Don’t you dare go inside the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts! It’s much too dangerous. They have had murders there for 39 straight years—every night, and some matinees too. And they still haven’t caught the culprit. Nightly murders, with groups of middle schoolers sitting there, applauding. Murders in a hair salon, of all places! Sheer madness.
It is not just the murder capital of Washington. Revolutions happen there, frequently. They built a barricade on one of the stages and tried to take down the whole French government. And they sang the whole time. This is the kind of thing that the Kennedy Center harbors and abets. They shot Alexander Hamilton there, not just once, but nightly, to make sure he was really dead. People went Into the Woods and got trampled by a giant. A rat king danced there. Valkyries rode there. Fairies forced people to fall in love, then out of love. It all happened in this building. The falling ceiling is the least of anyone’s concerns. Everything else about this place is far more threatening.
And it’s not just murders and revolutions and dancing rodents. Horrifying transformations happened. They tested out new technologies there, called “plays.” (They even tested a couple of mine.) People got handed sheets of paper to read from and stood behind music stands and became other people. A very dangerous device, the play, and the Kennedy Center encouraged it.
The most diabolical thing was that you did not always need to pay for these things. They just gave them away, free, every afternoon, for decades, to anyone who wanted to come in and watch. They gave them away online too! And nobody prevented this!
This place encouraged other, equally frightening things. Dance, music. These performers didn’t even speak with words, just moved their bodies around and blew wind through metal tubes and reeds and scratched at strings—and people left the room in tears. What was the music saying? What were the bodies saying? The audience seemed to understand, but there were no words to help them.
If people can communicate like this, then how can speech be properly controlled? If people can understand one another just by scratching a bow across taut strings—perhaps this is a form of witchcraft. No place that tolerates it must be permitted to stand.
A blue figure stood guard outside. Dancing? Kicking? There was ambiguity, and that was scary.
Sometimes people recorded podcasts there. Sometimes they watched movies on the lawn outside. Sometimes they played the tuba. They gathered together and experienced things together, and that, we can agree, was dangerous.
There was comedy and drama and voices you only dreamed of hearing in person. There were discussions and readings. People learned things of which they had been previously unaware. There were chimes and fountains and overpriced intermission snacks.
They dared to invite children into this place too. They dared to sit them down and tell them stories, on a stage. Do you know what a story can do to a mind? Do you know how long that story can linger before exploding into life, decades later?
The Kennedy Center is the deadliest condemned building in America.
For 55 years, people have been going in and coming out changed. Not physically, not visibly, but inside, carrying dangerous stories with them. Carrying music that could sustain them through times of trial, or the encouragement of shared laughter, or the seditious sense that they were not alone. Root it out! Stamp it out! Knock it down with a wrecking ball! This building is much too dangerous.
