Sunday, January 30, 2011

hrmm

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Have just been reading the livejournal pages of people who are friends with somebody on lj who I stalk. Am now looking at my own, new little blog here and seeing it as weird.

    Not so much the content (hah) as the format, though. I write letters/posts to you mainly because my mom told me several times over the course of last year that I should totally write letters to you, when I'd be enthusing and grinning and wiggling over how awesome you were and giggle-squealing about how much I loved you and so on.

    This is just how it worked out. I'm pretty sure she meant paper-and-ink-and-expensive-postage letters or something. The woman has strange ideas.

    (She told me a few times that I should write to David Burke back when she and I were on our big Sherlock Holmes kick. Love that man. Never did anything about it.)

    I've been meaning to write more lately anyway, so it's a nice little arrangement. (I keep meaning to write fiction, but "creative nonfiction" aka blather keeps getting produced instead. Woe.)

    Anyway the question that I raised to myself today was, how long am I going to be able to slip in enough Harriet-centric or Harriet-related posts to justify the way the blog is presented?

    (I know, it's rather early days to wonder that, but this tiny little nook of the internet is the only potentially long-term thing I feel like I have any real control over and so I muse and brood and fuss over it.)

    Any by Jove, Dame Harriet, but the movies and TV shows you've been in are fearfully obscure. I've gotten my hands on the easy ones already, but soon I will have to start blind-buying things off Amazon and irritating my family by surreptitiously stuffing things into the Netflix queue because they have HW bit-parts. (And then not always watching them immediately.)

    At some point I'll have to go back over things I've already seen but saw pre-blog and write second impressions, I suppose. I'll make my sister watch Macbeth, huurhurhurculture. Although I'd want to watch it again anyway after your book, which I for some reason have not finished. (It it sitting squashed underneath I, Claudius and a collection of Lovecraft.)

Saturday, January 29, 2011

I, Claudius

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So a few weeks ago I was directed to the BBC's new radio drama adaptation of I, Claudius because through some means my mother had heard that you were in it.

    Can't think why I haven't mentioned this before. I listened to all six episodes, the first two at once and the remaining four as they became available online every week.

    Anyway. You were excellent in it. Your Livia made me really appreciate your Fanny Dashwood-from-Sense and Sensibility as being, in fact, a pile of kittens and happiness. (You get the most amazingly nasty roles sometimes. Honestly.)

i love this picture to bits and also it makes me want a live-action version of the story filmed with you in it, you can play Livia again, actually you should just play everyone


    (Tom Goodman-Hill playing Claudius oddly reminded me of Edward Petherbridge playing Newman Noggs. Great fun.)

    I have recently bought an actual copy of the actual I, Claudius in its original papery form, because I rather liked the radio drama and as I don't really like getting books from the library when I know they're going to take forever to read and they're cheap used anyway. I'm a couple chapters in and I think it's going to be lovely.

this is the copy I got, except on mine the background is more greenish. he looks so sulky I am sorely tempted to draw a curly little french mustache upon his upper lip and give him something real to sulk about. (image linked from here)
[UPDATE a couple weeks later: Just found this picture and it has you in, like, a different pose. I'm not sure why Caligula, Claudius and Augustus are all in that same position - and in almost the same clothes, too - but for a photoshopped family portrait it is still pretty awesome.]

 (photo linked from here)

Friday, January 28, 2011

dream car

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I am an ashy rubble heap filled with the unmarked graves of many hopes and dreams.

    My father loves cars. I like cars all right. I like spending time with my dad and listening to him talk. He likes to talk about cars.

    My family owns about three cars and two half-cars (as in, not working too well) at the moment. One of them is my father's car. It is a darling little black Mazda Miata MX-5 from 1996.


    I am learning to drive. I am learning to drive manual cars and am pretty good with the stick-shifting. I have driven this car several times. I love driving this car. I love driving this car.

    Dad and I were talking about Miatas the other day. He wanted to know what my perfect car would be. I gave him a very clear description.

    Last night he found my perfect car on Craigslist.

    It's a Miata just like his. It's from 1992, which was the year I was born. It's French racing blue with a tan interior. It's in wonderful shape. It has a good rollbar installed already. It is gorgeous. It is gorgeous. Miatas aren't fancy, but this one is absolutely perfect in my eyes.

    It is three thousand dollars, which is not at all bad for what it is. My family does not have three thousand dollars on hand. My family is poor.

    I want this car so badly.

    Last night I busied myself with dreaming of how it would be surprise-gifted to me for my birthday, and with trying to decide whether I would name it Belinda, Georgiana or Simone.
    Therefore the denial is only now wearing off, and right now I am huddled into a little quivering ball of unhappy, and Reality is beating at my brain with the ugly, rusted hammer of practical thinking.

    My brain does not care overmuch. My heart is the one aching.

