One month down

Get up Tuesday Troupe it's the best day of the week! The day we all come together and talk about our feelings. Well, really just my feelings since I have editorial powers and you guys don't.

That weird kid in high school musical once said, 'we're all in this together,” and I think that perfectly describes Tuesday Troupe. I know there's still a lot of road left, but we've made it an entire month of quarantine life. One month without sports. One month without sanity. We did it.

If we can make it one month in this new reality, we can make it two. If we can make it two, then we can make it four. If it goes past four, you guys might be on your own because that means they canceled football season and I'll be curled up in a ball rocking back and forth and crying. I know they say men aren't supposed to cry, but I think the three times you're allowed to shed a tear are when someone dies, when you become a father or when any football game at any level is either postponed or canceled for any reason.

I hope the Easter bunny left you guys some fresh hand sanitizer bottles last night. With all the germs going around, I'd hate to have a job that requires you to break into every house in the neighborhood. How does he get in the house, anyway? I know Santa takes the chimney down, but does the Easter bunny just bust in the front door or what?

I survived Lent, guys. I gave up gambling this year, which was one of the hardest things to do until all sports were canceled and the Casinos were closed. Nothing helps quell the temptation like the government saying you can't do it. This must be how recovering alcoholics felt when they passed prohibition.

In order to keep my wife from going too stir-crazy, we bought Disney+ streaming service during this shut down, and we've been watching some old movies. A couple of nights ago we watched 'Newsies,” the 1992 film about the Newsboys strike of 1899. Interesting, by the way, that people in 1899 could focus on having fun little protests in the streets because they weren't afraid of the new mellnnium. Flash forward 100 years to 1999 and everyone was so scared about Y2K and sattelites falling out of the sky that they had no time for trivial things like raising the price of newspaper bundles or rumbling in the street. It's really interesting to think about how good people had it in the late 1800s.

If you're not familiar with the movie, Christian Bale plays one of the paperboys who go on strike because they raise the newspaper bundle price by 10 cents. I don't see what the big deal is since I've literally got like 84 cents sitting next to me at work as we speak, but apparently he didn't have anything better to do than raise a big fuss. Anyway, he leads this big protest and ends up getting a settlement or something and then people decide he did a really good job so then he gets to be Batman a few years later. What a meteoric rise.

So as we were watching this movie, I started to research the Newsboys strike, and I learned something new, which I will pass on to you, our faithful reader. That's something new we're going to do on ‘Tuesday's With Andy,' by the way. We're going to start learning stuff.

Did you know that in real life, the Newsies were aided by a state Senator named Timothy Sullivan? Apparently this guy wasn't a big enough hot shot to get a place in the movie, but he sponsored their big rally that changed the entire timeline of the movement. Anyway, that's not super interesting but I went into a deep dive about this Sullivan character (I like to think we're friends now, so I just call him 'Sully.”)

Apparently the guy who helped the newsies was a renowned expert in the time old tradition of electoral fraud. He would cheat to win elections he was in. He'd cheat for politicians he liked. A modern day Richard Nixon, but without the cool peace sign hand motion. He used to have people vote with a full beard, shave and then come back to the polls with no facial hair. Diabolical.

This guy apparently cheated so hard that his precinct went 395 to 4 for Grover Cleveland over Benjamin Harrison in the 1892 presidential election. And do you know who won the 1992 presidential election? That's right, Grover Cleveland. Boom. He actually became president due in part to the shady tricks of the Newsies' number one lackey.

Well President Cleveland, you made it over 100 years before somebody found you out, but you're not getting one over on me. I bet you didn't count on anyone finding your Wikipedia page, did you, President Cleveland? But I did, and now you're busted, bucko. I don't know what President Cleveland is doing with his life now, but if he still is scamming people in the political rhelm, I hereby demand he be impeached immediately by a federal court of law.

By the way, for any of you school children who are currently doing online classes right now, that was your big history lesson for the week. Go ahead and tell your teachers you learned something by reading the newspaper and you'll probably get some extra credit or something.