After Twitter announced a formal ban on former Cleveland city councilman Joe Cimperman's account for exceeding a tweets per minute threshold — "too myopic, with a perverse amount of back-slapping," the company's security team later added — other social media networks followed suit. First Facebook, then Vine, then Peach. Venture capital firms who have yet to fund as-of-yet-to-exist social media sites promise Cimperman will be banned from them whenever they're created as well.
Cimperman, telling The Press that there's still room in this world for photos of American flags in downtown Cleveland and proclamations of love for "our city's historic and sexy buildings," opened a one-man show at Cleveland Public Theatre this week. The script involves the actor reading through his Twitter archive.
"#Cleveland you inspire us to be, do, love more — thank you," a visibly quaking Cimperman bellowed before collapsing onto the stage to conclude the performance's first act. (There were 10 acts.) A slideshow of his twitpics looped in the background, featuring selfies taken with some of Cleveland's finest chefs and photos of Lake Erie, devoid of context or meaning.
The performance, which brought Cimperman to a hard sweat by intermission, was curious and disconcerting. But he knows how to please a distracted crowd; at one point in the sixth act, Cimperman began distributing samples of House of Blues' coconut cream pie, calling the dessert "surreal" and "OMG incredible."
He refused to begin the next act until everyone, including CPT staff, had sampled the dessert. There was thus a 30-minute delay in the proceedings
"To be honest, we got free tickets from the radio station. We thought Cimperman' was a weird indie band or something," Ty Regus, 23, said after the show. "We did like the pie, though."
The show runs for the next three months at CPT.