[UPDATE the next day:
It's gone, man. It's gone.
Love was not enough.]

Thursday, January 27, 2011

redrum

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I wonder if it's odd that the other day, drying off after a shower, I found myself trying to count how many kinds of killing I could list.

    And chanting their names over and over again.

    "Suicide, homicide, femicide, genocide, infanticide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, sororicide, regicide, tyrannicide, deicide, senicide. Suicide, homicide, femicide, genocide..." and so on.

    Best Friend just laughed at me when I told her about this. (Of course, I phrased it as a "do you ever find yourself doing such and such" question.)

    Laurie R King once used the word "ecclesiasticide" in one of her books. It is not in the dictionary but it is just another reason I love that woman to bits.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

more of The Price

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So, as one might expect, my sister and I have been watching your miniseries The Price (1985) over the past week or two. It's been...interesting.

    Like, it was all super slow moving for ages, all middle-aged men yakking and your character being beautifully kidnapped and goin' slightly loopy locked up in a dirty Irish basement, then suddenly the end of episode 4 comes and we're like OHAAAAAAUUUUUGH NO OHEMGEE TRAUMA ALERT TRAUMA ALERT TRAUMA TRAUMA TRAUMA ohhhhh the bastard's gonna use that knife oh girl

    And tonight we watched episode 5. I AM SO TRAUMATIZED RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FINGER AND THE ENDING I WOULD HAVE BEEN CRYING AND BLEEDING FROM THE EYEBALLS AT THE SAME TIME IF I WASN'T TOO STUNNED TO DO ANYTHING MORE THAN CHOKE WITH SPEECHLESS MISERY ON MY ANTI-TRAUMA HAM AND PICKLE.

    Fuck.

    My sister and I agree that there is not much to be done at this point for a proper ending except kill everyone. We'll probably watch the final episode, 6, tomorrow, but before we do I think I need to try and record parts of our traumatized consultation over ham/cheese/pickles. (Asterisks denote a skip to a different part of the conversation.)

    Sister: Frank needs to die.
    Me: Violently. With lots of blood and pain and slow suffering.
    Sister: Who should kill him? Clare?
    Me: Clare. With bits of the jigsaw puzzle.
    Sister: But they've already got Harriet's shiv.
    Me: All right, she'll kill him with Harriet's shiv and then stuff the jigsaw puzzle bits in the wounds.
    *
    Sister: Nobody cared that Andrew died!
    Me: Yeah, nobody gave a damn about that! They're like oh yeah whatever it was an accident, let's talk about money.
    Sister: Poor Andrew.
    *
    Me: Frank needs to die. Everybody should die.
    Sister: Clare should just kill everyone.
    Me: Including herself. And her mom.
    Sister: And Geoff. And Margaret.
    Me: And the police.
    *
   ****(edit: further speculative bit removed - 7-21-11)

    I expect that the actual end of the actual series will not be anywhere near as satisfying.

kill, clare, kill!
                                                     

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Jeremevangelism

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Best Friend has recently seen "Sherlock". You know, the recent miniseries starrin' Benedict Cumberbatch.

    She was rather obsessed with it.

    She has, this evening, asked me if there were any good older Sherlock Holmes shows.

    "Like, before Sherlock?" I said.

    "Yeah, and before the bad one from 2009."

    "Oh, well, there're the Jeremy Brett ones, those are the best. And the other famous ones are the movies from the '40s that had Basil Rathbone, but Jeremy is better."

    "Cool. Can you show me one of those sometime?"

    WIN.

    She's gone home now and I don't think I'll see her over the weekend but that is ok, I will just decide which episode to show her.

    Yay! I get to expose another person to the holy light of Jeremy!

[UPDATE about a week later: She and I have now watched "The Solitary Cyclist" and "The Dancing Men" together. I believe she's enjoying the show very much. winnnnnn.]

nurrrrr. <3
                                                       

crush

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I'm a little bit weirded out by myself these past few days.

    It just feels a bit odd to be getting huge crushes on the exact same dudes that my mom had crushes on when she was my age.

    Like Peter O'Toole.

    Or Roddy McDowall.

    I mean, it's just...I don't know.

    I am glad that I do not have a crush on Clark Gable, because that would be in double mom-and-my-aunt territory.

    Why is it so much weirder this way than when my mom and I fall in love with the same dude simultaneously? Like Jeremy Brett. We watched his Sherlock Holmes stuff together (neither of us had seen it before) and both eventually mooned, though he's more her thing by now. I say eventually because the first episode we saw was The Speckled Band and we were understandably under the impression of his being, like, kinda totally weird at first.
    Or Fred Astaire - she knew about Fred Astaire rather longer than I did, bein' some 32 years older than myself, but I was the one who got us into the Fred and Ginger movies. (She'd never actually seen a full movie of his, just clips on tv things.) And now we both totally adore him. Admittedly, Fred is more of an "oh he is so dreamy and charming and gentlemanly and snazz-tastic" thing rather than a Peter O'Toole-ish "damn it if only I could just get my hands inside his shirt" thing, but there is still love and eyeballing involved. And none of it is the least bit weird-feeling.

