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Posted by birdman I just read the book on which Ragtime is based (novel of the same name by E. L. Doctorow), and actually at one point he (she?) mentions the Leo Frank case. I forget where exactly, but it's close to the end when he fills gaps in time with little snippets from history. I think it's somewhere around the part where he talks about Younger Brother going down to join the Zapata revolution, and he says something like "And in Atlanta, a Yankee Jew named Leo Frank was defending himself against the murder of little Mary Phagan." Wish I could be more specific, but I got the book from the library, so I don't have it on hand. And actually, I can see parallels between Cabaret and Parade as well, and not just because both deal with Jewish people. I think both show the mindless mob mentality in their own way. In Parade, just about everyone but Dorsey and Watson are made out to be victims in some way (according to Al Uhry's interview in Show Music magazine, this was intentional), and we see how people get swept up in the emotion of Mary Phagan's murder. In Cabaret, we have night club dancers who go through life without a care, thinking politics don't matter and don't affect them. But as the show goes on, it's made obvious that the politics of the time (as the Nazis were coming to power in Germany) really *did* matter. Of course, it helps that we know the outcome of Nazi Germany. Many people have never heard the Leo Frank story, unfortunately (but everyone should!). Both Parade and Cabaret show us how people can sort of glide through life, so caught up in emotion (whether anger or pleasure) not realizing what's going on around them. -birdman
on January 7, 2003, 21:46:05, in reply to "Re: tarot "
66.219.138.131
: Yikes! That is eerie..We are in
: "Ragttime" now with many
: of the people we
: did"Parade" with. Lotsa
: similarities outside of the era
: itself:Race and religious bigotry,
: death of innocents,etc.
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God bless the sight of the old hills of Georgia...