JonGorey.com

So, this past year, as our nation has slipped into something frightening and unrecognizable (but also utterly recognizable, in all the worst ways) — with masked agents of the state kidnapping children and PhD students , aggressively raiding family apartment buildings with military choppers in the middle of the night , hunting people of color based solely on skin color and racial profiling , and even executing US citizens in broad daylight and then lying about it (!) despite plainly available evidence — I was gripped by a passion and fury beyond my control.  And so I did the only sensible thing I could do with that amount of energy, which was to write a whole-ass musical.  It's called ' Robyn and the Merrymen ,' and it's a feminist riff on Robin Hood set in mid-90s London.  Robyn, a woman in this telling, is a big-hearted busker and lead singer of the Merrymen. She and her bandmates, along with a fiery new friend named Marian, must take down a greedy developer befor...

I am a bleeding-heart liberal; I think it's funny that the term is somehow intended to be derogatory. Yes, my heart bleeds. It bleeds for the kids killed in Newtown. It bleeds for their poor parents and their families. It bleeds for the kids who survived but will forever be haunted by the horrors they witnessed. Not just as a parent, but as a person, with a heart, this is all I have been able to think about for the past few weeks. Even amid Christmas, work, weddings, and other distractions, my heart has not been able to wrestle itself free from the weight of this tragedy -- the latest in a long, terrible saga. So I wrote a song. And I made a video for it, with some facts about gun violence in America courtesy of Stop Handgun Violence and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence . It's an angry song , because I am angry. I'm devastated and desperate to do something. It is directed at the NRA , because they are the biggest, clearest villain in a story that is...