    Sigh. There's also the part of crushin' on dudes before one's own time that involves knowing their futures, so to speak. One looks at young Peter O'Toole and marvels that he looks so different from his ancient, grayer, modern version. One admires Roddy McDowall's handsome self and curly locks in Cleopatra and tries to focus on the thought of "o! to involve my hand in those golden curls whilst he speaks cunning political treasonings like a sexy thing!" and ignore the little curdle in the back of one's skull which murmurs, "yes, and also he died of cancer when I was six." I suppose my mother must know the feeling. Clark Gable, for example, died just over a month after she was born.

(sexy things that are dead are not as sexy)

Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Tempest

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So yesterday my sister and I were over at my best friend's house. Best Friend has recently been cast in a high school production of The Tempest. She's playing Ariel, which is awesome, I am envious.

    Anyway BF was supposed to read the play through cover-to-cover. Instead, she and her sister had me and my sister over to hang out the whole afternoon after church.

    BF told me about the supposed-to-read-the-play thing. She didn't sound like she really wanted to just then. More fun things to do and so on.

    I was like, "well, we could watch a movie of it instead!"

    And that is exactly what we did.

    We watched the one from 1960 that had Maurice Evans and Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall. It was super cheap and fruity and ridiculous. Those costumes, oh my goodness. (It was actually the first time I'd ever seen any version of The Tempest. I haven't read it, either. Hahaha oh I feel bad.)

    Anyway Richard Burton with webbed hands and webby claw-feet was pretty amazing but what I really want to say is that Roddy McDowall was amaaaazing amazing. I couldn't take my eyes off his - can one really call it a costume when it is mostly paint and sparkles and things rather than clothing? I expect one can. In any case I adored his insane sparkly blue/white almost-nude-but-for-the-discreet-matching-fairy-underpants getup and his super nifty fin/spine things on his head and back. He made a fantastic sprite. Moved and spoke wonderfully. Some of his expressions and hand-actions were a little gigglesome, but it was the sixties after all.

    Best Friend now wants to take inspiration from Roddy-Ariel's colors and sparkliness. I have promised to aid and abet her, especially if helping involves helping her cut her hair, dye it white, add blue streaks and spike it to high heaven. I adore hair dyeing and showering people with glitter and sparkles.





How DO the spikes stay on? Is there some discreet Spandex thing going on that I'm not seeing?

I could take pictures of this forever.
This, to deviate from the theme, is Ferdinand.
Ferdinand has absolutely no pants on. His Ken-doll loins are modestly covered, and he wears calf-length boots, but not a shred of pants as far as the eye can discern. Not a thread, not a smidgen. He is Ferdinand the Trouserless. Presumably he enjoys drafts and breezes upon his manly leg hairs and so on.
             


    Anyway so between this and Cleopatra I think I might have a tiny crush on Mr McDowall.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Audible 2

(written at a previous date, and also being a continuation of the previous post)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I hate that Audible's selection of Wimsey stuff is almost entirely Ian Carmichael-centric. They've got, like, ONE Petherbridge-narrated book, and it's the effing Attenbury Emeralds. Come on.

    My library has Strong Poison and Have His Carcase as done by Mr Peth on tape. I've listened to both of them. They're abridged. In Strong Poison, among other things Charles and Mary's romance is completely cut out, poor dears, much like in the miniseries, which makes the end of the book rather abrupt. (Something about Sylvia or Eiluned saying how Lord Peter's too much of a gentlemen to present himself to be thanked and Harriet will have to go to him herself, and Harriet is like, "Oh, I won't do that," and then silence and the listener goes "wait wut".)

    The Have His Carcase audiobook is a bit anxiety-making when one can tell that lots of things are being left out but one can't remember quite what. (I've only read the book through once, as it's long and difficult and I've only been a Wimsey convert for about a year.) Though there's a very amusing bit, I remember, in the middle or near the end, when Lord Peter receives a prettified copy of the coded letter found on the body from the police, and he takes it to Harriet, and talks to her a little teeny bit about what sort of code he thinks it might be...and then he takes off to go see a man about a horse or something, and he comes back the next day and Harriet has cracked the fucking thing by herself. She sits on the floor and reads the decoded letter to Lord Peter. It's amazing.

    I love Edward Petherbridge's rendition of Harriet. It's so soft and husky and just a little bit breathy. Deeper than his Peter-voice.

    What was I going to say? Oh, yes. I haven't heard any audiobooks of Gaudy Night. I can't listen to Ian Carmichael be involved with Gaudy Night. He's just not romantically appealing in the least, and Gaudy Night is a special special thing to me. (I almost recall something about the Carmichael version having Joanna David involved? Was it dramatised? Sigh, my memory, she is barely civil to me.)

