Empty Stages
On what it costs to say no...
Green scissor lifts against white marble. Two workers on a platform, grinning for a photo—one thumbs up, one throwing a peace sign. Behind them, the letters they just bolted to the facade: D.J. TRUMP AND. Below, the plaza where crowds once gathered for free performances. Empty now.
One touring production. That’s all they have booked for the next six months. As of this morning, the Kennedy Center’s public-facing calendar shows Chicago arriving in late March. Until then, nothing but subscription concerts and six thousand empty seats spread across three theaters. The Trump-Kennedy Center is already a mausoleum.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was supposed to lend them legitimacy—the revolution itself, eight shows a week, 2,300 seats filled by people who believe in the promise of America. The producers pulled it in March. “We have sadly seen decades of Kennedy Center neutrality be destroyed.”
Billy Harper’s saxophone was supposed to lend them history—a living legend of jazz, the music America gave the world. He was booked for New Year’s Eve with the Cookers. He refused. “I would never even consider performing in a venue bearing a name that represents overt racism and deliberate destruction of African American music and culture.”
Doug Varone’s dancers were supposed to lend them beauty—forty years of bodies in motion, booked for their anniversary in April. They’ll lose $40,000. They refused anyway.
“It is financially devastating,” he wrote, “but morally exhilarating.”
In a post on X, Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell called the cancellations “a form of derangement syndrome.” In a letter reported by the Associated Press, he threatened to sue one boycotting artist for a million dollars.
Sun City, 1985
We’ve seen this before.
A luxury casino resort in Bophuthatswana—one of the fake “homelands” the South African government created to forcibly relocate its Black population. Sun City offered gambling and entertainment banned in South Africa proper. It paid enormous fees to Western artists. Frank Sinatra played one night for $2 million and Elton John played and Queen played and Cher and Dolly Parton and Tina Turner who received an “honorary white” status.
The resort existed for one purpose: to launder apartheid’s image through the presence of artists. Your performance was your endorsement. Your ticket sales were your signature on the regime.
And what a regime. Black South Africans were required to carry passbooks at all times—failure meant arrest. They were barred from white neighborhoods, white beaches, white schools, white hospitals. The government bulldozed entire communities and trucked families to the “homelands”—barren territory with no jobs, no infrastructure, no future. Police shot protesters in the back at Sharpeville. They tortured detainees in prison. They killed Steve Biko in custody and called it a hunger strike.
This is what Sun City existed to obscure.
They ran ads in American magazines with Confederate flags in the borders. “C’mon home to Africa’s South.” A vacation for white southerners nostalgic for the good ole days—apartheid as a travel destination.
The United Nations imposed a cultural boycott. They kept a register—a list of shame—for every artist who performed anyway.
The apartheid government called the boycott elitist. Sun City was “for everyone,” they said.
Then Steven Van Zandt visited. He watched Queen perform at the resort. Then he drove the short distance to the homeland itself—where the Black workers who cleaned the hotel rooms actually lived. “Very desolate,” he wrote. “No work, no schools, no agriculture, no hospitals, nothing.”
He came back to America and wrote a song.
Artists United Against Apartheid. Fifty-four musicians—Springsteen, Dylan, Miles Davis, Run-DMC, Bono, Lou Reed, Gil Scott-Heron, Keith Richards. The hook was simple: “I, I, I, I ain’t gonna play Sun City.”
Half of American radio stations refused to air it. The song criticized Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement” with apartheid. The stations said it “didn’t fit their format.”
Within five years, apartheid began to collapse. The register outlives the excuses.
November 22, 1963
Kennedy was 46 when they killed him.
Two months later, Congress passed Public Law 88-260. President Johnson signed it in the Cabinet Room. The law renamed the National Cultural Center as a “living memorial” to the slain president. Senator Ted Kennedy was there that morning, on behalf of Jackie and the family.
Johnson broke ground with the same gold-plated spade used for the Lincoln Memorial in 1914 and the Jefferson Memorial in 1938.
That’s what a memorial is. A promise made by a nation to itself. A covenant between the living and the dead. Federal statute still names it the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They can change the signage. They can’t change the law.
