It was billed as “a marathon reading of the Watergate tapes.” For 33 hours they tied off at the elbow, mainlining through worm-fat engorged veins. They snorted it, smoked it, shot it up; they ate it baked in cookies. New York City’s chic and near-chic nodding, nodding, their pupils fuzzy as felt buttons. Watergate is the opiate of the elitists. Nixon can handle it better. Comes an impeachment trial, preempting Sesame Street from Amagansett to Oahu, and America’s liberal establishment may OD en masse, dead in the john like Lenny Bruce.
It had the geography of a medieval street market. Booths for food and games: hit Mitchell with a dart; find the gap in Rose Mary Woods’s tape. And a stage for the big morality play, everyman and everywoman getting his/her chance tobeDorHorEor the capital P. A church hosted it, what did you expect? St. Clements is the show-biz arm of New York Episcopal Diocese, where on occasion toilets have joined paten and chalice as instruments of the Eucharist, where God works for an Equity minimum. All Watergate Bizarre lacked was attendance. Posters on every light stanchion from 34th Street to 96th Street and still there were only 11 in the audience at prime time, ten o’clock Wednesday. The young ladies who served cheese and darts came down from a swanky casting call. They were on the make; couldn’t’ve cared less for H or E. They stuffed name plus two telephone numbers (home and service) in the vest pockets of actors, directors, producers. Even I got one.
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