lily_handmaiden

This is the concluding chapter of my account of my trip to England.

For my last stop, I went to the city of Bath with Whitney, Tiffany, and Jenaba (celtic_songster). We took the train from Stratford, which was... adventurous. Let's just say, it's not easy getting four people and all of their luggage through three train stops to a final destination. And then once we got to that destination, we lugged our luggage all the way across central Bath, lost a good deal of the way. At one point I had to stop and exclaim to the heavens, "WHY ARE THERE NO F***ING STREET SIGNS IN THIS F***ING COUNTRY?" But we did at last figure out where we were, and shortly after that figured out how to get to our B&B. 

After we had stowed our luggage and laid on our beds drenched in sweat for a while, burning off the exhaustion, we were able to go out and actually appreciate the beaty of the city, and Bath is beautiful. It was about 8:30 or 9 by this time, so we cast about for someplace to stop and eat that was not too smoky and not too expensive and close by. We finally settled on a groovy European Pizza Hut, where we had pizza topped with grilled chicken and goat cheese, had quesadilla apetizers that were stuffed with pepperoni, and had delicious ice cream cake for dessert. It was pretty awesome. As in the old days, the entire population of Bath seemed that night to be entirely made up of old people and teenagers. The teenagers loved hanging out at the Groovy Pizza Hut.

The next day we boarded a double-decker bus and rode on the top in the rain, for which we blame Jenaba. We went to the Jane Austen Centre, which was really cool, at least for me-- they had costumes from the new ITV Persuasion and the '99 Mansfield Park, and they had cool Regency and Georgian Stuff, and they had one of Jane Austen's letters to Cassandra... yeah, I'm a dork. I could have bought that whole gift shop. By the time we came out of the Centre, it had cleared up and turned into a lovely day. We next went to the Roman Baths, which were so cool. It was just unbelievable how long they had been there-- that that place had been sacred since before the Romans came to Britain. If there was a real basis for King Arthur, he probably came there-- the Battle of Badon Hill was probably in the surrounding area. And right next door was Bath Abbey, which was very pretty from the outside-- we didn't go in because we didn't have that much money left and we decided we didn't want to pay. Then we went to the Assembly Rooms and Museum of Costume. The Assembly Room itself-- the Ball Room, anyway, was closed for renovations, but the Octagon Room and the Tea Room were open, and I was in heaven. Because Jane Austen hung out there. Her fictional characters did, too. And it was gorgeous, of course. The Costume Museum was also really cool, and I we got to try on corsets and hoop skirts again-- I found a corset that would make my waist go as small as it could actually go, so that was fun. 

After that we just walked around Bath. We went to the Royal Crescent, and we walked on the Gravel Walk, and down Milsom Street, and Union Street, and the Circus. I will say again, though I can't say enough, that Bath is so beautiful, especially places like the Circus and the Crescent. And these were places I've read about a lot, and matters of fictional import took place on them, so that was just such fun. In the words of Rudyard Kipling in his story "The Janeites," "If you’d been initiated then,” he says, “you’d ha’ felt your flat feet tingle every time you walked over those sacred pavin’-stones."

We also went to Victoria Park, which has one of the coolest playgrounds I've ever seen. The next day we did more walking around and shopping. We rode around on the double-decker bus-- actually we rode around in circles a couple of time because the bus wouldn't stop where we wanted, even though Tiffany kept pressing the button, and we were pretty sure we were going to have to ride it for eternity. Actually, the audio tour on the bus is pretty amusing. From the lady on the recording, we learned about Prince Frederick of Wales, who got dead from tennis ball, and about how the most dangerous place in town is the beginners' golf course, and about how "Jane Austen came to bath in 1801, and has been good for tourism ever since." We laughed really hard right there and nobody else did... oh, well. We got it. We also saw Laura Place and Pulteney Bridge that day, plus lots of great shops.

By the way, I'm pretty sure that our B&B room was haunted, because when I was half-awake the night before we left, I kept hearing the floor creak over and over in the same place like somebody was pacing over it, but we were all in bed. That would also maybe explain why our bathroom kept smelling like smoke. I told Jenaba this in the morning, and she was very glad I had not told her beforehand.

We caught an exceptionally early train out of Bath, dealt with all of the horrible luggage transfers again, and made it to Heathrow before anyone in our group, so HA! Well done us. I would like to take this opportunity to say to my travel companions that I love you guys and thank you for roaming England with me. It was wonderful.

Can I go back now?

I am back from England! Where I had probably the most amazing time of my life, ever! 

I have been back for about a week, and I have so many things to cover!
*the trip itself
*the awesomeness of the last three Office episodes (sqeeeee!)
*the awesomeness of PotC: AWE (whooooo!)
*the suckiness of my job hunt, which I suppose you can go ahead and read about over here.

Other than that, I have decided on the order of addressing these things: first the trip, in three entries spaced closely together, then The Office, then Pirates-- or possibly both in one entry.

Normally I don't talk about my real life on my lj, but I have a feeling I'm going to wax a bit long for my blog community, so this is where this is going.

Jane lies in Winchester-- blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, Love, and Honour unto England's Jane!
-Kipling, "The Janeites"

Today is Jane Austen's 231st birthday. For some time now one of my lj tags has been "jane austen pwns you." I am going to take this opportunity to show you a little bit of why this is so.

Jane pioneered the art of making the everyday extraordinary. She knew people very well, and she wrote them just as they were. That is why her works have lasted so long. You can still recoginze people you know in the form of Lucy Steele, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Catherine Morland, and so on and so on. She created such wonderful characters. There was a point when I was reading Northanger Abbey that I got so angry and frustrated with John and Isabella Thorpe that I had to put the book down and fume. Because I knew people like that, and they had done things like that to me, and I wanted to whack them upside the head. I have also, many times, laughed out loud reading Jane-- and that's not something that even I do very frequently with "the classics."

It's not very widely known these days, but Jane is actually hilarious. In Rudyard Kipling's story "The Janeites," about a group of soldiers who had formed a secret Jane Austen society, one character says this: "...they'd begin, as often as not, on this Secret Society woman I was tellin' you of-- this Jane. She was the only woman I ever 'eard 'em say a good word for. 'Cordin' to them Jane was a none-such. I didn't know then she was a Society." That quote cracks me up, partly because it puts so plainly what is just perfectly true. You may not believe me when I say Jane Austen is hilarious, because you don't go in for the romantic comedy of manners laced with affectionate satire and snark. So let me show you this.

This is an excerpt from a piece of Jane's Juvenilia. It was written when she was about fifteen, and it's like something a really clever fifteen-year-old would write. It's from a... novella, I guess... called "Love and Freindship," a parody of the romantic novels of the day. It might be useful to point out that fainting and running mad were favorite pasttimes of heroines in these novels. When they disovered their husbands to be dead or unfaithful, the would a) faint instantly, recover only to faint again, repeat as necessary, or b) scream and fall into a hysterical fit, recover briefly, become hysterical again, repeat as necessary. Here a carriage has just been overturned on the road, and the two young ladies who act as heroines realize that the victims of the accident were their long-lost husbands.