    I haven't heard the Petherbridge version either, partly because it's gosh-derned difficult to get one's hands on and partly because apparently it lasts two hours.
    Two hours.
    Gaudy Night.
    Gaudy Night in two hours.
    I don't even....how? Not even the miniseries managed to cut it down that bad. I mean, what did they do to get it that short? What could be left? What is even the point?

    I'll probably still find it sometime, though. What time I do devote to morbidity and literary masochism, to be sure.

    I'm sorry this letter/post is so jerky and wandering. I have a cold. I think I mentioned that earlier. I need somebody to make me tea and everyone is either off grocery shopping, at work or useless at teamaking. Sigh.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Audible 1

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I was screwing around on audible.com - you know, the audiobook site - and wishing I had the spare money for a subscription when I looked you up in their search engine.

    I was happy to see that you'd performed Hard Times by Dickens, because I'm reading it right now. Hate that yours is abridged, though. Bleh.

    Then I saw that you'd also done Rebecca by that du Maurier woman. I think I'd heard something of the sort before, and wasn't too happy about it because I wanted to hear it but I'm also not super fond of the story. (I haven't read the book, but I've seen the Hitchcock movie and also the miniseries as had Jeremy Brett starring. You were totally in that miniseries, too! It was one of your earliest screen things! You were a maid with a Yorkshire accent and you got really upset and I have photographic proof that you and Jeremy Brett were once in the same room together, which just makes me insanely happy.)




    Anyway so Audible has this thing where one can listen to excerpts from the work one is interested in, so I listened to the provided bit from Rebecca and it was a part early on in the story and I got to hear you play Mrs van Hopper. You. Mrs van Hopper. American accent. It was so incredibly weird I thought I was having a hallucination from, like, this cold I have. You totally did not sound like yourself! I am so making my sister listen to that excerpt when she gets home. I've texted her about it already.

    (I told you that I have a picture of you as my cell phone background, right?)

Thursday, January 20, 2011

The Price

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Yessss!

    I totally just found The Price (1985) on youtube!

    I did last night, anyway. The joy has not worn off yet. I watched the first episode with my sister.

    YOUR HAIR WAS SO AMAZING AUGH.


    You were wearing a FEDORA.


    And you wore a white suit with a WHITE BOWTIE. And you looked RIDICULOUSLY ADORABLE.


   You managed to make the line "I can't stand the way you brush your teeth" sound like SERIOUS BUSINESS.


who is a fox? you is a fox.
    I've wanted to see it since I read about it and the whole kidnapping scene thing in your book Other People's Shoes, which was a while ago!
    So happy.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Paton Walsh

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    An innocent friend of mine who knows I love Dorothy Sayers has gotten me A Presumption of Death for Christmas, along with another couple books.

    I probably could have been a little bit more gracious about it. My brain just snapped into "hrrrrrmmmm" mode.

    Hrrrrrmmmmm.

    She meant well. I know those books get good reviews a lot of the time. From the professionals. I've never met any fans who actually like the things. Actually I've seen some pretty strong dislike coming from fans.

    Lack of fan enthusiasm is actually the reason I haven't read any of Jill Paton Walsh's attempted Lord Peter books yet, that and picking Thrones, Dominations up off a library shelf, reading a couple pages in the middle and getting extremely bad vibes. Something is wrong here, I thought to myself. Subtly but seriously, seriously wrong.

    I s'pose I'll try the book. I didn't have to pay for it and I don't have any library deadlines, at least. I know it's terribly bad form to trash a book or series of books without giving them a chance.

    But still. Hrrrrmmmm.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Cat Among the Pigeons

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I watched Poirot: Cat Among The Pigeons with my sister last night because you were in it.

    My sister was like "I want to go to the school where Harriet Walter is the headmistress"

    And I was like "and they wear those awesome uniforms"

    and she was like "mmmm"

    and we were in perfect accordance.

yes please.
                                                    


(screencaps from here)

Monday, January 17, 2011

holiday bread

(written at a previous date)

    I can smell orange peels boiling. The smell is coming from a large pot on the stovetop; the lid of the stove is steamy and sitting askew.

    My mother must finally be making her holiday bread.

    I'm knitting a soft scarf. The half-finished scarf is red, deep red. It has lttle wavy ridges and lovely little yarnover holes.

    I'm secretly afraid that I will never be able to fall in love with a real person because I will always be thinking in the back of my mind, "he's just not Fred Astaire."

    I've never been in love with anyone real.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

rotten

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Leaving aside such independent variables as tiredness, cold and hunger, is there any fouler way to be in a truly rotten mood than both being in a truly rotten mood and having "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" stuck in one's head?

