In September, 1995 The Negro Problem performed in Palo Alto opening for Cake, and a Black person went around town pulling down our posters because he thought we were KKK, and he called my office and I explained— Stew has always been a “crazy, weird kid” as he says above and it took him a while to simplify the message and yes Bill Bragin is 100 percent the genius who hit a bull’s-eye no one else could see even people who believed Mark Stew Stewart was a prophet.
There’s an album called “The Naked Dutch Painter” and song which tells the “Passing Strange” story exegesis, plus a song cycle called “The Drug Suite“. Bill Bragin said those three songs plus the funny stories you tell on stage could be Broadway material and five years later it happened; but I was in the room before it happened and so I’m very happy for the Shotgun Players’ production (two notes placed on Shotgun Players’ social media feed)
Mark Weiss
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Champagne Hughes we saw at CentralWorks “Human Ounce” and she says that she is an understudy appearing in four shows in Shotgun Players’ “Passing Strange” — it was good to see Stew doing some pr work for the local crew, Patrick Dooley et al.
I was explaining all this today to another artist I was suggesting can do this. I am the world’s expert on “Passing Strange” excluding people who have Broadway credits for the show. And I maintain that it was Bill Bragin who made this all happen. But I also say that if not for me Stew would be still lost in the woods somewhere near Saratoga.
I’m assuming that Shotgun Players get their name from the Chekhov adage that if a shotgun appears early in a play that it should be fired or heard from eventually in the show.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 