"Sophia shreiked and fainted on the ground-- I screamed and instantly ran mad--. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation-- Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves. Had we indeed before imagined that either of them lived, we should have been more sparing of our Greif-- but as we had aupposed when we first beheld them that they were no more, we knew that nothing could remain to be done but what we were about. ... I was overjoyed to find him yet sensible. 
'Oh! tell me Edward (said I) tell me I beseech you before you die, what has befallen you since that unhappy Day in which Augustus was arrested and we were separated--'
'I will,' (said he) and instantly fetching a deep sigh, Expired--. Sophia immediately sunk again into a swoon--. My greif was more audible. My Voice faltered, My Eyes assumed a vacant stare, my face became as pale as Death, and my senses were considerably impaired--.
'Talk not to me of Phaetons (said I, raving in a frantic, incoherent manner)-- Give me a violin--. I'll play to him and soothe him in his melancholy Hours-- Beware ye gentle Nymphs of Cupid's Thunderbolts, avoid the piercing shafts of Jupiter-- Look at that grove of Firs-- I see a Leg of Mutton-- They told me Edward was not Dead; but they deceived me-- they took him for a cucumber--' Thus I continued wildly exclaiming on my Edward's Death--. For two Hours did I rave thus madly and should not then have left off, as I was not in the least fatigued, had not Sophia who was just recovered from her swoon, intreated me to consider that Night was no approaching and that the Damps began to fall."

Is that not wonderfully goofy stuff? And it is awesome because I wrote things like that (maybe not that clever) when I was fifteen! I write things like that now! If I do things like this, how very easy it is to imagine teenaged Jane trying to repress laughter while reading this out loud in a highly dramatic manner to her sister!

Here is another bit of Juvenilia from the brilliant "History of England, by a Partial, Prejudiced, and Ignorant Historian," which reminds me of a mix of Monty Python and Dave Barry Slept Here, A Sort-Of History of the United States. In this work, Jane's overall goal is to try to make Mary Queen of Scots out to be a martyr at the hands of her cruel and inhumane cousin Elizabeth. This is from the section on Henry VIII, "whose only merit was his not being quite so bad as his daughter Elizabeth."

"The Crimes and Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned, (as this history I trust has fully shown;) and nothing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motive for his doing it, since otherwise why should a Man who was of no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for ages been established in the Kingdom. His Majesty's 5th Wife was the Duke of Norfolk's Neice who, tho' universally acquitted of the crimes for which she was beheaded, has been by many people supposed to have led an abandoned life before her Marriage-- of this however I have many doubts, since she was a relation of that noble Duke of Norfolk who was so warm in the Queen of Scotland's cause, and who at last fell victim to it. The Kings last wife contrived to survive him, but with difficulty effected it."

When I first decided to do this post, I had just finished Persuasion, Jane's last novel. I read it shortly after I read the Juvenilia, actually, and how much she had matured during her life, the sort of bittersweetness of Persuasion-- especially if the story if the Great Unknown, the man who met Jane Austen (at Lyme, I believe) and would have married her but died before he could, is true-- is so stirring. Here are some excerpts of what I'm talking about.

"Half the sum of attraction,  on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love."

"She left it all behind her; all but the recollection that such things had been."

"One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-- which was by no means the case at Lyme."

"No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as-- if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."

Mixed with the humor of such lines as:

"One likes to hear what is going on, to be au fait as to the newest modes of being trifling and silly."

And the romance of:

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tel me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you."

Let me state the obvious for a moment: What a range.

She's such a fascinating woman. And because of the way she writes, on such a personal level, forming a relationship with the reader, we all think of her as our friend. Our friend Jane. This is why her fans are called Janeites, not Austenites, usually. We feel like we know her-- which, of course, we don't. No one living today will ever completely know the whole truth of who Jane Austen was as a person. But we all know a little bit, the little bit that we connect to so intimately through her writing.

Let me quote Kipling once more: "There's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place. Gawd bless 'er, whoever she was."

Yes. God bless her, whoever she was.

Happy Birthday, Jane!

  

First of all, I finally finished reading and summarizing all of the articles I had for the SGGK research project! Huzzah! There were over 120 of them, and I did not think there was much of a chance of my getting through them all. But I did! This means I have done my job for the summer, and my conscience is much more clear on this topic than it has been in a long, long time! Also, I am dead from overanalysis.

A short time ago, I went with Whitney to see Snakes on a Plane. I have to say, Whitney was probably the best person hands down to see it with, because she also likes to talk and laugh during movies and we have similar senses of humor.

There was no way we were going to take this movie seriously. There is no way we could have even if we had wanted to. The script was just... so bad. So bad that it circled back around and became wonderful. I keep trying to explain this to people and they don't understand: it's horrible, yes. But it's horrible in a good way. 

You've got to love a movie with a premise this ridiculous. Come on, they say "I can't believe I'm about to say this, but..." twice! TWICE IN ONE MOVIE! And that's exactly the kind of humor the movie needs to float.

SPOILERS AHEAD! I'M NOT GOING TO PUT IN A CUT, BEWARE OF SPOILERS!

So, it starts out with Some Guy motorbiking through some jungle. He happens upon Eddie Kim's Asian Assasins assassinating some importnat prosecutor. Some Guy does not wait until the Asian Assassins leave the area, nor does he walk away quietly. He hops back on his little motorbike and careens through the brush while the dangerous men are still standing RIGHT THERE. So now they know they have to go get him.

Later, Some Guy is in his hotel or apartment or whatever, and Eddie Kim's Asian Assassins come to kill him for being stupid. But then Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson jumps in out of nowhere and is all badass and awesome and saves Some Guy, who reveals himself as Some Bad Actor. "Do what I tell you and you live," says Sam Jackson, as we will be reminded fifty billion times throughout the movie. "Don't move, don't even breathe." Then they run away, and Sam Jackson is like, "Why are you such an idiot?" And Some Bad Actor is like, "I don't know?"

So then Sam Jackson interrogates Some Bad Actor, and finally gets him to admit that he saw Eddie Kim's Asian Assassins, even though SBA really doesn't want to testify because Eddie doesn't mess around with dealing out the revenge. He's basically a whiny bitch about it, and Sam Jackson is like, "Fool, you're not even making any sense!" And SBA is like, "I know, we'd better just move on to the snakes on the plane." And Sam Jackson is like, "Damn straight."

Also, Sam Jackson's character's name is Neville Flynn. I mention this because he looks and acts the least like a Neville Flynn out of anybody in the whole entire world.