    I have serious doubts.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

sleepwear

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Damp pajama bottoms are horrific. It's a kind of betrayal. One spends fourteen exhausting hours in too-tight clothing and one wishes to slip into one's super-comfy tartan lumberjacky jams at the end of the  day, and then they are insufficiently dry because one's sister did the laundry this time and failed at it.

    Fourteen hours in the wrong bra is also horrific.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Star Trek

 (written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    One of my favorite things to do is as follows:

    Step 1: Go over to my best friend's house.
    Step 2: Watch an episode of the original Star Trek series with her (she's seen almost all of those) and/or her sister and/or my sister as well.
    Step 3: Come home and, when I next see my mom that evening, say to her, "So we watched an episode of Star Trek at Best Friend's."
    Step 4: Mom always, always says "Oh yeah? Which one?"
    Step 5: Fail to remember the episode title and summarize the episode in the absolute sparest, vaguest terms I can think of. (Such as "Like, there were alien shenanigans and Kirk and Spock went back in time and there was this girl," or "There was this alternate universe and Spock had, like, a goatee.")
    Step 6: See how long it takes her to figure out which episode I'm talking about and declare the episode title. (She was a huge Trekkie back in the day. Huuuuuge.)

    The last time I did this, the conversation was like

    Me: So we watched an episode of Star Trek over at Best Friend's.
    Mom: Oh yeah? Which one?
    Me: Umm, I dunno what it was called*, but they were, like, abducted, and then there was this guy in a silly coat.
    [three seconds pass]
    Mom: TRELANE
    Me: Yeah that was it

    I love what a nerd my mother was in her youth.

*This is honest. I hadn't been paying attention at the beginning of the episode due to knitting difficuties.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Facebook

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    When I registered on Facebook many months ago my dad recommended that I never show it my heart, or something to that effect. For various reasons.

    I wish my semi-friend - let us call her K - had been given that advice.

    It's embarassing to see people post statuses sagging with angst and whining over how they miss or dream about an indeterminate "you".

    I seriously hope she doesn't wonder why nobody responds to those statuses, because they are of a nature too private for social comment.

     I'll just have to imagine that K is talking to you, Dame Harriet.

    I'm so glad my best friend hasn't gotten into Boy Complications yet. Maybe soon, but not so far.

    (Best Friend is a class act, by the way. She and I once had a heated argument about what the word "gargoyle" meant for about 45 minutes at our pastor's digs because we'd both shown up for youth group too early by accident and had to find a way to pass the time. Three different dictionaries were consulted and she made some very insulting comments as to the relative qualities of said dictionaries, as the one that agreed with her definition was a Merriam-Webster. She nearly exploded with futile rage when I said "But this one is right because it agrees with me!" because I'm a bitch. Eventually we ended up arguing the definition of "definition", but thankfully by then people had arrived and we could get on to the snacks and couch-claiming and interactive sermon.)

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Fred and Ginger

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    A few things about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers:

    -I just found the song "The Whichness of the Whatness" as performed by Fred and his sister Adele on Youtube and it is basically dripping with awesome.  The "aaaaaah!" noise kills me every time. I had no idea Adele's voice was so scary-high, but I got used to it. She was probably mostly affecting it anyway. Fashions and whatnot. Like Snow White. Ew. I wonder what she sounded like when she was speakin' like a normal person.

    -If Fred and Adele were English, not siblings, and (as far as Adele goes) more reasonably pitched on the vocal front, they would be such a fantastic Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. For serious.



Look at them. Look at how fabulous they are. Look.




    -The slo-mo dream sequence dance that Fred and Ginger do after "Colorblind" in Carefree is the greatest thing ever.

    -I've heard a few different versions of the fiasco that happened when Fred and Ginger were filming Top Hat and they had to do "Cheek to Cheek" and Ginger wanted to wear her freakish blue feathery thing as a gown and Fred was like "wtf no" (basically), but I have today found a favorite:

    "Although Bernard Newman was in charge of dressing the stars, Rogers was very interested in dress design and make-up. For the 'Cheek to Cheek' dance routine, she wanted to use her own creation. Astaire (who normally approved his partner's gowns and suggested modifications, if necessary, during rehearsals) saw the dress for the first time on the day of the shoot, and was horrified at the way it shed, recalling later: 'It was like a chicken attacked by a coyote, I never saw so many feathers in my life.' Astaire lost his temper and yelled at Rogers, who burst into tears, where her mother 'came charging at him like a mother rhinoceros protecting her young.' An additional night's work by seamstresses fixed the problem. Later, Astaire presented Rogers with a gold feather for her charm bracelet, and serenaded her with a parody of Berlin's tune:

Feathers — I hate feathers

And I hate them so that I can hardly speak

And I never find the happiness I seek

With those chicken feathers dancing

Cheek to Cheek."



