Victoria Day's Sneak Peek

There were topics I would dearly have loved to draw about this week but didn't because ideas stubbornly refused to gel.

I sketched out a memorial cartoon for Jason Collins, the gay basketball player who came out of the closet in Sports Illustrated in May of 2013 and succumbed to stage 4 glioblastoma on May 12 of this year at age 47. But I couldn't come up with anything besides a caricature that I wasn't entirely happy with — no trenchant quotation or iconic photo image — and I certainly was not about to draw a basketball shedding a tear.

Then there is a local story that I thought would be worthy of a cartoon for a national, if niche, audience: the school board in Watertown, Wisconsin, voted 7-to-1 to stop their high school's Wind Symphony from performing "A Mother of a Revolution!" by Omar Thomas at their spring concert this evening. Thomas wrote the instrumental piece as "a celebration of the bravery of trans women, and in particular, Marsha 'Pay It No Mind' Johnson. Marsha is credited with being one of the instigators of the famous Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969..."

It's a technically demanding work, but the hours of practice those kids in Watertown spent mastering the music were all for naught when the school board decreed that it violated the district's "controversial issues" policy. Board Vice President Sam Ouweneel called the board's action “a perfect example of what everyone here ran on, which was ending indoctrination and radical curriculum.”

Watertown students staged a walk-out protest that was duly reported on state television news. Someone with sympathies for the school board complained that the coverage was all one-sided, so one TV station sent a reporter and cameraman out to the board members' homes to offer them opportunity to comment. None of them would answer the door.

Over the weekend, the owner of Minocqua Brewing Company invited the Waterford Wind Symphony to perform "A Mother of a Revolution!" at the biergarten he is sponsoring in Madison this coming weekend. He soon realized that the band's director could be in trouble with the school board were he to participate, but the invitation to the band stands.

The guy in Minocqua is a leftwing gadfly perpetually in trouble with the Republicans in charge of Minocqua city government over zoning and licensing type issues. He has declared his candidacy for Wisconsin governor as a Democrat, to which the Democratic establishment has responded, "Gee, thanks, but we have enough candidates already." 

To give you an idea of the sort of person he is, he has publicly promised that his brewery will host a "Free Beer Day" when Donald Trump kicks the bucket. After the latest assassination attempt, he posted "Well, we almost got #freebeerday. Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle."

All of which seemed like a lot to cram into a cartoon for readers who may not have heard of any of this. So I ended up drawing about something else very late last night.