David Bowie passed away last Sunday.  He was a rock icon, one of the great alternative music geniuses of the late 20th century.  To be honest, about half of his songs annoyed the hell out of me*, but just because I don't enjoy something doesn't mean I can't recognize and even appreciate the artistry.  Besides, the other half of his music was some of my favorite.
      I wanted to salute this genius by watching "The Labyrinth" (of course).  My husband nixed this idea.  Apparently, the movie traumatized him as a child, and he's just not ready to confront those demons.  So instead we drank a toast and listened to one of Bowie's most ingenious works, "I'm Afraid of Americans."

      But will somebody please explain to me how this is less traumatic than Jareth, the Goblin King?**



*Especially "All The Young Dudes"--I hate that song, and the more it gets stuck in my head, the more I hate it!

**If you say "the outfits," I'm going to disown you.

      Last month I saw a smashing performance of "My Fair Lady."  It had been years since I watched the movie with Audrey Hepburn (in my opinion, still the most beautiful Hollywood actress of all time), and I'd never seen a live performance of the whole musical.  The set design was great, the cast was brilliant, and the costumes were amazing--especially the hats!

Oh, the hats!!!!

      I had a great time, but there was some nagging little discomfort in the back of my mind.  Thanksgiving dinner occurred the very next day, however, and the copious amounts of turkey and other delicacies smothered said discomfort very well.  It wasn't until later when I found the playbill that I recollected the sensation, and began to ponder.
      My Fair Lady is a classic musical; a Broadway hit, rendered immortal by the film version, and the songs are frankly timeless.*  And the costumes.  Did I mention the hats?  Anyway, despite all this, it has never been one of my favorite musicals--but until this week I'd never stopped to wonder why.  Now, reflecting on the excellent stage production I'd just enjoyed, I finally put my finger on it.

      When you step back from the charm of the characters and the joy of the music, this is one really, really disturbing plot-line.  It basically tells the story of an impoverished young woman, neglected and exploited by her alcoholic father, who dares to attempt to break out of her under-privileged social caste only to become embroiled in an emotionally abusive relationship that disintegrates her social ties, shatters her identity, and seems to leave her chained to her abuser for life.  But with great dance numbers.
      So let's trace this back to it's roots.  The musical "My Fair Lady" is based on the play "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw, which essentially tells the same story.  That play is based on the ancient Greek myth of the same name, briefly: a genius sculptor named Pygmalion scorns women and all concepts of romantic love, and decides to mock both by creating his "perfect woman" in the shape of a statue.  Displeased, Aphrodite makes him fall helplessly in love with his own creation.  For awhile he pretends, but eventually breaks down, begs the goddess's forgiveness, and asks for a real woman to love.  He returns to his workshop, kisses the statue farewell, only to find Aphrodite has taken pity on him and brings the statue to life as a woman named Galatea.  The End.
      Oddly enough, I've always loved that myth.  To me it's the story of a man recognizing his own folly and embracing humility.  But Pygmalion's reimagined character as Professor Higgins barely tastes even a crumb of humility in "My Fair Lady."**  If anything, it seems his concept of women as things - first as annoying things to be avoided, then a flawed thing to be changed, and finally as a thing that's preferable to have around after all - is reinforced by Eliza Doolittle's choice to return to him, even after the way he's treated her.  The way he focuses on her "flaws" and takes her assistance around his home for granted is impersonal at best, and the way he speaks to her is abusive.  Yes, abusive: let's call a spade a spade.
      The stage performance I saw last month attempted to address this issue. They coached the actors to use body language and inflection to create a sense of change in Higgins, and a sense of strength in Eliza.  They attempted to portray Higgins as having an epiphany of love in his final song, "I've Grown Accustom To Her Face," and also a feeling of humility in the tentative, penitent way he delivers his famous last line: "Eliza?  Where the devil are my slippers?"  But performance can only change the meaning of words so much.

Here's your bloody slippers, Henry.  Wear these for a few days, then we'll talk.