    I have no idea if any of that is true, and I have serious doubts, but I don't even care. I would slaughter infants to be able to hear Fred sing that song.

    -I don't normally care about clothes more than your average 18-year-old who's figuring out her tastes in apparel, and I don't even care about this particular dress that much, but the gown Ginger wears in "The Continental" (from The Gay Divorcee, which is lame except for the musical numbers) is definitely not black and white (if you compare it to Fred's clothes, you can tell) and I want to know what colors it was so badly I may go insane. I will be like a Lovecraft hero if Lovecraft heroes were fashionably-minded.

what is that. WHAT.
                                                
    -I want to own a tailored-to-fit-me replica of the "Colorblind" dress. And a flappy cloak. Possibly like the cape that goes with the "Never Gonna Dance" dress.

     And then I want to stand on a breezy clifftop and be visually dramatic.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Order! Order!

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Dude!

    I know I'm, like, a week late to the party, but I just found out that you got your Order upgraded in the New Year Honours for services to drama the other day!

    Congratufuckinglations!

    "Dame Commander". Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. It's so nifty I just want to puke blood and sunshine and happiness.

    "Dame Harriet Walter". Like, totally equal to Dame Judi Dench or Dame What's-her-face. SO. AWESOME.

    (I think I'll have to be totally rude and keep writing to you with "Dear Harriet Walter," though. "Dear Dame Harriet Walter (DBE)" just hasn't got quite the same ring to it.)

    YAY! <3

victory

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Last night was a historic, historic night.

    Historic.

    Eighteen years I have lived on the wrong side of a series of glass boxes.

    Eighteen years I have raged. Seethed. Screamed curses at the sky.

    Imagine a balloon, an ordinary red balloon. Imagine it being pumped up with pure frustration and hope until it cannot hold any more, and explodes, and falls down to the dirty supermarket floor, defeated, collapsed, aching with failure. A failure that is not its fault. A failure that is the fault of the useless metal claw within the glass box, which falls and stays and rises and clamps back unto itself halfway back up its fucking rise to the ceiling of the glass box.

    I am that balloon. I have seen all my hopes and desires sit within those glass boxes, unmoving, untouchable, mocking me with their loveliness. Mocking me with my failure. Saying, somebody else will succeed, I shall escape my prison, but you will not be the one to succeed, because you cannot succeed. You will never succeed. Never, never, never.

    Guess what, you little bitches?

    I have done it.

    I have seized one of your fellows from his rest atop a strangely green Tweety Bird and the head of that slut Betty Boop (wearing a Santa hat) and a friendly owl whose eyes were glazed with death and unintelligent love.

    I have claimed the soft orange fox, and his large, startled eyes could not be more appropriate within the context of last night.

    I have done it.

    I have beaten the claw machine.

Monday, January 10, 2011

nutrition

******EDIT 7-21-11: this post is so annoying and loud that it makes me want to punch myself in the face so I have erased it because I can

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Swing Time/Top Hat

(written at a previous date)

   Dear Harriet Walter,

    I'm confused. I've been thinking about the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies Swing Time (someyearinthethirties) and Top Hat (alsosomeyearinthethirties). They're generally considered the two best of the ten Fred 'n Ginger flicks, and different people are always saying one of the two is the best followed by the other. I thought once I saw them both I would have a definite opinion on the debate which would automatically negate everybody else's opinions but I don't.

    Like, Top Hat has a tighter plot, better characters and a better supporting cast...but Swing Time has such damn fine musical numbers.

    Honestly Swing Time is a bit like a mosaic, with the plot forming the grout which frames and holds together the interesting bits which are the musical numbers.


    Also, seeing as the two numbers are basically parallel (at least in my mind), I have to say that Ginger's white swirly gown in "Never Gonna Dance" (from Swing Time) is SO MUCH BETTER than Ginger's gown in "Cheek to Cheek" (from Top Hat). I mean that awful feathery creation is just such an...object!


totally awesome, classy and gorgeous and so on


komondor had sex with an ostrich and their baby was a yeti and it lived in a haystack and ginger murdered it and wore its skin as an evening gown

    (Later PS: Have just learned that the white Swing Time gown was in fact light pink. Am shattered.)

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Breakfast at Tiffany's

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's with my sister a few months ago.

    At the end when everything was being all rainy and dramatic/romantic, the camera was watching the guy playing Paul (George Peppard or whatever) and he was saying something dramatic and acting as a Romantic Lead and stuff and I just don't know.

    I was like "I wish this guy was Ryan Reynolds."

    My sister was like "YESSS"

    And I was like "LIKE HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE"

    Just think about it.

Friday, January 7, 2011

cocoa

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Here is my recipe for Badass Hot Cocoa.

