#christopher moses

[dorothy16]

alliancetheatre It's been just over a month since we were on the red carpet for the Broadway opening of Maybe Happy Ending and we could not be prouder of the show The New York Times says is "fully imagined, sensitively expanded, and brilliantly executed." Here's a look back at that exciting night featuring Darren Criss, Helen J. Shen, Michael Arden, Neil Patrick Harris, Hue Park, Will Aronson, and our own Alliance celebs. 

[chanstopher]

🐺🫧230831

[vallygirl285]

[sherbertilluminated]

so this is what they mean when they say Empfindlichkeit had its own idiom for the expression of homosocial admiration

[gameofthunder66]

NCIS: Hawai'i (2021-2024) tv series

-(finished) watchin' Series (3 Seasons)- 5/7/2024- 3 [1/4] stars- on Paramount+ (CBS)

[womeninfictionandirl]

Reva Sevander by Christopher Taylor

[dunebat]

Dunebat's Top 10 Favorite Movies

"Dunebat's Top 10 Favorite Movies"

It’s no great secret that I’m a film junkie with a bent toward science fiction. Growing up as a poor, lonely kid in the ghost town that was 1990s West Texas, movies were sometimes the only friends I had on the weekends. They were the storytellers who spun two-hour yarns that snatched me out of the real world like faerie kidnappers come to transport me to some faraway fantasy realm of danger and…

[standupcomedyhistorian]

One of the good things about having an IG account again is that I can finally see all of the awesome behind-the-scenes shots for specials.

Case in point: the astonishingly talented Marc Janowitz—one of the best lighting directors in the business—just posted pics from Wanda Sykes' Emmy-nominated special, I'm An Entertainer.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Marc Janowitz (@marc_janowitz)

If you aren't a hardcore comedy nerd like me and don't recognize Janowitz's name, you should be able to recall some of the comedy specials he's worked on in the past:

Make Happy (Bo Burnham)

Homecoming King (Hasan Minhaj, directed by The Bear's Chris Storer)

Flight of the Conchords: Live in London

Rothaniel (Jerrod Carmichael, directed by Bo)

8 (Jerrod Carmichael, directed by Bo)

Tamborine (Chris Rock, directed by Bo)

Trash White (Moses Storm)

Don Wong (Ali Wong, also Emmy-nominated for Beef!)

Feelings (Ramy Youssef, directed by The Bear's Chris Storer)

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Ex-Moonie recounts his life as a follower of the Rev. Moon

Chicago Tribune March 1979

By Michael Hirsley

One week, he was a Yale University graduate with a bachelor of arts degree in psychology and philosophy, considering graduate school and beginning summer vacation in Berkeley, Calif.

The next week, he was on a farm with his new friends, jumping and pumping his arms up and down while chanting, “Choo-choo-choo-choo,” like a “choo-choo” train in a sort of rural Romper Room gone wrong.

After four weeks, he called his parents to assure them he was doing well. Within six months, his new California friends had become his only family.

He turned over to them his earnings from selling flowers, then from washing dishes, while settling for peanut butter sandwiches as nourishment, and four hours for sleep. Once, he sneaked away and bought himself a glass of milk and a cookie. After he finished them, his shame was instant. He threw up.

Why would a 22-year-old man with a college education begin acting like a child, pliantly follow orders and work for next to nothing, and be unable to eat a cookie in solitude without feeling like a traitor?

He met them that first week in Berkeley. A man who had been kind enough to direct him to a hotel invited him to dinner. There, he met the group.

“They didn't say anything about being a religious group. They were friendly and paid incredible attention to everything I told them about myself,” Edwards says. ‘‘I liked the atmosphere better than social hours in college.”

But still, it is disquieting to imagine that someone like Christopher Edwards — who still fits the Ivy League image in a vested suit, and still looks like a college student as he sips a cup of coffee in a Chicago hotel room — “gave” his soul temporarily to a cult.

His credentials are non-radical, middle-of-the-road: Son of a doctor, member of an upper middle class family, spent summers traveling in this country and in Europe... Was he really the typical college graduate he seemed to be when he became a Moonie?

“What’s typical?” he asks. “One of the last memories I have of college is sitting with a friend and watching (on television) the last troops leave Vietnam. I was somewhat disillusioned with the war and our society.”

He said his peers in the Moonies included many white, middle-class, college-educated men and women in their early 20s.

“There are people who are more susceptible to a religious group like this, people coming out of college, a little disillusioned, looking for a loving community,” he says. “But I really fight the notion that something has to be wrong with you to get involved in a group like this. I think only an extremely selfish, narrow-minded person would not be susceptible.”

He accepted the group’s invitation to go to the farm in California for the weekend. Once there, he ignored guards at the front gate, the silly “choo-choo” game and the fact that “someone followed me everywhere I went, even to the bathroom.”

Edwards admits he found those things “silly and embarrassing, and very odd, but they seemed harmless. I thought theirs was a simplicity that could be trusted.”

And, he concedes, that as a psychology student, “part of my motivation for staying was pure curiosity. Their tactics attracted me.”

