Homosexual Soccer Players Destroy Photo of Bella's Eduardo Verastegui in Press Conference (Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, October 23, 2008, LifeSiteNews.com)
Verastegui's support of California's Proposition 8, which would amend California’s constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman and overturn the judicial activist decision approving homosexual "marriage" in the state, is likely to have a serious impact on the voting in November. "Verastegui is very well known among Latinos for his role in 'Bella', and other telenovelas," noted Maria Ramirez of Viva la Familia.Verastegui is also participating in advertisements in favor of California's Proposition 4, which would require parental consent for abortions for minors. Pro-lifers believe that they may narrowly win because of strong Hispanic support for the measure.
Tri Gay, which bills itself as "Mexico's Gay Soccer Selection," is composed of homosexual activists who seek to legitimize the homosexual lifestyle in Mexico. They participate in "gay" soccer tournaments including the "Gay-Lesbian World Cup," and the "World Outgames" (scheduled for 2009 in Denmark).
The Opera's New Clothes: Why I walked out of Doctor Atomic. (Ron Rosenbaum, Oct. 24, 2008, Slate)
Since I had recently been to Hiroshima and am working on a book about the new face of nuclear warfare, I'd been thinking about the nuclear version of the Faustian dilemma. Especially about the phenomenon of ineradicability. Faust signs his contract with the devil—in which he agrees to give Lucifer his soul when he dies in return for being granted all earthly wishes—with a pen dipped in his own blood. But, predictably, when it comes time to carry out his part of the bargain and descend to hell, Faust cries out for a reprieve, for divine mercy.At the end of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, when Faust's ticket to hell is about to be punched, he cries out:
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul ...It is one of the most heart-rending pleas in literature. But no mercy is forthcoming. Faust offers to burn his books in exchange for divine mercy, because his lust for knowledge—here's the Oppenheimer parallel—the knowledge he thought the devil could bestow on him was the reason he sold his soul.
It's too late. Books can be burned, but information cannot be destroyed. Similarly, it's too late for us. Nuclear bombs can be banned, but the knowledge—the equations—required to remake them cannot be eradicated. Oppenheimer was among the first to realize this. Once the spells for conjuring up the nuclear devil had been written down, they could be erased but not eliminated, deleted but not destroyed. They had entered the world and the world had entered hell.
Exciting stuff, then: Faust, Oppenheimer.
What material for transformation into tragic operatic art! Or so one would think, until one actually sees Doctor Atomic or, as I think of it now, the Emperor's New Opera.
There is some lack of clarity in the program about the opera's authors; it was conceived by John Adams (composer of the previous contemporary-history operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, about the murder of an elderly, wheelchair-bound Jew by Palestinian terrorists) and produced for the Met by Penny Woolcock. But the libretto has largely been "written," if that's a verb you can apply to this text, by theater and opera director Peter Sellars, who has compiled an assemblage of quotes from books and documents interspersed with the work of noted poets and dialogue of provenance uncertain to me.
Adams and Sellars have chosen to focus on the days before the first Los Alamos test, less than a month before the bomb was used on Hiroshima. And on the conflicts among—and within—the atomic scientists assembled by Oppenheimer.
I was expecting something powerful and sophisticated. And the music and the sets couldn't have been more effectively dramatic.
But the libretto, the words ... They were pedestrian, speechifying, and painfully simplistic (when not embarrassingly schlocky as in the "love scenes"). Yes, it's true, opera librettos comprise their own genre. Opera lyrics are not poetry. But these ones suffer in particular from the contrast between the pretentious grandiosity of operatic treatment and the actual, disappointing content. And "singing" relentlessly dull prose does not raise it to the level of art. Instead it makes everything sound—forgive me—bombastic.
Imagine, if you will, starting at the top of this column and "singing" it, intoning it with a tuneless, stentorian, pompous affect.
Come on, try! Give it your best mock operatic treatment:
Does this ever happen to you:
You discover key forgotten elements
In over familiar fables ...Now imagine these (admittedly pedestrian) words being performed on what looks like a multimillion-dollar set by a male chorus making dreadfully hammy gestures at one another?
No, that still doesn't capture it. To appreciate the bad poetry of this libretto, you must see how it veers from the utterly pedestrian—
[Deep operatic voice] Well how do you feel?
