30 Days of NYMF Day 20: White Noise

White Noise
 by Joe Drymala, author/composer of White Noise 

When April publicly attacked us, I knew we'd won.

April Gaede, notorious white supremacist, and mother of Lamb and Lynx Gaede, the teenage twins who inspired White Noise, finally went on the radio and blasted our show last week.  It was possibly the most satisfying moment of my career as a writer so far.

When Ryan and I started working on White Noise, we knew there would be some misinterpretation.  We were working on a show about hateful people, and we wanted to make them as scary as possible, so we naturally tried to make them as appealing as possible.  Most of our early audiences understood our goals, but a vocal minority thought we were dangerous.  One woman went so far as to tell us, in a room full of people, that it would be best if White Noise fell apart and was seen by no one at all.

Even worse than our fellow liberals misconstruing our goals was the possibility of actual white supremacists embracing our show, just as a would-be presidential murderer might conceivably embrace "Everybody's Got The Right" from Sondheim's Assassins.  The last thing I want is for a song I've written to be featured at a David Duke rally.

So when the hate mail started to come from the white power folks, we began to sleep a little better.  People get it, we thought.  Even the bad guys get it.  One nasty fellow talked about how he saw our pictures and his "Jewdar" went off.  Another charmer sent us an email that was as offensive as it was grammatically indecipherable; I'm grateful to the author for so thoroughly reinforcing my stereotypes about racist wackos.  We were concerned about April Gaede, though; she seems to never miss an opportunity to get media exposure, and we were receiving reports that she was quietly excited about a stage production inspired by her daughters, even if the picture we painted was hardly a flattering one.

Things finally came to a head last week when April went on a California talk radio show and condemned us in front of God and everybody.  We were part of a larger rant she had prepared about the "inaccurate" portrayal of her daughters and their beliefs in the media recently.  It was beautiful.  

Ryan and I are political animals, and we love a good fight.  The battle lines we'd been itching for were finally drawn last week: White Noise versus the racists.  And in no small way, we've already come out on top.  Because no matter what happens, we'll always be the kids who baited a bunch of Nazis into complaining about a musical.  It was a situation that couldn't have been better scripted by Mel Brooks himself.

Visit www.nymf.org for tickets and more information.