At the airport, three stewardesses are boarding the Flight of Doom, making all kinds of comments which will become very ironic later. Their names are Grace, Tiffany, and Julianna Margulies. You can tell Julianna Margulies is the serious stewardess because she is wearing pants. It is Julianna's very last flight, and she really hopes it is not going to be the worst flight ever. Unfortunately, it is. Because FBI agent Sam Jackson and his peeps are taking over the entire first class section. 

Among the pissed off first-class passengers who now have to sit in coach are Some Rapper and his two bodygaurds, Kenan Thompson and Other Bodyguard, (Seriously, I did not catch half the names in this movie. ) and a Poor Man's Alicia Silverstone with a dog in her purse (the dog's name is Mary-Kate! I knew that one!) who is totally the same person as Tiffany the Stewardess. I swear, that part was double-cast. Other passengers include a Sweet Newlywed Couple, a Kickboxing Asian who we immediately assume to be evil because of Eddie Kim's Asian Assasins, two Cute Little Boys, Bitchy Old Man, Gross Slutty Couple, and Hispanic Woman With Baby. Sam Jackson introduces SBA to his partner and special friend, who he clearly has very strong feelings of some sort for. The pilots' names are Rick, aka That Guy from Anchorman, and First Pilot. 

There is a funny scene in which Tiffany comes and flirts with SBA, even though for all she knows he is a dangerous wanted criminal. She seems slightly let down when he tells her he's just going to LA to testify. "Have you ever heard of Eddie Kim?" She's apparently not the brightest bulb, 'cause she's all ,"Yeah, I heard that once he gouged out the eyeballs of a witness who testified against him and fed them to ravens just like that scene at the beginning of the new Pirates of the Caribbean, wasn't that gross, why do you ask?" "...he's the... guy I'm testifying... against..." "Oh... Awkward."

At some point, SBA tells Sam Jackson that he doesn't seem like an FBI agent, and Sam Jackson is like, "Well, I don't seem like a Jedi either, but you know what? I motherf*cking am, bitch!"

Aaaaanyway, Eddie Kim has had the most devious plan. He wants to kill the guy on the plane. What would be the most logical way to do that? If your guess is: Place a crate full of exotic poisonous snakes in the cargo hold and rig the crate so that it opens at a certain time and lace the leis lying nearby with pheremones that will make the snakes really angry and wait for the snakes to bite the guy and kill him and/or bring down the entire plane, YOU ARE APPARENTLY CORRECT!

The snakes start crawling all through the plane and the passengers are all oblivious. The Slutty Gross Couple go into the bathroom to do the sex, which clearly means they are going to die, and the snakes come down and bite them in inappropriate places, and I could really have done without seeing that, but oh well. Some other guy goes to the other bathroom to use the facilities, and a snake bites him in an inappropriate place, which I could also have done without. It's just... unnecessary.
Then the snakes start crawling all through the plane and crawling into more inappropriate places. They also mess up the wiring, causing the plane to almost crash oh noes. So First Pilot goes down to fix the problem, and while he's down there a snake crawls up to Rick and is all "Hey, baby." And Rick freaks out and hits the console with it, and First Pilot is all, "Dude? Not helping!" He gets the problem fixed but then a snake bites him and Julianna Margulies and Rick are all, "He must have had a heart attack, woe!" They have Sam Jackson come in and examine him, because wouldn't you? And Sam Jackson confirms that yes, he is dead, and completely fails to notice the suspcious bite marks. Julianna is like, "Worst. Last. Flight. Ever."

Rick tries to fly the plane some more, but more bad stuff happens, and the oxygen masks come down, and with them, the snakes. EVERYBODY PANIC! About fifty extras die. Sam Jackson takes charge: "We have to put a barrier between us... and the snakes." So they try to build a luggage barrier, which doesn't hold for long. Two Cute Little Boys and Woman With Baby both get trapped behind the barrier, and Kickboxing Asian I think maybe saves the kids... somebody does, anyway. But the Littlest Boy is bitten. And Grace saves Woman with Baby and Baby, but gets bitten by snake. His arm starts to swell up grossly, but it turns out Woman With Baby has mad venom-sucking skillz and saves him. People make really inappropriate jokes about her sucking abilities. Why she does not save everyone else this way I do not know. Anyway, eventually Grace dies, and it is sad, becuase she could have taken early retirement blah blah blah heartstringcakes. And Woman With Baby is like, "It's okay, because you saved my baby, and she is a cute baby." And everyone is all, "Awwwww." Except for Julianna. "Worst. Last. Flight. Ever." She goes and cries and Sam Jackson comforts her and they bond.

In the second onslaught of snakes, Sweet Newlyweds and Sam Jackson's Special Friend die, and it is sad. They block the stairway with a life raft, which magically is just the right size. SBA is all, "I want to help!" and Sam Jackson is like, "This whole thing is to make sure you get to LA safely, so stop being a moron! Remember the first thing I said when I met you?" "Stop breathing?" "Good idea, but no-- besides that." SBA tries to save people anyway,especially Tiffany. Also, Mary-Kate the dog gets fed to this random GIANT SNAKE-CROCODILE HYBRID MUTANT. And then it also eats Bitchy Old Guy. Germophobic Rapper freaks out and takes Sam Jackson's gun and threatens to kill everybody, including his new girlfriend the Poor Man's Alicia Silverstone and the Cute Kids, but then Sam Jackson and Kenan Thompson tell him to calm the hell down.

Sam Jackson contacts his FBI friend, Will's Cop Boyfriend from Will and Grace. They have previously bantered about his wife and kids so we know he is not gay in this role. He is all, "I can't believe I'm about to say this, but... get the best poinsonous snake expert you can find on the phone RIGHT NOW." They do, and he's like, "Well, shit." They send him pictures via cameraphone, and he's like, "That's not even an actual species of snake! That's some giant snake-crocodile mutant hybrid!" They have to go to some venom dealer or something to get the antivenom for the foreign snakes, which should teach us all something about how unprepared U.S. hospitals are for snake attacks on planes.

The air stops circulating in the plane, which is bad because everybody could suffocate. Sam Jackson has to go into the cargo hold and fix it. Julianna Margulies can't go because she is  girrrrl. But she does lend Sam Jackson her homemade flamethrower, because fortunately she was a pyro as a child and still carries this thing around everywhere, especially to her place of employment. She talks to him via radio to tell him what to do. He's like, "This is really familiar... I feel like I've done this before... Except it was raptors instead of snakes... and I had hair... and instead of this flashlight in my mouth it was a cigarette... and it ended really, really badly." Fortunately, when he loses Julianna's flamethrower, he discovers that somebody has helpfully packed a harpoon gun in their luggage. Yeah, I totally take mine everywhere, too. He fixes the air.