      This is what has been bothering me since the first time I saw this musical, which was about age 10.  I was a feminist at age 10, before I even knew what the word meant.  And I think that's because I have always had a deeply ingrained value of fair play.  Life isn't fair, the forces of Nature aren't fair, and Death is certainly never fair.  But human beings can choose to be fair in the ways they treat one another.  I am an advocate for women and minorities because society does not treat them fairly, and it should.  Henry Higgins treats Eliza Doolittle horribly unfairly, and it's a tragedy that she lets him.
      I want to re-write this musical.  Here's my version:

      Everything stays the same up until the night of the ball, with the exception of the Higgins house staff empathizing with Eliza instead of Henry.  When she leaves after his dismissive and impersonal treatment of her following the ball, the servants all quit.  The shock gives Henry a stroke.  The stroke causes him to lose the power of speech, making him even more ornery than before, and nobody will come and work for him.  On the verge of ruin, his mother comes to his aid (once more) by hiring Eliza - who has made good on her "threat" to become a vocal coach using Henry's own techniques - to teach him to speak again.  Eliza essentially takes control of his household, his finances, and his life, giving him a taste of his own medicine as she helps him re-learn how to talk.  And he REALLY learns humility then.


   My version makes this song seem waaaaay more ominous.  Which is frankly awesome. Anyway, I haven't decided whether they would end up together or not.  How would you end it?




*Proof: my husband, who had never seen the musical in any format, told me afterward that he recognized over half of the songs.

**I've neither read the script nor seen a performance of Shaw's play, so I cannot comment on his rendition.

      And may you have a good All Hallow's Eve, however you care to celebrate!
      My night will include a large feast of autumn treats (you are so not surprised by this, are you?) and some good reading. I finished re-reading "Rebecca" by Daphne de Maurier, and liked it just as much as I did the first time. "Gone Girl" was an excellent book, but it has nothing on "Rebecca" as far as I'm concerned. So wanting to finish the season with something a little more supernatural, I picked up "Something Wicked This Way Comes," by Ray Bradbury. His prose in this short novel is superb, full of eloquent phrasing that flies in the face of grammar, but captures human (and particularly childhood) experience with exquisite accuracy. Here's a quote from the prologue:

"But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy-ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smokey-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft clap of bedsheets around corners.
"But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.
"One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight."

      And if that doesn't make you want to read the book, then there's something wrong with you.
      So now I have tastes and smells and stories - and of course my decorations have been up for weeks - so that just leaves the sounds--or more specifically, the soundtrack. There are few things in this world as inspiring as music. We use it to set the mood in dozens of ways, from spiritual ritual to casual parties, from the hip restaurant down the street to formal celebrations. A lot of writers will tell you they also use music to set the mood when composing their tales (some famously so, such as Stephanie Meyer's unabashed adoration of the band "Muse"). I have been one of these from my earliest typing days: I remember sitting down at the Macintosh LC in my parent's office, slipping an Enya CD into the stereo, and furiously typing away on my fantasy novel with all the enthusiasm of raw Middle School naïveté. (I'm pretty certain if I went back and read that old manuscript, I would find that that the lulls and action scenes follow the sequence of songs on "Watermark" perfectly.)
      These days I usually find individual songs that set a certain feel for me. I like to play these just as I sit down to write, rather than keeping them on in the background. For my zombie novel, it's been "Come With Me Now" by The Kongos. For my gas-lamp fantasy novel, it was the "Danse Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saëns. And it was also this classical piece that also inspired me to start my Ultimate Halloween Play List.
      On previous Halloweens I've tried Pandora and the albums you can buy in the party supply stores, but there's only so many renditions of "Monster Mash" I can take. There are too many good, eerie songs from too many different genres to be captured in those mass-appeal compilations. So I've started my own playlist and I'm always open to new suggestions! Here's what I've got so far:

"Danse Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saëns
"Possum Kingdom" by The Toadies
"Goodnight Moon" by Shivaree
"Enter Sandman" by Metallica
"Baby's Got An Atom Bomb" by Fluke
"Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky (oh, go on and click on the link--you know you want to watch that bit from Disney's "Fantasia!")
"The Real Man" by Yoko Kanno, from the soundtrack to "Cowboy Bebop"

      And I will be adding Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto, not because it sounds particularly scary, but because apparently it was lost, and then found again due to a ghostly message sent from beyond the grave! I heard about it yesterday on NPR, and if nobody's written a novel based on this story, someone should, and fast! It's one of those real-life situations that puts fiction to shame: a tortured artist is banished to an insane asylum, his unfaithful wife buries his last work, and then a descendent is prompted to find and perform the piece in a seance...wow.

Every day is Hallowe'en with my Fuzzy Princess around, but the Jack-O-Lantern adds to her spooky qualities!