His early days with the group consisted of repetitive exercises and lectures in which “you were praised for following directions and accepting repetitive boring speeches without questioning them,” he says. “I felt confident that I couldn’t be manipulated, but I was.”

Those childish games and dogmatic speeches were exercises to break down resistance to brainwashing, he says. “I was put in a hypnotic state,” he says. “I was in a trance.”

For nearly four months, his parents — Dr. Charles Edwards. a surgeon, and his wife, Betty, of Montclair, N. J. — were blissfully unaware of what was happening to their son. It wasn’t unusual to hear little from him when he was traveling on his vacation.

Even a letter, in which he described to them his work with a Creative Community Project in Oakland, caused them no anxiety until they saw the project name again in a newspaper article.

“It was about a meeting for parents who had lost their children to cults. It indicated that Christopher’s project was part of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, the Moonies,” Dr. Edwards said in a phone conversation from his New Jersey office. “We were shocked.”

The Edwards attended the meeting, and were shocked anew. “It was supposed to be a one-hour meeting, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.,” Dr. Edwards recalled. “It lasted until 8 p.m. There were over 500 parents there.” Unification Church membership is estimated at 80,000.  [There were never more than about 10,000 core members in the US and many of those were imported from Japan and Europe. If everyone who ever had any connection with the UC was counted the number of 30,000 might have been reached decades ago.]

After the meeting, the Edwards’ contacted Ted Patrick, the controversial “deprogrammer” who assists parents in kidnapping their children from the Moonies.

“Patrick had a three-and-a-half month waiting list,” Dr. Edwards said. While he waited for Patrick’s call, he read everything he could about the Moonies.

In January of 1976, Dr. Edwards met with Patrick to plot Christopher’s kidnaping.

The doctor closed his practice for three weeks. He flew to California, found his son after considerable searching, and said he just wanted to be sure Christopher was all right.

“I met him in a coffee shop were he worked,” Dr. Edwards said. “I saw all these kids there walking around with passive looks and mechanical movements. I thought they were in a trance, and I have had some training in hypnosis.

“I didn't say anything against the cult, and I was invited to lunch the next day. I watched recruiting techniques used on me. They looked me in the eye and spoke lovingly, flatteringly, and made me feel important.

The next day, Patrick and assistants helped Dr. Edwards pull his son out of a car and away from a fellow group member.

Dr. Edwards said the weeks of deprogramming that followed — including plane fares for five deprogrammers and assistants and a detective after the family received threatening phone calls and suffered two break-ins at their home — cost “tens of thousands of dollars.”

Christopher Edwards now lectures on cults, and has written a book about his experiences, entitled, “Crazy for God.”

“Its just coincidental that my book is coming out just when Guyana and Jonestown are making us worry about cults,” Edwards says.

“The People’s Temple suicides in Jonestown and thereafter; and an “informal” congressional hearing on cult worship last month; are heightening public anxiety about cults.

Edwards’ book provides fuel for such concern, citing mechanical movements, glassy eyes, and loss of intelligence and initiative as changes which cult members undergo hypnosis.

In one small section, where Edwards expresses hope that “a psychological test will one day emerge to verify these changes,” the book provides a scary glimpse at the potential for “psycho-war” between cults and deprogrammers.

“I fought against the deprogrammers for quite a while, and I told them I would die for my cult friends and leaders,” Edwards says “That still worries me a great deal.”

__________________________________

Crazy for God: The nightmare of cult life by Christopher Edwards

The Social Organization of Recruitment in the Unification Church PDF  
 by David Frank Taylor, M.A., July 1978, Sociology

Moonwebs by Josh Freed (the book was made into a movie)

__________________________________

Unification Church’s deceptive recruiting tactics - Part 1

4:00 Ford Greene “At the outset there is never a disclosure: 1) We are the Unification Church
 2) We believe that Rev. Moon is the second coming of Christ
 3) We believe that you are dominated by Satan 
4) The way for you to become free from Satan is by being unconditionally obedient to Moon because he is the only human being who has ever conquered and defeated Satan.”

1:30 Allen Tate Wood
“…The purpose of getting there is to get them off to a training center, run them through a training regimen of 7, 21 or 40 days. When that is complete that person is going to be on a bus for the next seven years, working 16 hours a day. They are not up front about that.”

Unification Church’s deceptive recruiting tactics - Part 2 5:00 Ford Greene:
 “The pitch that is always made is a pitch to conscience, is a pitch to a person’s highest, most moral inner yearnings and the ultimate result is enslavement.”

__________________________________

Ford Greene on Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church

Allen Tate Wood (was also interviewed by News Center 4) LINK to a webpage of interviews with Allen Tate Wood

[badmovieihave]

Bad movie I have Renfield 2023

[fictionalreads]

Found Season 2 Episode 2

Lacey

Poor young Lacey.

Please be smart about this. If you run immediately you’ll most likely get caught and never get another chance.

SMART GIRL

NOOO NOT HER HEAD

Gabby

Now one thing I know about Sir is that he hates dirty things. Why would you think he’d put something in the trash can?

Of course he’s watching you.

Don’t come for Margaret.

Oh no. She went to talk to her before realizing she’s not there.