But then Rick dies from snake. Woe. Julianna: "I can't believe I'm about to say this, but... does anybody know how to fly a plane?" Kenan will do it, because he has mad video game skillz. Sam Jackson has finally had it with these MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES on this MOTHERFUCKING PLANE. "It's time to open some windows." Wait... what? "It worked in Star Wars! It must work here, too!" So they totally break the windows of the plane so that the snakes will be sucked out and they all hold on tight and nobody suffocates or dies although the plane is crashing because it is no longer stable because you punched holes in it and for some reason you all thought this was a good idea.

Sam Jackson finds out that Kenan's only piloting experience is of the Playstation variety, and he gets that "I can't f*cking believe this," *facepalm* look on his face, and looks like he wants to beat Kenan senseless. But Kenan does manage to successfully land the idiot plane, and Sam is impressed and might make him an honorary Jedi.

At the very last minute, SBA The Very Important Witness looks like he gets bitten by snake and shot by Sam Jackson, but he had on a bulletproof vest. I bet it felt good for Sam Jackson to shoot him.

They get the antivenom to the bitten people who are not dead, and Sam Jackson realizes that it is now obligatory that he as Julianna Margulies out, just like at the end of Speed. She says yes. SBA asks Tiffany out and she says yes and gives him her number, and Sam Jackson is like, "OMG number! Dammit! How am I supposed to contact Julianna now? *facepalm*" And then he and SBA shake hands and he gives SBA the name of his acting coach and all is well.

And then SBA and Sam Jackson go surfing. What? No, seriously, they totally do.

Fin.

OMGSQUEE!

I just saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie and I'm on a complete piratey high! It was so good! And now I want to go around with a British accent which, in my head, I already am. Movies with British people do that to me.

I was afraid going in that I was going to be disappointed due to high expectations, because a lot of what made the first Pirates so wonderful was that you went in with no expectations, and were pleasantly surprised. But on the other hand, I am very hard to disappoint. Really, all I wanted was to be entertained and know what happened to these characters I like. And that I most certainly got.

And the special effects were really very amazing. Especially Davy Jones and the Kraken.

Okay, the movie was a bit too long (toward the end I was actually thinking, "Surely it has to be over soon?"), and the plot is definitely all over the place. But everything in it connects back to the first movie in some way, so that's good. Including the throwaway line, "And then they made me their chief." I think it helped a lot that I had seen the first movie again recently. I don't know what the Star reviewer was bitching about, it makes sense. I mean, I could probably do with seeing it a second time to figure out how all of the dots completely connect, but that's just because they connect rather quickly.

The ending is a complete cliffhanger, which I was expecting. But still, now I'm all anxious for the next movie. Perhaps this is what people felt like in 1980 after they saw Empire Strikes Back? The difference being that they had to wait three years for resolution, and we only have to wait less than one. I really hope they don't break up Elizabeth and Will. Because then I would be sad. It is fate, baby. Also, I really hope they explain decently how Barbossa is somehow not dead. They actually did explain what the deal was with Bootstrap Bill and the curse and all that. And the monkey was back! And I'm sure Keira was very happy that he had between one and zero scenes with her. And Scruffy!Norrington is very, very hot. He lost everything but his wig, poor man. Which brings me to a very important point:

THE EVIL EAST INDIA COMPANY MAN WAS MR. COLLINS! Tom Hollander from the latest P&P movie. This hit me suddenly in about the third scene he was in. In my head I was going, "He seems a little familiar... A little like... like... Ohmigod! No... It can't... is it? Is that.... I think it IS!" And then I leaned over to Bethany (my companion in piracy) and said, "Is that Mr. Collins?" And she said, "I think it IS!" And then we both just started laughing. Which continued through every single scene he was in. It's the revenge of Mr. Collins. He is out for vengeance on any Elizabeth played by Keira Knightley. Their scene together made this especially hilarious. This is his motive in the film. Not anything to do with the key to the chest, etc. etc. The only question now is... is he working for Lady Catherine ("I'll teach you to have the audacity to marry my nephew!") or is he working alone? (Also, I believe Captain Jack called her "Lizzy" at one point.)

On another wonderful in-joke front (which there were a lot of), Elizabeth's "When in doubt, faint" policy did not work this time. And I love the Will taught her how to fight. And man, did she kick some pirate ass! In speaking of pirate ass... poor Elizabeth was all, "Excuse me? I would really like to do the sex now!" which I thought was funny. Her poor dad just looked at her in the jail scene like, "Um... Elizabeth? I think... it's time that you and I had a little talk." And I liked the rum jokes. And pretty much all of the other jokes that carried over from the first. 

So, in conclusion... 

Mates, fetch the nets and rackets! It's time to play... Cutthroat Badminton!

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What I did on my holidays I read and I wrote and I slept a lot and it was fun.

I read the M15M book, of course, and I finished Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (To His Bed), and I started I, Robot. We read part of that in  SciFi class last year, but I want to read the whole thing. I'm about a third of the way through. I wrote my first drabble and finished "Never an Absolution" and typed "Cutthroat Badminton." Oh, and I wrote a post on Society's Pants.

Okay, I'm watching the Oscars Red Carpet. Tell me if this makes sense: They've put Ryan Seacrest up in the isolated overlooking room (not that I like Seacrest, but...), and they're letting The Guy Who Groped Scarlett Johansen have contact with the celebrities once again.

My next entry will be my review of Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (All Night Long, Until the Break of Dawn). I wanted to wait till I had my Pride and Prejudice book so I could cite a few specific things.

I'm going to take this opportunity (my slightly delayed weekly scheduled update) to acquaint those of you who are new to my lj with a few things. First of all, I have a story blog. This is a blog for my forays into fiction. You will find it linked at the top of this journal where it says "Notebook Mythology (my story blog)." But if you're too lazy for that, it is here. My latest entry is my very first drabble. For those of you unfamiliar with a drabble, that is a story 100 words long. My note of explanation of the story is longer than the actual story.

(I just went to the TV Guide Channel to see which channel the Oscars will be on, and was just in time to see Joan Rivers not know somebody's name. BWAH! For those of you who don't know my feelings on Joan Rivers, they are not positive.)

Society's Pants is a group story blog written in a round-robin style by my friends Marten, Jonah, Nathan, and Evie (eve_wings). This story has been going on for quite some time. We each write from the perspective of a different character. Nathan has Ian, Evie has Gillian, Jonah has Greg, Marten has Virgil, and I have Ellen Leigh.

I slapped together an SP icon. In my head, Lauren Graham pretty much plays Ellen Leigh. I might make a prettier SP icon later. If any of my co-writers want to send me pictures, I will make some for you.



(OOOOH, Keira so pretty! She is 21 now. I can take comfort in that. But still just seven months older than me. SO. GORGEOUS. TONIGHT.)[ETA: I was wrong. She's not even 21 yet. Dammit.]

