PERRY: Rep. Boebert says her divorce had a hand in her groping for answers at Denver theater last week

Sure, all the world, other than X, is all atwitter over news that Congressperson Lauren Boebert got caught on secret tape having some serious mutual grope at the Buell Theater during a performance of Beetlejuice.

But isn’t the most shocking news here that Boebert actually went to the theater?

If you’re just coming out of a coma or a deep cave in Turkey, Boebert has been grabbing headlines this week after some on-camera mutual mammary and genital handiwork while apparently on a date at a performance of Beetlejuice in Denver last Sunday.

After the Denver Post reported she’d been eighty-sixed from the DCPA theater because of vaping, loud singing, taking photographs, and generally being obnoxious, Boebert and her staff snarkily pushed back.

“It’s true, I did thoroughly enjoy the AMAZING Beetlejuice at the Buell Theatre and I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud!” according to an Associated Press story that ran in the Sentinel later in the week. She denied that she was vaping in the theater, dismissing the event as the result of an uptight Denver thing. 

She clearly didn’t anticipate 9News using the power of Colorado’s open government laws retrieving the entire videotape of her visit to the Buell.

The tape made it clear Boebert was a vaping, selfie-snapping, hooting and wooting tyrant to those near her, including the pregnant woman behind her who asked her not to vape inside the theater. The tape also revealed that Boebert’s date spent at least some minutes motor-boating Boebert, as she threw back her arm, except for the one that kept returning to between the legs of the gentleman accompanying her.

Confronted with the irrefutable truth, Boebert said she was sorry about the vaping thing, and that, “I simply fell short of my values.”

Given Boebert has a history much like Donald Trump, whom she has repeatedly called the “best” president ever and continues to support, despite his numerous impeachments, indictments and even a court admonition for his sexually assaulting a woman and then slandering her. So it’s hard to tell which “values” she believes were misaligned with lying and public obscenity.

She’s attended many a rodeo in making clear she doesn’t cotton to gay people in public, and especially drag queens reading to children in libraries. But that was months ago, and I think a lot of us gave Boebert the benefit of doubt, given her apparent intellectual capacity, that she was more concerned about the immorality of teaching people to read more than having a guy in drag being the teacher.

We do know that she may be fine with some serious hands-on sex education for children attending the Buell theater performances, but peeing in the street crosses the line, or at least it used to.

Boebert drew similar national embarrassment and scorn to herself earlier in the year when she tried to go all Perry Mason on a congressional committee witness about crime in Washington DC.

“Did you or did you not decriminalize public urination in Washington D.C.? Did you lead the charge to do so?” she asked.

The witness, clearly unexpectedly to Boebert, said, “no.”

Unfazed, Boebert continued hammering away at DC Councilman Charles Allen, and he continued to tell her how wrong she was.

Making clear how she did not value people whipping it out in the streets of DC, she immediately brought media scorn on herself, or actually her ex-husband-in-waiting, for a past criminal convictions of indecent exposure he was convicted of years ago, of which Boebert, a teenager at the time, was witness to, according to police and numerous media reports.

All that is now just a memory, which Boebert regularly has problems with.

She said she simply didn’t remember vaping in the theater, possibly because she was just so excited about the show and being in a new “environment.”

She apologized that the stress of her divorce pushed her away from her values.

Who among us who’ve undergone divorce can’t acknowledge the stress inflicted by it and are simply thankful we never found ourselves in the Buell watching a musical with a vape pen and a date?

She did not, apparently, apologize for violating state public decency laws, which, under C.R.S. 18-7-301 includes public sexual intercourse, intentional exposure and lewd fondling.

The fondling in Boebert’s now well-documented case does not appear to be any kind of medical resuscitation, oddly timed physical therapy or simply theater patrons clumsily looking for lost items in dark theater. It meets the definition of lewd, but so far, Denver Police and district attorney officials haven’t responded to queries by the Sentinel or other media as to whether a crime was committed, on tape, and whether Boebert or her date will be charged.

Under Donald Trump standards, adopted by numerous states and a vast number of Congressional Republicans, it’s not a crime to lie, like Boebert did when, being hustled out of the theater by Buell staffers, she first ask them if they “know who I am,” and then told them that she was “on the board,” and would be contacting the mayor.

Boebert is not a member of the board of directors of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Which brings us back to my initial wonderment. Boebert rarely misses on opportunity to mug with a gun strapped to her leg, she berated “Tic Tacs” after a congressional hearing about “Tik Tok,” and she once pushed back against paid parental leave and said she gave birth to one of her four children in the front seat of a pickup truck, “because as a mom of four, we got things to do.”

What was she doing at the Buell with a loaded vape pipe, anxious hands and a boyfriend set on automatic?

Perhaps, confused, she thought Beetlejuice was an adult show, and the Buell, being in a place we call “Downtown Denver” was the kind of theater that would offer shows that “fell short of my values.”

Or not.

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