Pop culture fused with big picture (Preview)

Posted on: Thursday, January 7, 2016
SHAWN CONNER, VANCOUVER SUN

BOOM, Rick Miller’s one-man multimedia production, begins with the dropping of the atomic bomb and ends with another kind of boom — the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The writer/performer won’t go so far as to call the latter event an aphrodisiac. But he believes it might have had an effect on some who were living through that time.
“When they (the Americans) landed on the moon, a lot of people felt somewhat relieved,” the Toronto-based performer said.
“For a lot of people, 1969 was a mini-baby boom. It was for my parents. The way my dad put it, he finally felt that communism wasn’t going to win. And if that inspired you to have sex, then so be it.”
In the ambitious BOOM, Miller covers 25 years in 100 minutes, finding connections between world events and pop culture in the post-Second World War, baby boom era.