    Twoish heaped spoonfuls of storebought hot cocoa mix
    Oneish heaped spoonful unsweetened baking cocoa
    Fourish or fiveish vigorous shakings of cinnamon powder (unsweetened?)
    Threeish shakings of nutmeg
    (add very hot water)
    One and a half squeezes of chocolate syrup
    (stir)
    One precisely calculated dash of milk, just enough to make the hot cocoa drinkable but not so much that it ends up cold sooner than you're warm
    (stir)
    Top with marshmallow or two and whipped cream
    Replace whipped cream twice throughout course of beverage

    And that is my recipe for Badass Hot Cocoa.

    (Later footnote: I've been going a little more minimalist lately - the mix, water, cinnamon, syrup, marshmallow and whipped cream are the real essentials.)

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Chem lab

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Today (11/23/10) has been One Of Those Days so far. If I didn't have a sense of humor and a proper appreciation of quality pathos, days like this would just send me over the brink like a protagonist in an H.P. Lovecraft story.

    I won't go into painstaking detail, but it's worth noting that I did not get enough sleep at all, my contacts refused to get along with my eyes leaving said eyes blithering with pain and irritation and redness and weepery and I had to resort to my super ugly glasses, almost all the other schools and universities in the state are delayed or closed because of the weather but HERE in this town it's just cold enough to make the world absolutely frigid but not icy/snowy enough to merit the academic cry to abandon ship. (I suppose at this point I should clarify something - I'm no longer in high school, I was homeschooled all my life, I'm going to college next year, a year later than most people go to college, and I'm taking a chemistry class at my local uni to have another science credit on my homeschool transcript. Chemistry lab was where I was headed today.)
    By all the God-fearing lemurs of the earth, it was cold outside. No numbers to brag about, really, just cold and penetrating, the kind of cold that makes one's eyeballs ache and one's overlong nose turn red and drip something fierce, like a tomato golem who's just been stabbed lots like Julius Caesar.

    Oh, it was snowing a little when I was walking to campus, too. Pretty, delicate, Hollywood snow that is all like "hahaha look at me I am so innocuous, I could never do anyone harm, you are just a shivering weakling" because I am something of a shivering weakling, I really don't think I produce as much body heat as everyone else does, like I'll take people's recently vacated computer chairs and be like "is your ass a hot water bottle by any chance, this chair is super warm" but anyway.

    So I got to chemistry lab. My lab partner never showed up, so I had to work with someone else whose partner was also not there, and I can't really blame the people who skipped because today we were analyzing urine.

    It was synthetic urine, of course, but I still really do not care to relive that part in detail. I am not a person comfortable with bodily fluids even if they have never been inside a body.
    One point, though. I think I mentioned H.P. Lovecraft protagonists before. I will carry that simile.

    There was a moment, at the end, when we were cleaning up. Different Lab Partner - we will call her BD - was throwing away the droppers and pH papers and things, and I was rinsing out the test tubes containing our urine samples. (We'd had to do six tests, so that ends up as twelve tubes, six small six large.)
    You know that moment in Lovecraft stories - I am assuming you've read them because it saves me explaining - when the hero has been through some scary stuff already and he's wavering a bit, and the climax comes when the guy sees/hears/interacts with/whatever something so wrong, so literally unfathomable, so blasphemous and shattering and awful that he simply cannot process it, and his mind breaks and then there's all the shrieking and flailing and fleeing into the night and so on? That was what it was like when I tipped over one of the large test tubes into the sink, one of the samples we'd heated in warm water for a few minutes, and nothing happened.
    I shook the tube. I ran water into the tube. Nothin' doin'.
    "Becca," I croaked to BD as she returned from dumping things in the trash. "I'm scared." I shook the tube as it was upside down again to illustrate.
    "Oh," she said. "That's gross."
    It was a bit hazy from there on. I remember BD got me a little wire scrub-brush from the other DI sink, and I thanked her and used it and the congealed urine began to come out of the tube in clots, and I died a little inside and kept cleaning tubes.
    There was only the one completely solid sample, but it was the first one I did. The unheated samples were still totally liquid, of course, and some of the heated ones were liquid with occasional clots.

    By now, I am coherent enough to write, obviously, and this is because I have had a very hot hot cocoa with extra hot, and I have listened to a couple old songs sung by Fred Astaire because Fred Astaire is the bomb. I talked to my parents about the lab, because they know I have Issues, but writing is my natural creative medium and I have recently decided that creative expression is probably going to be my most powerful weapon against insanity.

    (I have also recently decided that insanity comes in many, many forms.)

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Macbeth

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    My mom asked the room in general today what the tiny little package as came in the mail was. My sister asked where said package had come from, and my mom said she believed it came from the UK.

    Naturally, the words "package" and "UK" make a combination which tends to seize me by the ears, being as it is that they are two of my favorite things and the best packages I ever get always come from the UK.