This is basically just an entry to brag about how prolific I've been and pimp my blogz.

(Eric Bana also pretty. But married. Sigh.)

beatricepeabody, your challenge is next on my list.

Natalie Portman was fun on SNL last night. Go to theforce.net and watch clips.

Happy Oscaring, everyone!

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Whoa. It is snowing.

This past week was pretty hellish. Hence the delay in update.

So. Here at Casa Erin for the past couple of weeks it has been All Titanic pretty much All the Time. I got the Special Edition DVDs for Christmas, mostly because the special features looked way too awesome to pass up. It is impossible to deny that the amount of research and detail that went into that movie, the historical recreations and everything, is pretty amazing. And this interested me because, really, I probably qualify as an amatuer Titanicologist. I will admit that it started with the movie in 1997, but the obsession went way beyond that. The real story behind the Hollywood one really got to me somehow, grabbed hold of me. (I understand that it has a pesky tendency to do this to geeks like me.) The obsession only waned because, well, I had learned pretty much everything there was to learn. There is a limited amount of information about this disaster available in the world, and I had gone through most of it. So, time went by, and I forgot things like the names of all the officers and the number of lifeboats. But still, every time I see a Titanic-related thing on TV or what have you, I have to stop and watch. It grabs me all over again. It is a powerful and tragic story, even more so because it is real. I could spend this whole entry listing off the tiny little things that, had they been otherwise, the whole thing could have been averted. But that's not the way it happened. The opening of the ROTS novel could just as well apply here: "It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is the story of the blurred line between our best and our worst. It is the story of the end of an age." (Which reminds me, if you ever get the chance to go to the Titanic museum exhibit thing in Orlando-- Go. They have reconstructed rooms, artifacts... basically, by the end, my mom and I were pretty much crying).

So, I got the DVDs because I wanted to hear the details of all of this historical and technological and awesome stuff they did. I actually watched most of the special features before I even saw the movie. But then I did watch the movie. And you know what I had completely forgotten? This movie does not suck. It was so overhyped and overplayed and overexposed that it sort of destroyed itself, burned in its own flame, as it were, but... It's actually pretty good. Yes, all right, the dialogue is pretty bad, but as a Star Wars afficionado I've come to terms with much worse. The acting is pretty excellent-- Kate Winslet, especially, really rocks. Her face is so expressive, it says so much. And the movie really does a pretty good job combining historical epic, romance, and action (OMG Disaster-Related Peril!). And, I will admit, seeing Titanic was a formative experience for my 12/13-year-old self. I didn't want to see it at first, because I'd heard there were frozen dead bodies, and I didn't want to see that. But the instant I did see it, well... Let's put it this way. It was the first historical epic-type movie I'd ever seen. It was possibly the first adult drama I'd seen and enjoyed. It was the first movie I'd seen with nudity and/or sex. It was the first movie I'd seen wherein one of the romantic leads dies. Is it really any wonder that I became obsessed with this movie? There was a time when I could probably have quoted the whole thing from beginning to end. And, having seen it a few times recently, it's amazing how fast that came rushing back. I suddenly cared about these characters and their stories again.

I'll admit, this time I was keeping track of the days that passed (I'm sure I must have always been aware of it, but never really thought about it) and found myself going, "What kind of proper Edwardian lady are you? You've known this guy two days and you're sexing him in the back of a car? TWO DAYS!" But still.

The special features on the DVD are awesome. The cast interviews are good, and the tech stuff is pretty interesting. I watched all the commentaries, and they are each uniquely cool. The cast/crew commentary is pretty funny because you can tell that about two of the people are in a room together watching the movie, and the other people are not together and are probably not even watching the movie. Because they'll talk about a scene and describe it-- "In the scene where Leo is at the bottom of the staircase when they're about to go to dinner and he's leaning against a wooden column..." as it's happening. If you were actually watching the movie, you would just say, "That column Leo's leaning against? It's made of oak." And they all refer to each other as though they're not there. Like, "Gloria Stuart said to me..." or "Jonathon Hyde always said that the scene where they're having lunch..." But there were some pretty good stories and character insights there. Like "You're seeing them for the first and last time" and a sort of crash course on When Kate Winslet is Acting and When She is Not, featuring The Story of How I Almost Died, by Kate Winslet. The Historian commentary by Don Lynch and Ken Marshall is pretty awesome, too. Their commentary is the one that sounds sort of like how I would comment. You have Don, the historian and renowned Titanicologist, and Ken, the historical artist and self-professed rivet-counter who admits that it took him several viewings to get the whole plot because he was looking at the pretty set. A typical exchange between them goes, "Wow. Kate is so good. She should have gotten the Oscar, I think. This is a funny line. I love that line. Don't you?" "What? Oh, sorry, I was looking at the set. It's so pretty. They had to scale it up a little to accomodate the bigger people." "Yeah. Don't you think Victor Garber looks like Thomas Andrews?" "Well... close, maybe. Hey, there's Astor." "Tell that one story about him, Don." And they prompted me to get out their book and match the illustrations to certain shots in the movie. And when Don Lynch said the little girl in the dining room is, in his mind, Lorraine Allison, I went "YAY! I WIN!" because that's what I'd always thought. Then I watched the James Cameron one, even though I don't particularly like James Cameron, because by that time a lot of questions had popped up, some of which the commentary answered, some of which it did not. It was pretty interesting, like when he says Cal is "Pretty psychotic. We didn't necessarily intend that, but..." and "She's just defied every authority figure in her life. I think she can go outside without a hat." He says he refuses to say whether Rose at the end is dead or just sleeping, but I'm thinking dead since on the Crew Video (hilarious!) they refer to that scene as "Rose rendezvous with Heaven Titanic."

