an evening of watching this guy clomp around, ruining whatever production he’s in without wanting to hang themselves. Maybe, just maybe, if the cast required a pirate to come crashing around knocking shit over with his big wooden leg for awhile he wouldn’t look completely out of place, but otherwise the simple truth is that he has one fucking leg.

This is right on par with the blind painter I saw a story about last year. It’s only a short leap until we start seeing obese ballet dancers, models being discovered in burn units or guys with no legs at all racing in the Olympics then murdering their girlfriends.

Has everyone lost their critical-thinking skills or have we all just become so afraid of people thinking that we’re insensitive that we’ll sit back and absorb this stupid shit with a straight face?

This peg-legged tool is so self-absorbed that he will actually inflict himself on others without the slightest consideration for the fact that there are some pretty basic requirements to be a good tap dancer.

Requirement One: A pair of tap shoes.

Requirement Two: Two fucking legs.

I think we get confused when bad things happen to people. What we need to do is be able to provide support to the person on the receiving end of misfortune without giving them the green light to make a bad thing much worse. Just because something is “brave” doesn’t mean it can’t also be stupid as hell.

I almost want to cut off both my hands, put those little Whack-A-Mole hammers on the end of each stump and then play piano at Carnegie Hall and force everyone to come listen and tell me how inspiring I am.

Someone get the writer from that newspaper on the phone.