If you were too busy eating and shopping and eating again to have heard about the Twitter stir caused by the performance of my show, Kinky Boots, on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, here’s what happened.

The Tony Award Winning Best Musical of 2013, Kinky Boots, which has been thrilling thousands and thousands of people from all over the world each and every week since it opened, performed on the parade.

And some, ahem, “concerned citizens” thought that the show and its characters were inappropriate for the parade, and took to Twitter to raise their voice, as this country allows them to do . . . whether we like it or not.

I am reluctant to give some of these hate-mongers citizens any more attention than they have already received, but if you want to see some of their ignorant chatter, click here to read a HuffPo article about the controversy.

Last week, when I was told that we were appearing on the show, I remember being excited . . . first, for the promotional value that comes with that kind of exposure, and second, because I knew it probably wasn’t the easiest choice for the NBC executives.  Let’s face it, we ain’t no Disney musical.

But choose it they did, and I’m so thankful for their courage.  They had to know there would be some backlash.

I certainly did.

Truth be told, when I was deciding whether or not to produce the show, part of my due diligence included the question, “Broadway show audiences are 65% tourists.  Will the red-state folks take to Kinky‘s title and subject matter?”  And many of my investors asked me the very same thing.

At the end of my process, I/we came to two conclusions:

1 – Hell yeah, they’ll take to it.  It’s that good.

2 – If they don’t take to it, well that’s all the more reason to produce it.

And the majority of people that see it, do take to it, evident by its status in the million-dollar-show club each and every week.

So why this backlash?  Why now?  Where was the backlash for Priscilla‘s parade performance in 2011?  La Cage in 2004?  Cabaret in 1998???

Weren’t those shows just as “offensive” to those who threw their homophobic-tweet-bombs this past week?

One of the simple reasons why we heard more backlash this year than ever before . . . Twitter has simply become an electronic bullhorn for more people.  In 2011, the year of Priscilla, Twitter had just announced that it had reached 100 million active users.  Just two years later it has over 210 million.  More than twice as many people have their fingers on their Twitter-trigger and are ready to share their opinion.  And some of them don’t realize that what they say could bounce back at them (Read that Huffpo article again – look at the bottom – there is a disclaimer about a bunch of removed tweets from people who said, “I didn’t mean it!”).  I’ll go even further and hypothesize that people with slightly outdated views on society, might also be later adopters to technology like Twitter.

And the other unfortunate reason that this occurred is that . . . well, despite all our wishin’ and hopin’, there are still people out there who just don’t get it.  Yet.

What do we do about it?  Do we scream at them?  Yell at them?  Throw hate-bomb tweets right back at ’em?  You can bet your Kinky-Bottom that I wanted to take the space on this blog to make all sorts of generalizations about who these people are, where they live, and even toss in a couple of -guess-who’s-married-to-their-cousin jokes.

But that’s not the answer.

You know what is?

Produce more shows like Kinky Boots.

So if you’re upset about what happened, put your time and energy and emotion into something that thrills and educates at the same time.  It’s not the easiest of roads to travel down, but its the most important.

(Got a comment? I love ‘em, so comment below! Email Subscribers, click here then scroll down to say what’s on your mind!)

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