The main unanswered question, which is STILL not answered because Cameron insists on being so damn VAGUE about it, is the ambiguous sexual relationship of Rose and Cal. DID THEY DO IT OR NOT, CAMERON? I just don't know. I even made a list, look: Okay, first off it would be WAY improper for the time for them to do it premaritally, but on the other hand the DeWitt Bukaters' money situation is so precarious that Rose may have been prompted to just close her eyes and think of Philadelphia. Then, in one of the deleted scenes, Cal makes some snide comment about how when he climbs between the sheets tonight, he'll be the first, but he says "I'll still be the first." But then she just sort of awkwardly pecks him on the cheek. After the suicide attempt he comes into her room while she's half undressed and he's half undressed like it's no big deal. But then he's all, "There is nothing I would deny you if you would not deny me." The morning after she goes cavorting belowdecks, he says, "I had hoped you would come to me last night," like it's a regular occurrence. And then he says that she is his "wife in practice if not yet by law." But then he's all, "You will honor me! You will honor me the way a wife is required to honor a husband!" and throws things around in a sexually frustrated manner. And then she leaves him the Naked Picture of Taunting, like, "Ha ha, you'll never see this in real life, asshole." But then her... reaction to the... escapade in the Carters' automobile does not quite match up with that of someone who has never done it before. So, taken all together, it is a freaking TIE. For some reason the still gallery contains the original scriptment (which is funny because Cameron obviously knew a lot about the sinking itself but not a lot about what came before-- such a boy), so I had hoped that would clear it up, but NO. It says something like, 'They are practically living together and, one assumes, sleeping together." What do you assume, Jim? You're the one making these people up. GIVE US A STRAIGHT ANSWER, DAMMIT! The scriptment is a tricky thing because the characters were obviously in their infancy and not completely formed in it, and many things about them were going to change. But in the scriptment Rose does say that she thought she loved Cal when she accepted his proposal, but later realized that she mostly realized she just wanted to get rid of her mother. So I have two possible explanations. The first is that she went to Cal's bed to be defiant and shocking. The second is that Cal expected her to come to his bed and she kept putting it off and putting it off because she doesn't wanna.

No, I don't know why I care about this so much. Except that I always feel this compulsion to really understand characters. The deleted scenes were a big help in this. I found that I liked Jack and Rose's relationship a lot better after I saw them, actually. There are a lot of hilarious scenes of them goofing off. (I don't remember the real names of most of the deleted scenes, so I renamed them according to what they say to me: Rose Pitches a Hissy, 101 Things A Rich Girl Can't Do, Slightly Drunk and Highly Improper, Damn Horny Teenagers (In the BOILER ROOM?), and Flirting with Irony.) The best one may be in Slightly Drunk and Highly Improper when they're coming back from the third class party singing "Come Josephine in my Flying Machine" (my new official cold weather song, an excellent reminder that although it may be cold, it could be colder). "Something... about a... bird on a beam, in the air she goes! Where?! There! She goes! Up, up, a little bit higher! Ooooh, MY! The moon is on fire!" Wonderful. I also found through the deleted scenes and scriptment what a truly wonderful character Rose DeWitt Bukater (Dawson Calvert) is. In 101 Things a Rich Girl Can't Do, she goes into this big, completely naive rant about how she wants to be an artist living in a garret, "poor but free": "You see these hands? They were made for work!" She says that she wants to be an artist or a sculptor or a dancer (I'm going to start saying "I want to be a dancer like Isadora Duncan!" when people ask me what I want to do with my English major.) or a moving picture actress. As she speaks, she twirls around and poses and it's adorable-- her enthusiasm and innocence, I guess. And it's just particularly amazing because that's not all there is to her, because she goes out and actually does all those things. She completely stops being this perfect Edwardian princess and becomes an unusually strong person. With the kind of sense of humor that lets her laugh about the irony of trying to kill herself by jumping off the back of the Titanic.

The alternate ending is... well, thank God they didn't use it. It's cheese to the nth degree and completely anvilicious. ("THIS! IS! THE! MEANING! OF! OUR! MOVIE!") The only thing I liked was that it cleared up why Rose never sold the Heart of the Ocean. She wanted to know that she could get by without Cal's help. I was like, "Ohhhh! That makes perfect sense, then!" The sinking-centric deleted scenes were mostly based off of real events and people, and were therefore heartwrenching. There was one with the wireless operators wherein Harold Bride tells Jack Phillips to send the new SOS signal and jokes that "it may be your only chance to use it." And that really happened, and I'd read about it and everything, but... seeing it just made me go, "Ohhh, man. It is. Jack Phillips is going to die." It made it more real.

As I was saying earlier, seeing this movie again made me look at a lot of the characters again and see them in different ways. I'd always sort of felt sorry for Ruth, because she thinks her daughter dies. But now I feel even more sorry for her because I know that she thought she was doing the right thing with the whole forcing-Rose-to-marry-Cal thing. She wasn't evil, like I thought when I was 12. She was just a woman of her time. Same with Cal, sort of, except Cal really does just suck. That's something about the way I was when I was 12 and 13. I saw everything in black and white. There were good people, and there were bad people. I think it took Star Wars, actually, to show me that there is a huge gray area and that pretty much everybody is in it, and it took Pratchett to teach me that people are just people, wherever you go. I'm working on a Ruth vignette right now, actually. It's called "Never an Absolution," which is the most obvious title ever, but it fit too well not to use.

Being re-grabbed by the whole story prompted me to tentatively look into Titanic fanfiction. No big surprise there- I found about two that don't suck. Most of them were probably written by 13-year-old girls who have the same writing and characterization issues I had when I was 13, and Lord knows I was one of those Titanic-ficcing girls at that age, too. I actually started a couple back then, may they never see the light of day again. But I feel that if I were to follow this story now, it would be completely different, because I understand the darker side of things now. Not that I have any real intention of serious Titanic-ficcing. Of course, I think about things and make things up, I do that for everything. I have done it for Pride and Prejudice, for instance, and Star Wars, and countless other things. I know, for example, that if I were to do a lengthy Rose Dawson story, it would be called "The Butterfly," after a deleted metaphor in the movie. But most of it will remain in my head. I will do a short piece or two-- this Ruth one and a drabble I have in my head (I've never tried a drabble before, and I want to see if I can do one).

Okay, I think that's about all I wanted to say about that. Sorry to inflict it upon everyone. See you next time with icons galore.

 

 

 

Ah! I totally forgot to mention in yesterday's entry that I saw the Chronicles of Narnia movie. It was really, really good. I liked it a lot. The effects were amazing-- I mean, really amazing; you would forget sometimes that the CGI animals were in fact CGI. Aslan was wonderful. I wouldn't have really thought it, but Liam Neeson was perfect for his voice. And the young actors are also good. Not always stellar, but good. I, like most other females who saw the movie, I believe, now have a crush on both Mr. Tumnus and Peter. Peter looked like a young King Arthur, which made me really pleased. And Lucy Pevensie is the cutest little girl ever. EVER. I mean this.

The main thing I took away from the movie, though, was an overwhelming sense of the magic in the world that, as we grow up, we tend to ignore. Seeing this made me want to start searching all the closets in the house for other worlds again, like I did after I read the book when I was about eight. The idea that things like this, however improbable, are possible is something that I really don't want to lose.

I also saw the TV adaptation of Once Upon a Mattress the other day. It was okay, but is it weird that I thought LC's production my sophomore year was actually quite a bit better? Tracey Ullman was good as Fred, and Dauntless was also good, but they cut out a song and a character or two, and they were missed. And I love Carol Burnett, I really do, but... somehow, I got the sense that she wasn't really into this as much as she should have been, considering it's her baby. I thought she was much more delightfully evil as Miss Hannigan in Annie. She did all right here, but I kept comparing her performance in my mind to that of Miss Ella Seet, whom I totally fangirled in high school, and Ella kept coming out on top. So did Brad Brockway's wizard. So did Whatshisname's jester. But Ella, above all, was fabulous. So, there you have that.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, as promised, in random order...