[Less deep operatic voice] Well, pretty excited.—to the consciously "poetic." Not merely when the libretto uses actual poetry taken from Donne and Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, but when it give us lines like:
The hackneyed light of evening
Quarrels with the bulbs ...Who or what is being "hackneyed" here? Sellars does not make it clear in his libretto what—if anything—he wrote and what he "appropriated." But clearly he has a career as a curator of bad poetry. His "appropriations" sound fake-profound when not merely ridiculous (the way they might not sound in context). Even Donne's "Holy Sonnet," which is magnificent, is mangled.
I found myself sitting stunned in the well-dressed opening-night crowd. Rarely an operagoer myself (I prefer poetry and drama without orchestral distractions), I'd nonetheless always respected operagoers for what I presumed to be their sophisticated taste. What amazed me was the respectful, reverent, awed look on the faces of the crowd around me. I could glimpse them most clearly when the lights came up for intermission.
Virtually all of the other faces in the audience had this somber, awed, this-is-important-art-we-are-witnessing look. A look of suffering: "We are weighed down by the terrible profundity of it all. We're in the Metropolitan Opera, for God's sake. This thing must be profound!"
But then I recalled these lines from the "love scene" between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty:
... only my fingers in your hair, only, my eyes
splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love ...I'm sorry to have to say it, but there are an abundance of lyrics like this in the libretto, which made Doctor Atomic begin to seem like the Spinal Tap of opera. (And, yes, I get it: "Splitting the skull" is like splitting the atom! Stop cringing; it's literary! No, sorry: It's ludicrous.)
I have rarely felt so alone as I felt at that intermission. I felt like the kid in "The Emperor's New Clothes." Do words not matter in opera? It's not something I'd thought about, because opera is so often in a foreign language, which discourages close reading. But I began to wonder whether opera follows different rules: Because words are sung, do they transcend any bombastic triviality, any wounding awfulness? Do opera buffs believe words don't need to be well-chosen but are elevated to poetic heights merely by the sonorities, or snore-ities, that they are "sung" to? In Europe, they boo lustily at badly sung arias. What is one to do in America at offensively trivializing words?
In any case, the next evening as I was talking about my "Emperor's New Clothes" feeling, Julia Sheehan told me she'd recently reread the original Hans Christian Andersen fable and found an aspect of it that she (and I) had forgotten.
She'd always wondered, she said, why everyone in the fable went along with the gag and no one but the little boy spoke up and said the emperor was naked.
Well, I said, you know, conformity, peer pressure, fear of punishment, right?
Turns out there was another element: In the Andersen version, everyone was told ahead of time that the emperor's new costume was so radical and different that stupid people wouldn't even be able to see it. And nobody wanted to be considered stupid. Which reminded me of a feeling I often have at overhyped Broadway dramas about "important" subjects: The applause you hear at the end is the audience applauding itself. Just for being there at what they've been told is such an important artistic event. Stupid people wouldn't understand.
That had to be it! With the entire apparatus of cultural capital supporting the idea that it was important and profound and thus good to be there in the luxuriant rosy glow of the nation's premier opera house, their assumptions cushioned by the Met's velvet seats, how could one dissent? If you didn't think you were witnessing greatness, you marked yourself as mentally challenged.
What Have We Created?!: Obama's supporters have high expectations, and they may expect to have a voice in governing. (Howard Fineman, 11/03/08, NEWSWEEK)
Much of America may be gung-ho about putting more troops into Afghanistan, but it's not clear Obamaworld is; he could run into opposition if he seriously pursues it. On the other hand, initiating talks with Iranian and Venezuelan dictators enjoys more support on his e-mail lists than in the rest of the country. If the Democrats win bigger majorities in the House and Senate, they (if not Obama) may well be eager to exact vengeance on Republicans, or at least cram Democratic ideas down GOP throats. Obama supporters might prefer more reaching-out. As Marshall sees it, most of them want a "transpartisan" approach that jettisons the old labels. "These people feel a close, personal tie to Obama, just as conservatives did to Reagan," he says. "But if and when he starts governing, he is going to start disappointing them."At that point, the names on those voter and e-mail lists may start talking to each other, and may start saying things that Barack Obama—and White House aides hunched over their computers—don't want to hear. That's when we'll know how "trusting" an organization it really is.
