Yesterday I went to the east coast(by which I mean Riverside) to meet some friends, a couple who were neighbors of Grandma Neva’s and here from Iowa. They are staying in Redlands, so my grandmother decided that we would meet them in Riverside. Now, riverside is not somewhere I would normally want to go of course, but I wanted to see these people and Gramma picked this historical hotel called the Mission Inn to meet them at, so it was actually really neat. One of the things that I liked the most was that there were big portraits of all the preisidents that had been there. Here are some highlights.
The first thing I noticed was our neighbor, Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon was actually married at the Mission Inn. His attempted Assassin has a great monologue but no song in the musical.
William McKinley
Has been to the Mission Inn. He was also Assassinated in 1901. The song about him in the great Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins is The Ballad of Czolgosz.
John F. Kennedy.
Everybody knows about this one. The conspiracy, the drama, the fact that people didn’t notice that C.S. Lewis died that same day just because of a presidential Assassination. An important part of the musical, and a great story, really, but between you and me I think that Lewis was the more important guy. 😉
Also pictured was Gerald Ford who had two assassination attempts on him within one month. I love that scene in Assassins with Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore. And there was Ronald Reagan who, as you may know, was the one who John Hinkley Jr tried to assassinate to impress Jody Foster. Great song, Unworthy of Your Love. The rest weren’t related to Assassins, but they were pretty good. Herbert Hoover does have a song about him in Annie, and Teddy Roosevelt was featured in Newsies. William Taft was there, but he’s not in any musicals. He was, apparently, so large that they had to give him a special chair.
Shannon Kay 