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Experimental dramaturge-director John Jesurun in 1994 devised a multi-media theatre adaptation of Sophocles' Philoctetes at the behest of the iconic American avant-garde actor Ron Vawter, who at the time was dying of AIDS. Feeding on classical Greek drama and Jesurun's own trademark 'mediaturgies' alike, this production presented its audience with a barren and alien landscape where communication is both problematic as well as the only possible means of salvation. More concretely, it featured Vawter in the lead role creating a troubling tension between the play's fictional theme of physical suffering and the 'embodied liveness' it highlighted through the HIV-induced purple Kaposi rash on the actor's naked body. At the same time Jesurun'sPhiloktetesis also a funeral play about a stricken warrior narrating his own demise from beyond the grave, a memento mori that unsettles its ancient predecessor by recycling the mythological story of Philoctetes the existential transgressor who refuses to either die or live as he rather opts physically to rot in the isolation of a deserted island. The production thereby deliberately dramatized the actual crossing of the border between life and death with Vawter's naked Philoktetes re-enacting and commenting the process of his passing – all while literally decaying before the eyes of the spectators. Arguably, therefore, when the stricken warrior of Jesurun's play hauntingly reminds us that "the body knows the answer" whereas we ourselves "don't know the question," he opens up a panoply of problems with the potential to range far beyond mere descriptions of story, scene, or theme. If anything, the case of Vawter'sPhiloktetes-performance indeed indicates that drawing attention to the mediation behind the artistic creation, and particularly the physical embodiment of the actor performing it, highlights both the artificiality and – above all – the negotiability of the illusion, thereby intrinsically invalidating reductive readings.

Ron Rivera, after eight and a half years as the only Latino Head Coach employed by the NFL, was fired in 2019 by Carolina Panthers' new ownership. Soon after, Rivera was hired as the new Head Coach of the then-Washington Reds*ins. Empowered to not only coach the team, he has been tasked to shake up the organization's cultural, gendered, and racialized leadership-status-quo. In doing so Coach Rivera threads new ground across the ever evolving color line in U.S. sports, particularly "the brown color line." This essay explores the life, career, and ongoing-regionally based celebrity stardom of Ronald Eugene Rivera. I argue that Ron Rivera charts pathways forward amidst a U.S. socio-cultural-political climate rooted in anti-Native, anti-Black, anti-immigrant sentiment and a sporting industry embezzled in neoliberal racial politics. The essay theorizes "brownness" in sport from a "Latino masculinity" perspective to situate Rivera's struggles for (in)/(hyper)visibility and the complexed realities of the ongoing gendered color line in U.S. sport amid social pressure and protests for transformation and change.

Citizens Property Insurance "is not solvent."

"Every booster you take, you're more likely to get COVID as a result of it."