    Sure enough, the tiny little package turned out to be a copy of your book on Macbeth! I knew it wasn't going to be a huge book but great Scott this thing is tiny, tiny and delicate and holding it makes me feel like a zombie gorilla manhandling a butterfly. Fantastic picture of you on the cover, too.



    I believe I shall begin reading it now. I ought to be working on my prelab report for class tomorrow but I think I'll only do that once I've eaten. (said she, waiting for her mother to get done cooking like an extremely useless lump which cannot feed its own damn self)

    (PS, the author bio thing in the front flap claims that you have "contributed several essays and articles to other drama publications" and I just want you to know that it causes me near-physical pain that I don't know how to get my hands on these essays and articles in other drama publications)

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

dogbrain

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Have you ever seen somebody digging and scrabbling in the cracks between large cushions and things to recover something small they lost or think they've lost down there?

    I think that's what my dog is doing right now.

    And he's looking for his mind.

    I think it fell out some long-gone day before this.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Petherbridge!

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I've discovered that all kinds of bridges become all kinds of better when you add the prefix -Pether- to them.
    For example!

    The Petherbridges of Madison County
    Petherbridge of Birds
    Golden Gate Petherbridge
    Petherbridge to nowhere
    Petherbridge of the gods
    Complete and unapetherbridged
    Dental petherbridge
    Hands across the petherbridge
    Rainbow petherbridge
    Petherbridge of Sighs
    Petherbridge & Burn
    petherbridge failures
    petherbridge clubs
    petherbridging world history
    petherbridging between joists
    movable petherbridge
    pigtail petherbridge
    segmental petherbridge
    covered petherbridge
    wooden petherbridge
    burning one's petherbridges
    petherbridgeable
    to cross a petherbridge when one comes to it
    The Petherbridge on the River Kwai


    And oh so many more.

    Don't even mention Benedict Cumberbatch to me.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

novelist

(written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    When I was seven, I decided that one day I would be a Novelist. This key moment came after my family read the first Harry Potter book, and Ms Rowling made it look so easy, at least to my empty blue eyes.

    It's the one ambition I have never given up on or decided against.

    In a way, it's shaped my life so far. My mother tells me I have a gift for writing, making it the one and only talent I might have except for being able to wiggle my littlest toes. Not that I even write much at all, though I've been doing a little bit more and a little bit more over the past few months.

    But the odd thing is I've always been straight up dead centered on the notion that I am going to be a Big Thing. Originally it was just a Popular Thing like Rowling, but as my brain has grown it's become a Big Thing. An author so good, so brilliant and hilarious and devastating that oceans would crumble at my name. Pulitzer Prize winner on my first novel. Nobel prize winner on my fifth. Dying children would beg for me to have tea with them as their Make-a-Wish wish. I would write for all age groups, in any genre I wanted, and publishers would lap it all up. I would be a sort of literary Prometheus, bringing light and hope and great wisdom and the all the fires of joy and despair and aching survival to the minds of thousands. Serious Business.

    I'm only just now really questioning that but-of-course-I'm-going-to attitude, the manufactured destiny. (I'm 18 years old by now, so that's fair impressive.) I know I'm extremely underripe as a person, and I haven't really experienced much yet, but I can't help imagining myself, 37 years old, flipping burgers in the sewers to earn a living, alone and dead inside and sometimes wondering what happened to my dreams and certainties.

    It's not like I work hard at my writing, either. Is developing as a person enough to be doing? As I write that, the little voice in my head says DO BOTH like the demanding little bitch that it is.

    And then my dreams come out from behind the clouds again and they're like oh shit, when you ARE super rich and famous and adored people are gonna look into you and find this blog and that will not be a good thing, look at all this dreck I blather out

Saturday, January 1, 2011

scribble

 (written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I have a habit of writing things down on my hands when I'm going to bed and don't want to forget something. Now this is a relatively normal thing, I know, as lots of people do it during the day, but it gets better when you realize that I write these things in the dark when I am mostly asleep.

    I can't always remember what I was thinking when I wrote the things. For example, one time I woke up with the words "sexual deadline" on my left palm. I don't know whether this was just a phrase I thought of and liked or a complaint or a threat or what.

    Another time, a few weeks ago I woke up and the words "who voiced the Wart?" were on there, which was really fucking disturbing until I remembered that I'd realized in my slumbering stupor that in Disney's movie The Sword in the Stone (based on the first part of, what hey, The Once & Future King) the character of the Wart/young Arthur sounds completely different in the beginning from how he does in, say, the fish scene, or the whole rest of the damn movie. And I'd wanted to look the movie up and see if he had more than one voice actor. (He had three.)

    And today I woke up and saw upon my forearm, mostly rubbed away, the following passage:

    A sickened, sensitive shadow, writhing in hands that were not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low

    Yes, children, this is the danger of reading H.P. Lovecraft before bed. You wake up and you have lines from "Nyarlathotep" scrawled on your goddamn body.

    I love books.