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Fact check: Would Obama's tax rates be less than Reagan's ? (CNN, 10/24/08)
[Brian Deese, deputy economic policy director of the Obama campaign] said the campaign projects that under Obama a median-income family of four will pay an annual effective income tax rate of 4.32 percent. That number, Deese said, comes from the campaign's calculations based on projections in the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of the candidates' tax plans.According to Tax Policy Center historical data, a rate of 4.32 would be lower than during the Reagan years, when average rates for a median-income family of four ranged from 11.79 in 1981 to 9.30 in 1988. By comparison, rates during the Bush administration have ranged from 6.71 percent in 2001 to 5.91 last year. [...]
Deese also cites Obama's proposed capital gains rate of 20 percent for families earning over $250,000. That would be lower than the 28 percent capital gains rate Reagan signed into law in 1986. Currently the top capital gains rate for taxpayers in that income group is 15 percent, according to Williams of the Tax Policy Center. [...]
The Verdict: Misleading. While Obama says that his tax rates will be lower than under Reagan, according to his economic adviser he is referring to specific rates out of the many rates in the tax system. Also, it is not clear how many taxpayers would qualify for the lowest projected income tax rates.
Is Richard Dawkins still evolving? (Melanie Phillips, 23rd October 2008, The Spectator)
On Tuesday evening I attended the debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox at Oxford’s Natural History Museum. This was the second public encounter between the two men, but it turned out to be very different from the first. Lennox is the Oxford mathematics professor whose book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is to my mind an excoriating demolition of Dawkins’s overreach from biology into religion as expressed in his book The God Delusion -- all the more devastating because Lennox attacks him on the basis of science itself. In the first debate, which can be seen on video on this website, Dawkins was badly caught off-balance by Lennox’s argument precisely because, possibly for the first time, he was being challenged on his own chosen scientific ground.This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said:
A serious case could be made for a deistic God.
This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that
...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could.
Anthony Flew, the celebrated philosopher and former high priest of atheism, spectacularly changed his mind and concluded -- as set out in his book There Is A God -- that life had indeed been created by a governing and purposeful intelligence, a change of mind that occurred because he followed where the scientific evidence led him. The conversion of Flew, whose book contains a cutting critique of Dawkins’s thinking, has been dismissed with unbridled scorn by Dawkins – who now says there is a serious case for the position that Flew now adopts!
To Know Her Is To Respect Her: The great Palin divide. (Fred Barnes, 11/03/2008, Weekly Standard)
Lorne Michaels is the longtime executive producer of Saturday Night Live. Sarah Palin appeared on SNL in mid-October, after which Michaels noted, "Her politics aren't my politics." But that wasn't all he said. "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated," Michaels told EW.com. "I watched the way she connected with people, and you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."Randy Ruedrich, the Republican chairman in Alaska, is someone you might suspect would be a friend and ally of Palin. He isn't. She helped drive him off the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, criticized him publicly, and later tried to get him ousted as party chairman. Ruedrich is part of the "body count" of male politicians Palin left behind as she rose to become governor of Alaska. Yet Ruedrich says Palin is smart, very capable, and a political star.
Ruedrich isn't alone among Alaska politicians who take a cold-blooded view of Palin. Another Republican who has followed her career closely believes Palin has a ruthless streak. Yet this person, too, regards Palin as a rare talent with the skill and self-confidence to be a national political leader. And Palin's Alaska acquaintances were certain, from the moment she became John McCain's vice presidential running mate, that her acceptance speech would be a smashing success and she'd have little trouble in her debate with Joe Biden. Turned out they were right.
NAFTA wisdom: Mexico has offered the U.S. an opportunity to hold it to its word on labor, trade and immigration. (Houston Chronicle, Oct. 23, 2008)
The nation's 44th president will be welcomed to the Oval Office by a willing and able partner in Mexico. But that country's leadership will also greet the new commander in chief with a blunt message on trade and, by inference, immigration: Don't mess with NAFTA.The Mexicans deserve a careful hearing on this; NAFTA merits a less cavalier and more focused approach than generally shown on the presidential campaign trail. Despite the sniping of critics on both the left and right, NAFTA has brought proven benefits across North America.
Renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement on short notice would throw a "monkey wrench" into North America's economic works, Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to Washington, told the Chronicle editorial board on a Houston visit Tuesday. Sarukhan also expressed skepticism that immigration would be solved in the first 100 days of a new U.S. administration but voiced hope that a grand bargain could be retooled as soon as the second year. He called on the two countries to "play chess rather than checkers" and to think strategically on trade and immigration.
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McCain, Obama agree on immigration (Dave Montgomery, 10/23/08, MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS)
Earlier this month, the Pew Center estimated the undocumented population at 11.9 million. From 2000 to 2004, approximately 800,000 illegal immigrants a year crossed the U.S.-Mexican border in search of work, but over the past three years, the average has fallen to 500,000 a year, Pew reported.McCain and Obama appear to be in basic agreement on the most controversial aspect of immigration. Both advocate a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, with conditions. Those who qualify, however, would have to go to the "back of the line" behind other applicants for legal residency.
Obama would require undocumented immigrants to pay a fine and learn English. McCain would impose those requirements too, and he thinks that illegal immigrants should pay back taxes and pass a citizenship course.
Until the onset of the 2008 presidential race, McCain won accolades among pro-immigrant groups for the McCain-Kennedy bill and his support of Bush's initiatives. But some pro-immigration leaders are taking a second look after McCain, as a candidate, retooled his immigration strategy to insist on securing the U.S. borders before moving forward with legalization and other aspects of immigration reform.
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McCain's Private Visit With Chilean Dictator Pinochet Revealed For First Time (John Dinges, 10/24/08, Huffington Post)
John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that. In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere.
According to a declassified U.S. Embassy cable secured by The Huffington Post, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism."
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Questions for Christopher Buckley: The Right Stuff (Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON, October 23, 2008, NY Times)
What would your father, who died at his desk, in Stamford, Conn., in February, have made of all this?It’s very tricky to try to channel one’s dad’s ghost. Look what happened to Hamlet. But I think he would have been appalled by the Palin nomination, frankly. I don’t think he would have viewed her as presidential material.
A Turn in the Housing Market? (Dennis Byrne, 10/24/08, Real Clear Politics)
Is it possible that the housing market has turned?Blamed for just about everything bad that has happened recently to the economy, housing sales, I dare say, are showing signs of picking up. At the risk of being considered a lunatic, I say this for reasons of systematically gathered data, personal experience and common sense.
First the data, which hasn't and won't get as much attention they deserve, considering the fact that everyone has been blaming the dismal housing market for as far back as recent memory can take us. The good news is that the National Association of Realtors said sales of existing-home sales--including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops--for September jumped 5.5 percent higher over the previous month. They are1.4 percent higher than September 2007. That's the first time that sales have risen compared to a year earlier since November 2005.
Could this be a turnaround? Let's look at another NAR measure: its "pending sales of existing homes" index most forward-looking barometer of residential sales because it records a sale when a contract is signed, rather than at closing, which can be months later. In August, the latest month available, it rose 7.4 percent over July. More significantly, that's 8.8 percent higher over August 2007. These are the kinds of numbers that should be on the front page over every newspaper in the country--but they weren't.
Point of No Return: Will we vote for the same soothing siren song as our enervated allies? (Mark Steyn, 10/25/08, National Review)
“People of the world,” declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people — the Barack Obamas of the day — were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.
To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – ie, the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex — voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?
The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present”, you can stand down.
Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from “community organizer” to the world’s President-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.
Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the “Now what?” questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance.
U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has been working from his sick bed with lobbyists and lawmakers to craft a bipartisan healthcare package, aides saidKennedy's goal is to introduce a universal healthcare bill as soon as the new Congress convenes next year and push for a quick passage, The Washington Times reported Friday. [...]
"Senator Kennedy has spent the last several weeks laying the groundwork for reform so that we can be ready to go in 2009," Coley told the Times. "This is and has been the cause of Senator Kennedy's life."
Among lawmakers receptive to a bipartisan plan and who have been involved in initial talks is Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., the ranking Republican on the Senate Health Committee chaired by Kennedy.
The meetings offer "testament to how people feel about" Kennedy, Enzi spokesman Michael Mahaffey said.
