Angels in America by Tony Kushner, ABC-TV, directed by Mike Nichols

Clockwork me, my brothers and sisters, I done viddy what I viddied. And if it wasn't the whole of it, it was because your humble narrator, full of rocks and flimflams as so she is, boots minus and creeching plus, punched the viddy button and cried out, no no no, no more!

Them viddy droogs lay down Angels in America in all its gorgeousness and give it a right kicking, my loves. They give it the old in out and fisted it until it was dead dead dead. And why, my brothers and sisters? Why did they do it so? Why stre-e-e-tch it out on the old rack? Why sweeten it up with vomit music that would bore an elevator to the doldrums? Where were the old hair-on-ends? Where was the sharp jokings? Even my lovely droog Al Pacino, that beautiful tough old melchek, he was acting his plotts off my sisters, but even he couldn't save it. They turned my lovely into a nice piece of viddy because they thinks we're all a bunch of loopy housewives who needs those beautiful bright pills to waft us off to bye-bye land. They make it nice as nice, they stick in pretty vids to distract us, they make all fusses to weigh it down because they think it needs to be as real as real. But my lovelies it isn't real, it's only true.

But think in your teeny tiny minds. The Angels are an angry play, my brother and sisters. They is full of death and millennial madness, they is grand as Ludwig van. They was rotting of AIDS in Ronnie Reagan's Amerika back then in 1985. I thinks in my teeny tiny mind, how horrorshock to see this now, just as Reagan's biting the green turf all stiff and lovely after ninety three years of forgetting and all the slimy news wiggles on and on about his grandness. How to be reminded, my brothers and sisters, of those fiery lizards he bred for our delectations. O how they rain down on us now. But this is sex with a raincoat on, my lovelies, safe as safe.

It did make me think of that melchek Adorno, though, that snobby old modernist. How he planted it in the gulliver, my friends. He viddied the lot of it, I tell you now, he would have hated it all and even your humble narrator. But sometimes he got it right. He would have smecked out loud to see how right he got it, how they take a lovely angry thing like the Angels and shovel it through the sausage machine so it comes out all minced and antibiotic. Here he is: Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Prudish it was, my lovelies, and porno. No my brothers and sisters, I won't viddy the rest of it. I have the book of the play, I'll viddy it there, in all its lewd grandosity and yumyumyum. And there I'll stay.