Clickable Advent Calendar, 5: Dispatches from the Rat Wars
Opening night of Atlanta Ballet’s ‘The Nutcracker’ inspires a war-time flashback to a ‘Creative Loafing’ embedded journalist’s dispatches from the Rat Wars.
The Atlanta Ballet’s perennial production of The Nutcracker debuts tonight, Dec. 5, at the Fox Theatre. The Tchaikovsky ballet always reminds me of two things:
1. The Klezmer Nutcracker and
2. A story from December 2003, back when Creative Loafing’s intrepid Tom Bell, now with the Decatur Book Festival, was an embedded journalist in the Nutcracker’s army, sending dispatches from “Operation Extreme Extermination,” a military action against the armies of the Rat Kingdom. (Currently the occupying army of toy soldiers expects to withdraw from the rat kingdom within 16 months, although the Nutcracker hesitates to give any timetables.) The story from our war correspondent offers a flashback to five years ago: