We love to pretend to be somebody else. It frees us. We can lose our own inhibitions and ignore those of others.

We also love to watch somebody else pretend to be still somebody else. It's a way we can fool ourselves into believing that we're seeing into the life of someone we couldn't really know.

Augustus was outraged when he found Roman citizens going on stage to play roles with troupes of travelling actors. He forbade the practice and ran all the actors out of town. Such behaviour was only fit for children and lower classes.

Now that we're all children and lower classes, singing and acting are among the most admired vocations. In an age when just about all human activity has to be presented as entertainment to attract any interest whatsoever, even war seems like a video game.

So we demand entertainment. We now spend 3 times as much on entertainment as we do on education, and it shows.

It's great when we can get back to basics and provide a little entertainment for ourselves. We don't have to pay $200M to make a movie to keep us interested in something for 2 hours.

We can actually put on a costume and act out or sing a song all by ourselves without a multi-million dollar contract. It doesn't even have to be good. It's entertainment of the people, by the people, and for the people. How American is that?