The Durham Performing Arts Center punches well above its weight, both as a venue and as a draw for events and performances. It also helps that I can walk to DPAC, which I did twice in the past week. My first visit was to see Shucked, a touring Boadway musical comedy. My second visit was to listen to a lecture from Dr. Jordan Peterson as part of his current tour.

My Shucked visit was not as originally intended. Illness forced a change in plans as my expected guests were unable to come and my weekend plans were scuttled. In an era of digital tickets, I was still able to go and managed to find a home for one of the others. I knew very little about the show going into it, which was probably for the best. The premise bordered on the ridiculous but that was deliberate and the writers leaned in hard to the corn motif with what is surely the highest concentration of corny jokes in the history of musical theater. One of the minor character’s monologues were the piece de resistance of this corny humor and he got the biggest laugh of the evening with a joke about how politicians are like diapers. I haven’t seen Book of Mormon but a few people said Shucked was like a toned-down version of that show. It had some vulgarity but wasn’t blasphemous. I’m glad I didn’t travel to New York to see it (especially after seeing Hamilton when I was in New York in January), but it was a nice change of pace on a Thursday evening.

Dr. Peterson’s lecture was much more what I anticipated it would be and more impactful. It was a solo trip and the second time I’ve seen him give a lecture. And while I wish he (and everyone else) would refrain from Twitter/X, his writings and his recorded lectures have been of great value to me during the past few years. The lecture focused on conscience through the lens of the stories of Elijah, Jacob, and Jonah and how those Old Testament stories offered a preemptive repost to Nietscheze’s idea that man would be able to reconstruct a value system after the death of God, how the existence of conscience itself points to problems with Nietscheze’s claims. The lecture paralleled the thoughts contained in the prologue to his latest book, which I started reading just this weekend so it was almost like spaced repetition of the ideas as you might study flashcards in order for the content to seep deeper into memory. These two exposures to a particular passage of scripture aren’t even the only ones I’ve had recently as one came up in my church small group as well a few weeks ago. It has all left me thinking about creating still and quiet instead of crowding it out with noise and stimulation at all times since that quiet is where the best things come from.