Reasons We Love Mr. Darcy

1. Mr. Darcy is wet.

2. Mr. Darcy's shirt is undone.

3. Mr. Darcy is the sexy.

4. Mr. Darcy likes women who read.

5. Mr. Darcy is kind.

6. Mr. Darcy is kind of shy.

7. Mr. Darcy stands up to Lady Catherine.

8. Ten thousand a year!

9. Pemberley.

10. Mr. Darcy is the sexy.

11. Mr. Darcy is a one-woman man.

12. Mr. Darcy is generous.

13. Mr. Darcy is the ideal older brother to Georgiana.

14. Mr. Darcy is a man's man.

15. Mr. Darcy is the sexy.

16. Mr. Darcy is witty.

17. Mr. Darcy gives good presents.

18. Mr. Darcy is a good friend.

19. Mr. Darcy is an honorable gentleman.

20. Mr. Darcy is the sexy.

21. Mr. Darcy has an awesome sister.

22. Mr. Darcy has two ponds.

23. Mr. Darcy knows how to ride a horse.

24. Mr. Darcy owns half of Derbyshire (not the miserable half).

25. Mr. Darcy is still the sexy.

26. Mr. Darcy can't math.

27. Mr. Darcy can speak in parentheses.

28. Mr. Darcy is intimidating.

29. Fitzwilliam Darcy has a dorky first name, but we never see him mocked or get his ass kicked because of it.

30. Mr. Darcy continues to be the sexy.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, etc. to everybody!

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Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I can talk about other things.

I saw two excellent movies over Thanskgiving break. The first was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was quite well done. Except that Groovy New Dumbledore did emote a bit too much in that one particular scene, and it made me kind of laugh. Miranda Richardson was pervy and awesome. There was lots of high rollicking adventure and humor (Ah! Get out of my fireplace, Crazy Gary Oldman!). But, yes, the movie did make me cry. They made Cedric all likeable and noble and cute and sympathetic, and the minute he showed up with his dad, I was like DAMMIT. I believe I literally groaned, out loud, in the theater, "Ohhhhh, man. Oh, crap." And my mom asked what was wrong, and I had to be like, "Nothing. The movie is toying with my emotions." She did correctly guess that Cedric was going to bite the dust (omg spoilers!), and was glad that she knew by the time he did. We both cried, actually, and it wasn't even really because of Cedric. It was because of Cedric's dad. From the very beginning you can see how his son is his whole world and then... Well, if you didn't get choked up, you're dead inside. That's all.

The second movie I saw was Pride and Prejudice. I'd watched the BBC version here at school beforehand, which is very good and oh my GAWD Colin Firth Mr. Darcy is sexy. *sigh*. And Kelly and I watched it and giggled through most of the movie-- lots of jokes that will probably come up as icons later. I, frankly, loved it. And now? I love this version, too. They're different, too, but perfectly wonderful in different ways. I'm about to have a recap/review of it here in a minute (not as long as my ROTS one, don't worry), but first I want to talk about how this excessive Austen exposure has affected my life in the past weeks. I had almost forgotten exactly how brilliant this book is; I love it so much. I now ship Darcy/Lizzy so hard. I adore Elizabeth Bennet and if Mr. Darcy, any Mr. Darcy, were to show up, I would not say him nay. I have not stopped squeeing over the whole thing since break.

It snowed yesterday for a brief time, and that was very pretty. But earlier in the week we had a day of fantastically English weather. Most of the day it was overcast and very windy, though not too cold, which was an absolute pleasure to tromp through and it gave me a feeling of Elizabeth Bennet-ness every time I went outside. This heightened as the day went on, for during Arthurian lit it began to rain. I had no umbrealla. In fact, I have no umbrella here at all, because I keep forgetting to bring it from home. I got soaked just walking back to Ogle from class in the most delightful rain-soaked way. It wasn't windy, it wasn't storming, it wasn't terribly cold, it was just raining in a perfect downpour. It was exhilirating, really. I then had to walk back to Classic in the rain, to the library in the rain, and back to Ogle in the rain. By the end of it I really looked almost wild. I kept hoping that maybe Mr. Darcy would come ambling up with his shirt undone, but he never did, which was quite disappointing.

I now present...

First Impressions of P&P

Hee, "First Impressions." Get it?

Overall, I loved the movie. I want to see it again, but sadly everyone I know who lives in my area and would even remotely want to see it went all at one time, so... We were giggling the whole way through. Keira was excellent, absolutely perfectly excellent. Which makes me proud, because I was adamantly insisting that she could in fact act back when certain among the critics were saying she could not. Bingley was so adorable, and so was Jane. Kelly and I had a big debate over how they could possibly cast a Jane who was prettier than Keira, and I patiently explained to her that they mouse Keira up as much as they can, and then they place her next to somebody who looks quite different from her who really is very pretty, and the general effect is that if you walk into a room, you're going to notice Jane first, and then, only after a little bit, you're like, "Hey! That's Keira Knightley! She's gorgeous. I hadn't noticed." And I think the producers were right when they say that Keira doesn't fit the idea of beauty for the time. She's very tomboyish and somewhat flat-chested and all. Although I think they made a good decision in not rubbing in the "Elizabeth Bennet is no great beauty" angle, because the audience would have been like, "...". Mr. Darcy, Matthew MacFayden style, was certainly different, but he was certainly good, once you got used to him. Most of his sexiness arises, I think, from his chemistry with Keira, which is hot, let me tell you here and now. Mr. Collins was hilarious, and Judi Dench is the perfect Lady Catherine. I wasn't too wild about the elder Bennets in this version, although I did get used to them, too. Mr. Bennet was too serious at some points and not flip enough. Mrs. Bennet was not over-the-top enough, although when I said this to Mom in the car on the way home, she was all, "She wasn't?"

