Boston sensibilities

I'm looking forward to attending the musical version of "The Color Purple" this weekend. It is a marvelous and important story by Alice Walker about racism, sexism, and poverty in the early 1900's, as well as a wonderful story about personal self-worth and support.  This show is as clean and wholesome as anything you might imagine.

So it is not to take anything at all away from that when I report, tongue in cheek, about this notice that came to ticket-holders from the ticket agency:

Regarding your tickets to "The Color Purple", we have just learned that there is a brief moment of nudity in the show, which is included in the original script.

Here is what we have been told audiences can expect:

Toward the end of Act One, an adult female rises from a bathtub, her naked backside to the audience. She then turns very quickly toward the audience as she is wrapped in a towel. They extreme sides of the theater may catch a brief glimpse of her breasts. She will be wearing a skin colored patch over her lower front so there is no chance of full frontal nudity.

OMG.  When was the last time you heard concerns about showing the skin of intimate parts of the human body anywhere in American life?  Such images appear on television, in ads, and in movies everywhere.  We will probably see more provocative things in store windows on the way to the theater than we will in the theater!

Newbury Street

I guess the ticket agency is guided by its view of Boston sensibilities.  While I think their concern is a bit silly, at least we no longer have to  worry about the "Banned in Boston" movement, which--according to Wikipedia--prohibited such immoral performances and publications as the following:

• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (suppressed, 1881)
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1894)
• Three Weeks by Elinor Glyn (1909)
• Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson (1923)
• Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley (1923)
• The American Mercury (magazine, 1926)
• Desire Under the Elms' by Eugene O'Neill (play, 1926)
• Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (1927)
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1927)
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1927)
• Oil! by Upton Sinclair (1927)
• Black April by Julia Peterkin (1927)
• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos (1927)
• Mosquitoes by William Faulkner (1927)
• Nigger Heaven by Carl Van Vechten (1927)
• The World of William Clissold by H.G. Wells (1927)
• Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson (1927)
• Strange Interlude by Eugene O'Neill (play, 1929)
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1929)
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (magazine serial 1929)
• Jews Without Money by Michael Gold (1930)
• God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell (1933)
• Within the Gates by Seán O'Casey (play, 1935)
• The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman (play, 1935)
• Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets (play, 1935)
• Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith 1944
• Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor (1944)
• "The Moon is Blue" (1953)
• "Wake Up Little Susie" by The Everly Brothers (song, 1957)
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (1965)