Trent is gonna be mad for a while.

Who the fuck is that?

SIRS BROTHER

Sir

What the hell happened to him? Do we know and my brain just ain’t braining?

He’s spiraling.

Oh shit he’s there.

He got the fuck on didn’t he?

Damn he really hate his brother.

Fuck him being there clues him in that they knew where he is.

Margaret

Why can’t you focus? Too mad?

PEOPLE Why are y’all not giving your attention to the missing baby?

YOU TELL ‘EM MARGARET

Guess your sense thing works just fine with Gabi.

Oh it’s back.

Zeke

Something is wrong. Why won’t you admit that?

Why don’t you

Baby Reign

See this why people don’t go to the doctor. They don’t listen. But some of them aren’t at fault, they’re just overworked.

Oh shit her body was attacking the baby. That can’t feel good to know.

What the hell? I’ll m so confused. Maybe the sister had something to do with it? Cause it has to be somebody on the inside.

NO BABY GIRL DO NOT DO THAT

Miscellaneous

Oh no. Not a newborn. That’s too sad.

LMAO Zeke she with the shits she wants you to get the footage.

Shaker saying “that’s my cue” was great timing

I love Dhan.

[3nn-express]

Eddie Izzard describes how her fear helped her become a pilot.

Eddie Izzard told Donal Skehan on Saturday Kitchen that she overcame her phobia of flying by learning to be a pilot.

Face many fears

Eddie Izzard’s admission that she is a licensed pilot startled Saturday Kitchen anchor Donal Skehan. The announcement of Izzard’s talent outside of acting and humor left the cook and presenter perplexed. Izzard revealed that after overcoming the intense dread of coming out as transgender several years ago, she has learned to face many fears. Flying was one of those things.

Article Source Link

[jewishbarbies]

good news though! The actor who plays Superman in the new Superman movie is a Jewish man! David Corenswet is his name, he’s Juilliard trained, and a Jewish man from Philly.

I don’t know if you’re a comic fan like me but a lot of Superman’s mythology is drawn from Jewish faith and beliefs. The character isn't supposed to be Jewish but he's definitely heavily inspired by the creators faith. The characters he was inspired by at his creation were John Carter of Mars, Samson and Moses according to his creators two of which are prominent characters in Jewish faith.

Additionally his original heroic role as a defendant of the oppressed during the 1930s considering what Jewish people were going through was very deliberate. Especially when his role was inspired by the Golem from Jewish faith which is usually a being created from Clay made to protect the innocent, marginalized and oppressed within a society, particularly the Jewish people within those communities. Which is literally what Clark initially did, before settling on his alien origin he was even supposed to be an actual Golem made from newspaper.

Even his name and disguise are Jewish coded with his Kryptonian name Kal-El being Hebrew in origin and his disguise as Clark of slicked back hair hidden in a cap being something that Jewish men often did to hide their curly hair and avoid prosecution.

So while Superman as a character is definitely not Jewish a noticeable amount of his Mythos are inspired by Jewish faith due to his creators being Jewish.

So I think it’s pretty cool that Superman is being played by a Jewish man. Kinda comes full circle, don’t you think?

yesss I’ve been making people angry being happy about it on twitter. i don’t think there’ll be much judaism in the movie but it does look like we’re getting a Real superman and not another grimdark dudebro fantasy, so that’s really good. also heard Christopher Reeve’s son is gonna make an appearance in some way and that makes me happy.

[ed-recoverry]

Daily reminder that…

Samuel L. Jackson didn’t start acting until age 40.

Jane Lynch didn’t have big roles until her 40s. She was 45 when Glee started.

Leslie Jones didn’t join SNL until she was 47.

Melissa McCarthy did gain popularity until she was 41.

Christoph Waltz didn’t find a breakout role until age 52.

Patrick Stewart wasn’t popular until age 47.

Estelle Getty Was (Golden Girls) didn’t have a breakout role until she was 62.

Morgan Freeman didn’t find same until age 50.

Kathy Bates didn’t break through until she was 42.

Betty White didn’t find popularity until age 51.

Colonel Harland Sanders didn’t establish KFC until age 65.

Julia Child was unrecognized until her show debuted in her 50s.

Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was 78.

Kathryn Joosten didn’t start acting until she was 42.

Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish her first book until she was 65.

Bob Ross didnt premier in The Joy of Painting until he was 41.

It’s never too late to start working for your dreams. It doesn’t need to happen right away. Life is so long. You have time.

This is dedicated to my classmate in many of my college classes who was in her seventies and isn’t in my classes this year, meaning she probably graduated <3

[sherbertilluminated]

Semianonymous publication in the 18th century is fantastic.

According to Altmann, Mendelssohn writes a criticism of W from Zürich, only to learn that the author was not Wieland, as he had supposed, but someone named Jakob Wegelin. Who had read Mendelssohn's critique and thought it was by his friend Lessing: "only a Lessing could poke fun at so serious a theme" (142)!

[gameofthunder66]

'Modern Persuasion' (2020) film

-watched 6/3/2023- 1 [3/4] stars- on Hulu

53% Rotten Tomatoes