Everybody I went with liked it very much, by the way, which I was nervous about. Throughout the movie I kept thinking, "Would somebody who hasn't read the book get this?" but Mom assured me that she did. I like that there was mud in the movie, and that the Bennets actually seemed poor and that Lizzy was almost always slightly grubby. I also really appreciate that they cast age-appropriately; it was very effective and just... right. Realistic. The first time I saw a picture of Lydia, my immediate reaction was, "Gah! She's just a baby! She can't get married to Wickham!" The movie had a strange tendency to make me feel sorry for characters I hadn't felt sorry for before-- Mary Bennet, Mr. Collins, Charlotte Lucas. I was kind of like, "Dammit. You've just made a one-dimensional character multi-dimensional. Thanks a lot, movie." Let's see, what else? You could tell that the characters were "off-book," as it were, when they got romantic, which was kind of amusing. Some of my favorite lines weren't in there, but many of them were. I got kind of frustrated because the fashion was off (according to Marietta, who knows her costumes, by about 30 years). Regency/ Georgian dresses have a very distinct style, and the waists on many of these dresses were placed far too low. I have since learned that this film is set a little more than a decade before the story normally is, so maybe that justifies it, but I don't know. I kept going, "Move their waists up!" Some of the locations and the weather thereat were rather random, in the interest of changing it up and not having everything happening in someone's parlor. And some of the directorial choices were interesting, like doing transitions by having Lizzy swing on the swing for several months and stare at herself in the mirror without moving for several hours. Some were effective, like the part of the Netherfield Ball where it looks like Lizzy and Darcy are the only two people in the room. And some were not, like the time there was this sloooooowwww fade-in on Lizzy's face and I went, "Ah! I'm blind!" Some things seemed a little... not rushed, but they happened in very quick succession. Overall, they did about as good a job as anyone could do trying to cram all of that into a two-hour movie. And now, the specifics. Which I mapped out in the car on the way back to school. Including reproductions of some scenes which may or may not be accurate! ;)

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A lot has happened since my last update. I got a boyfriend, for one thing (and he is wonderful), and then I turned twenty. Whoa. I feel old. It's bizarre that my age no longer ends in "-teen."

But that's not the purpose of this entry. The purpose of this entry is to talk about the play I was just in. "She Stoops to Conquer" closed Sunday; during its run I was waaay too busy to post, and I've been simply exhausted since. But I'd like to talk about it now. It was great fun. I never thought I was going to get cast, because I was up against a major theatre veteran. I didn't want to say, but I really wanted the part I was up for, that of Miss Constance Neville. I just didn't think there was any way I was going to get it. But I did. And I went, "Squeeeeee!"

"She Stoops" is an 18th-century comedy, and it really is very funny. Especially with the great cast we had. Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle and my dear cousin Tony in particular cracked me up. Jack, who played Tony, based his character on such esteemed personages as the Riddler and Jack Sparrow. There was much farcical hiding behind screens (mostly by me, for some reason) and much stage kissing (mostly by me, for some reason). Seriously, Constance and her "admirer" Mr. Hastings are joined in a secret engagement, and at first we only had to kiss about twice. Every rehearsal that number increased. Eventually it was... hm... four? five? Something like that. I actually got scolded for making a face-- not because of the person I was stage kissing, but the awkwardness of stage kissing in general. Then I had to kiss Tony on the cheek. Then I had to blow a kiss to Kate. At that point I exclaimed, "Because Constance kisses everybody!" And Paul, the director, was like, "Yeah."

Oh, Paul. Let me tell you about Paul. He does not understand things. Or people. At all, really. He thinks that everything in the theatre happens by magic, which is not a very good quality in a director. He got pretty harsh with some people's notes, but he hardly said anything to me at all. I'm going to go ahead and take that as a compliment.

The Hardcastle family is very messed up because we got to make up backstories. In brief, here is the big picture: Mrs. Hardcastle and my mother were sisters, but my mom died when I was five. I then went to stay with the Hardcastles for about a year because my dad was pretty broken up about it. Mrs. Hardcastle was married to Mr. Lumpkin (who had a hilarious first name made up by Casey which I can't quite remember), but he died while she was pregnant with their son, Tony, who is a bit older than I am. After his death, she was supported by Mr. Hardcastle, a neighbor. She admired his kindness for taking in a local hobo, Diggory, and making him his servant. They married and had a daughter, Kate, my best friend. I remember staying at the Hardcastles and being chased around and having my hair pulled by Tony a lot. Then father got a job with mother's brother Geoffrey, in India. Uncle Geoffrey liked me, and from him I discovered that I was supposed to marry Tony. I was not pleased. Father and I stayed in India until I was eight, at which point we returned to jolly old England and I was sent to school. When I was fourteen Uncle Geoffrey died and left me a small fortune in jewels. Mrs. Hardcastle was pissed because he left her nothing and she felt the jewels were rightfully hers. When Kate came of age, she came to live with me in town for about two years. During this time I fell in love with Hastings. He obtained father's permission to marry me, but then father was thrown from his horse and killed. I had to go live with the Hardcastles. At this point, Mrs. H. was having an affair with Diggory, Bridget the maid was Mr. H's illegitimate daughter, and Tony was impossible as always. I had to pretend to have "a violent passion" for him in order to secure my fortune, which was in the care of Mrs. H. She would not relinquish it unless it was upon my wedding to Tony, apparently, but I was resolved to trick her. What with my unstable life, those jewels were all I had that were mine in the world, and the only thing I could be sure of should something happen to my dear Hastings. Thus the play opens.

I loved doing this play, even if for no other reason than the absolutely awesome costumes, courtesy of the unrivalled Wanda, a professional costume designer lady. You know the "Il Muto" opera in Phantom? Yeah, this was that time period. (And I kept getting that song stuck in my head.) Let me recite the layers for you: chemise, butt fluff (Casey had a paniet [sp?], which is the really wide skirt; also, a ginormous wig with bows and birds named Friedrich and Franz in it, along with a spider named Fernando), corset, smoother a.k.a. short petticoat, petticoat, skirt, dress. It was soooo awesome to wear, and a huge help with getting into character.

And yes, you heard me right, corset. We rehearsed in our corsets most of the time, and if you have not heard me go on about it before-- I heart my corset. Oh, so much. This is because I am, quite frankly, skinny, and the corset was actually a tiny bit big; it could have been taken in around the waist more. The corset makes you stand differently and breathe differently and sit differently, and it was SO MUCH FUN. I mean, I don't know which I like more-- breathing or my corset. Here is the biggest reason: CLEAVAGE! It actually gave me-- ME!-- a tiny bit of cleavage! I was so proud! I frankly wasn't sure it was possible. But apparently it is. I can now completely sympathize with Keira Knightley in her Pirates of the Caribbean commentary, in which she repeatedly declaims, "Look at that cleavage!" I said it a few times myself. I miss it now, knowing that I'll probably never have it again. I had pictures taken, for posterity. I can't wait to show y'all all the pictures I took. So many good ones-- not just of my cleavage.

I also had a ginormous wig, but that's not important.

Ahh, so much fun. I loved doing it, and maaaybe, hopefully, we'll get to do it again for a contest later in the year.

I loved all of my castmates. I loved singing songs from musicals with Katie (who has a good heart), I loved calling Casey a whore in the background while we were having an upstage conversation, and I loved hitting Jack with my fan. I also loved Jen, CJ, Aaron, Zach, and Josh, and Stephen. And the whole crew. So, yeah.

Huzzah for "She Stoops to Conquer!"