A name on a building is supposed to honor the dead. But a name is also what a family carries. And the family is still alive.
Yesterday, Tatiana Schlossberg died. JFK’s granddaughter. Caroline Kennedy’s daughter. Thirty-five years old. An environmental journalist who won the Rachel Carson Award. She’d been fighting leukemia since they found it after she gave birth to her second child last May. In her final essay, published in The New Yorker in November, she wrote about watching from her hospital bed as her cousin RFK Jr. was confirmed as Health Secretary—and worrying what his cuts to research funding would mean for patients like her.
She wrote until she couldn’t.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning,” her family wrote Monday. Hours later, he was on Truth Social boosting screenshots mocking them. “The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys,” one read.
For Everyone
Power doesn’t just want to control culture. It needs culture to legitimize it.
That’s what Sun City was for. Not the money—the image. Every artist who performed there told the world: This place is normal. These people are worth entertaining. This regime deserves to host beauty. Your presence was your endorsement.
Picture the Kennedy Center gala. The red carpet. The cameras. The president in the balcony. The honorees with their rainbow ribbons. The applause rising toward the crystal chandeliers.
The Trump-Kennedy Center’s official statement after the cancellations: “You don’t get to boycott taxpayers and still try to claim moral high ground.”
Listen to that sentence. The artists are cast as elitists. The desecration is cast as democratization. The man who put his name on an assassinated president’s living memorial accuses others of claiming ownership.
The apartheid government said Sun City was “for everyone.”
Same language. Same inversion.
The Transformation
The $40,000 doesn’t come back. Doug Varone knows this. One dance company’s boycott doesn’t restore the name. Billy Harper knows this. One saxophonist’s refusal doesn’t reverse an executive order.
They did it anyway.
This is what most people miss about refusal. The outcome isn’t the point. The act is the point. You don’t say no because it will work. You say no because the person who says no becomes someone different than the person who says yes. The victory isn’t in what changes out there. It’s in what changes in you.
What did Sinatra tell himself in 1981?
He’d refused to play the Copacabana until they admitted Black patrons. He’d walked out of the Sands in Vegas—the entire Rat Pack behind him—when they wouldn’t let Sammy Davis Jr. use the front entrance. He’d hired Black musicians for his band when no one else would and demanded they be paid the same, stay in the same hotels, eat at the same tables. He’d supported King. He’d raised money for the civil rights movement when it cost him bookings.
And then he took $2 million from apartheid South Africa.
Even the ones who know better can talk themselves into it.
These are the things people always tell themselves. Before the list comes out. Before history sorts the names.
What are you telling yourself right now?
Her family is burying her while he mocks their name.
Doug Varone lost $40,000 and gained something he couldn’t have bought.
The next invitation will come—money, access, applause, a seat near power.
What will you say?
Notes & Sources
Kennedy Center cancellations; Grenell “derangement syndrome” post; $1M lawsuit threat (December 2025):
Doug Varone cancellation ($40,000; “financially devastating but morally exhilarating”):
Billy Harper statement (”overt racism and deliberate destruction”):
Hamilton cancellation (March 2025; “decades of Kennedy Center neutrality be destroyed”):
Tatiana Schlossberg (December 30, 2025; age 35; Rachel Carson Award 2020; New Yorker essay November 22, 2025):
Trump Truth Social posts mocking Kennedy family (hours after Tatiana’s death):
People: https://people.com/donald-trump-attacks-kennedy-family-hours-after-death-of-jfk-s-granddaughter-tatiana-schlossberg-11877663
Sun City, Bophuthatswana (apartheid resort; cultural boycott; UN register):
Artists United Against Apartheid; “Sun City” song (1985; Steven Van Zandt):
Frank Sinatra Sun City performance (1981; $2 million):
Frank Sinatra civil rights history (Copacabana; Sands walkout; Sammy Davis Jr.):
Steve Biko death in custody (September 1977; “called it a hunger strike”):
Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Biko
Sharpeville Massacre (March 21, 1960):
Public Law 88-260 (January 23, 1964; Kennedy Center as “living memorial”):
Happy New Year, Jermaine.
Let’s pray it’s better than this past one.
Keep up the fight. The world will catch up to you soon.
fire.