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Interview with Sarah Palin: Immigration, latino vote, Irak, Obama... (Jorge Ramos, 22 de Octubre de 2008, Univision Online)
AmnestyDo you think they all should be deported?
There is no way that in the US we would roundup every illegal immigrant -there are about 12 million of the illegal immigrants- not only economically is that just an impossibility but that's not a humane way anyway to deal with the issue that we face with illegal immigration.
Do you then favor an amnesty for the 12 or 13 million undocumented immigrants?
No, I do not. I do not. Not total amnesty. You know, people have got to follow the rules. They've got to follow the bar, and we have got to make sure that there is equal opportunity and those who are here legally should be first in line for services being provided and those opportunities that this great country provides.
To clarify, so you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?
I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here. It is so important that yes, people follow the rules so that people can be treated equally and fairly in this country.
Palin allies report rising campaign tension (Ben Smith, October 25, 2008, Politico)
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline."She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said. [...]
Palin's "instincts," on display in recent days, have had her opening up to the media, including a round of interviews on talk radio, cable, and broadcast outlets, and chats with her traveling press and local reporters.
Reporters really began to notice the change last Sunday, when Palin strolled over to a local television crew in Colorado Springs.
"Get Tracey," a staffer called out, according to the New York Times, summoning spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt, who reportedly "tried several times to cut it off with a terse 'Thank you!' in between questions, to no avail." The moment may have caused ulcers in some precincts of the McCain campaign, but it was an account Palin's admirers in Washington D.C. cheered.
Palin had also sought to give meatier policy speeches, in particular on energy policy and on policy for children with disabilities; she finally gave the latter speech Friday, but had wanted to deliver it much earlier.
She's also begun to make her own ad hoc calls about the campaign's direction and the ticket's policy. McCain, for instance, has remained silent on Democrats' calls for a stimulus package of new spending, a move many conservatives oppose, but which could be broadly popular. But in an interview with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck earlier this week, Palin went "off the reservation" to make the campaign policy, one aide said.
"I say, you know, when is enough enough of taxpayer dollars being thrown into this bill out there?" she asked. "This next one of the Democrats being proposed should be very, very concerning to all Americans because to me it sends a message that $700 billion bailout, maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg. No, you know, we were told when we've got to be believing if we have enough elected officials who are going to be standing strong on fiscal conservative principles and free enterprise and we have to believe that there are enough of those elected officials to say, no, okay, that's enough."
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"High School Musical 3": Stop rolling your eyes -- the latest fluffy movie in Disney's powerhouse franchise is a total kick. (Stephanie Zacharek, 10/24/08, Salon)
[T]his is a movie that offers simple, buouyant pleasures. The director is Kenny Ortega, a longtime choreographer ("Dirty Dancing" is among his credits) and the director of the unjustly maligned 1992 Disney musical "Newsies," an enjoyable little picture that never had a chance. (The fact that a corporate entity like Disney would even make a pro-labor musical is interesting by itself.) The songs in "HSM 3" may not be particularly memorable, but I wouldn't say they're any worse than the faux-rock toodling of "Rent." And in staging the splashy, effervescent musical numbers, Ortega borrows, joyfully, from a wealth of references, taking bits and pieces from Busby Berkeley and from Bob Fosse, from "West Side Story" and from "Saturday Night Fever."In fact, the overall vibe of "HSM 3" isn't so far off from the "Let's put on a show!" boisterousness of the old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musicals. Since when shouldn't it be fun to spend 90 minutes or so watching good-looking young people, singing and dancing relatively well? I had fun at "High School Musical 3" partly because I got such a kick out of the audience, which consisted largely of preteen girls. Most of my friends who are parents lament that their kids are growing up too fast, that they're no longer allowed to have a childhood, and in general, I can see that it's true: There's no shortage of 11-year-old girls out there who've already donned the uniform of low-rise jeans and belly-baring tops. But in one scene, when Efron peeled off his shirt to reveal a perfect V-shaped torso (we get only the back view -- no nipples!), a number of little girls scattered through the audience giggled with embarrassment. In their innocence -- there was nothing knowing or salacious about their laughter -- they were just so, well, cute. No matter how allegedly sophisticated our preteeners may be, if they can still giggle at the sight of a boy's naked back, perhaps all is not lost.
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