OK, enough with the financial crisis, the porkulus bill, the new president, Iraq… we’re going local here.

Next weekend, Feb. 20-22, a talented troupe from my church, St. George’s Episcopal in Maplewood, NJ, will stage Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, complete with live music.

My wife, the lovely and talented Web Goddess, and I are not in the production, but we’ve been involved in helping to publicize it. By “we” I mean mostly her. Here’s the scale of our respective contributions — she conceptualized, designed and executed the colorful banner you see here, combining a stock image rainbow swirl with a coat outline she drew herself, and tweaking the words endlessly to get them to fit.

Me? I looked over her shoulder when she asked me to, talked through some ideas and made encouraging sounds. At one point near the end, I said “maybe you could put a narrow white border around the coat,” and then left her alone to figure out how to actually do it. If you look closely you can see the little white border, which really helps the coat pop out more from the rainbow background. That was my idea. I also sent a rehearsal photo, caption, and an ad to our local weekly. (The Web Goddess took the picture and designed the ad.)

Not that I’m proud of her or anything, but I actually think the poster my wife made is nicer than the official image from the London revival. It’s certainly easier to read. And the white line is a nice touch.

Oh yeah, the production itself… it’s gonna be great. There is some amazing musical talent in our parish, and a couple of the performers have done the show professionally. They’ve been preparing and rehearsing since October — our church puts on a musical show every two or three years, and it’s always fabulous. I strongly urge all of you to attend — even the 13% of you who live outside the U.S. Details on tickets and show times are here, and you can see a two-minute rehearsal teaser on YouTube.

That’s it from Maplewood — regularly scheduled political grumpiness will resume soon.

Photo of the Web Goddess by Kirk Petersen (I borrowed her other camera).

I meant to follow up in a more timely way on an earlier post about the conservative gay vote. From that earlier post:

Along the same lines, I also want to note estimates that nearly one out of every four gay voters pulled the lever for Bush in 2004 (as did I), despite Bush’s odious support for the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. (As for this year’s GOP nominee: “In the Senate, McCain has been an ardent opponent of a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, arguing his case on federalist grounds.”)

Today I belatedly found a GayPatriot post from last week, quoting the Log Cabin Republicans as saying that McCain got about 27% of the LGBT vote. This is clearly up from what Bush got in 2004, but the Log Cabin Republicans estimated Bush’s tally in 2004 as 19%. Where I say “nearly one out of every four” up above, the actual tally was 23%, so there’s a discrepancy.

Turns out that if you stick consistently with CNN exit poll data, the numbers are:

• 2000: Bush 25%
• 2004: Bush 23%
• 2008: McCain 27%

This progression makes sense to me — Bush got higher support overall in 2004 than in 2000, but his support for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage cost him some votes among gays. McCain’s opposition to the amendment helped him hold on to a few more gay conservatives. The striking thing is that the one-out-of-four ratio, in rounded terms, has been quite steady.

So where did that 19% number the Log Cabin Republicans cited come from? Annoyingly, they kind of made it up, averaging the 23% CNN number with a 17% result from an LATimes exit poll, and deciding that was “about 20%,” which somehow became 19% in their earlier missive. Hmm.

What’s the point of all this? Well, it’s about me being defensive, I suppose. The Web Goddess and I have been involved for years in our church’s efforts in support of full marriage equality for same-sex couples. (The Web Goddess designed the shirt above — click it to order a copy from Cafe Press, at no profit to us.) Some gay friends have taken issue, politely, with my support for McCain. I’m just trying to show that a vote for a Republican shouldn’t be considered beyond the pale by people who support gay equality. Even in our deep-blue town of Maplewood, I know at least one gay couple who are “out” Republicans.

I suppose there’s also a message here for those who would caricature all gay people as being driven primarily by their sexuality. In each election cited above, of course, any gay voter who voted primarily on the basis of issues important to gay people would have voted for the Democrat. But one out of four gay voters felt strongly enough about other issues — presumably national security or taxes — to vote for the less gay-friendly candidate.

I know you must be just aching for yet another post boasting about my recent flurry of traffic from all over the world (where the heck is Malta?), but it’s time to go hyper-local for a moment.

Susan Mangasarian, much-beloved 84-year-old matriarch of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Maplewood, NJ, led the local CROP Hunger Walk for the third year in a row Sunday on a beautiful fall afternoon. The walkers, representing several local churches, raised $2,500 for international and local hunger relief.

Previous walks have been covered in the local weekly, but this year — big-time PR guy that I am — it finally dawned on me that we might even be able to get some coverage in the Star-Ledger. After an advance call to a former co-worker from my ink-stained days in the 1980s, photographer Tim Farrell was dispatched with a long lens and a willingness to extend himself to get just the right perspective.

Susan later told a Star-Ledger reporter that fighting hunger has been a key issue for her since childhood. She was born in this country, but her parents were Armenian, and her mother often told her about how hungry the family was when they were surviving the Armenian Massacre in 1915. But the Ledger ended up running just a photo and caption, above. (No link, as the photo ran only in the print edition of the paper.)

That’s me, the paunchy guy in the middle — I’m saying, “you get what you need, Tim?” (That’s how big-time PR guys chat up the press.) The photos of Farrell are by my wife, the lovely Web Goddess, who also documented Susan’s two previous excursions. The Web Goddess also captured 56 seconds of live-action footage of this year’s walk.