The accidental filmmaker

In which our Diva took a walk and made a thing

I love where I live. To wit, where I can, on a Friday morning whim, walk two blocks, shoot for about an hour with a consumer DSLR and zero crew, and by Saturday afternoon have made this:

Even before I went to VidCon, I've been pulled up short more and more often recently by the ever-expanding array of creative tools accessible to the ordinary person. Did you know you can download full-blown 3D animation software for free? I didn't until last week. And those hand-drawing-on-a-whiteboard videos you see all over the place? Sparkol VideoScribe is only free once, but isn't terribly expensive after that, and it's super easy to use.

Cross-pollination of ideas from tech to arts and back again drives evolution of both at a merry clip, with concepts like open source and Creative Commons benefiting creators and consumers alike.

Next thing you know, you've made a thing that can quite properly be called a short film, starring a gorgeous pocket of nature that happens to be down the block.

Nature and technology conspire.

It's a pretty fantastic time to be a storyteller, y'know?

Grieve not with thy bitter tears

In which our Diva commemorates a famous death

On this day in 1862, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal died of a laudanum overdose. The inquest ruled it accidental; some who knew her claimed to know for a fact that she had taken her own life. We will never be able to confirm with absolute certainty what was in her mind that night.

We do have her poems, many of which dwell on death and loss, a tendency in which she was not alone among her contemporaries.

On this solemn anniversary, this one -- probably my favorite of hers -- seems fitting. It closes Unvarnished; I recorded this reading a few years ago.



Early Death
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal

Oh grieve not with thy bitter tears
The life that passes fast;
The gates of heaven will open wide
And take me in at last.

Then sit down meekly at my side
And watch my young life flee;
Then solemn peace of holy death
Come quickly unto thee.

But true love, seek me in the throng
Of spirits floating past,
And I will take thee by the hands
And know thee mine at last.

Ophelia is everywhere

In which our Diva ponders how the girl nobody at court considered until it was too late came to be considered a great many things

Long, long ago, when woolly mammoths roamed roamed the wilds of the information superhighway between the glittering GeoCities and the gates of AOhelL (which one reached by means of shiny wheels that appeared by the dozens in one's physical mailbox), yours truly created a section of her personal website called "Doubt Thou the Stars Are Fire - An Ophelia Gallery."

Through the magic of the Wayback Machine (and a temporary change in my display resolution - raise your hand if you remember SVGA being fancy!), I can give you an idea of what it looked like:

Also thanks to the Wayback, I can quote my long-forgotten "about the site" statement:

I had no idea it was going to get this big.

This project was originally conceived as a page for my Fireside Tales section [that was where I used to blather about fairy and folk tales before discovering blogging], but it wasn't long before I realized there was far too much material to fit in that context. It began (as so many things seem to) with Shakespeare, and with the familiar figure of Hamlet's poor tragic lady-love, who is driven mad by the madness going on around her, and who drowns in the brook with a song on her lips.

The next ingredient was my long-standing fascination with Pre-Raphaelite art, and with the circle of individuals who produced it. Ophelia was a favorite subject of theirs, as you'll soon see if you didn't already know. At one time I had notions of doing a website on the Pre-Raphaelites, but the lovely folk at WebMagick and The Germ have covered the subject far more thoroughly than I ever could.

The final catalyst was reading Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, a standout amid the recent flood of pop psychology and women's studies. To Dr. Pipher, Ophelia is the symbol of the loss of identity that so often strikes girls as they reach adolescence and are pressured to define themselves by everyone's standards except their own.

As you'll see throughout this site, Ophelia has far more faces than those few. She is a potent identifying figure for women in general and teenage girls in particular, and she means something a little different to everyone.

"This big" might sound funny in the age of blogs and content management systems and wikis (if I were to undertake such a project today, it would totally be a wiki!), but in the Wild-Digital-West days we prided ourselves on hand-coding HTML, which was actually the easier way to make something look the way you wanted than the clunky web-authoring software of the time!

So there were quite a few hours and a lot of love in that handful of pages, gathering art, photos, essays, and links to people, businesses, and pets bearing Ophelia's name.

Then came blogs and wikis and aggregators, and a far wider and more populous online world, and it all became far too much for one busy woman to keep track of. The links became outdated, and the subject became amply covered in multiple elsewheres. So I retired the site, and moved on to other things.

I still think often of poor drowned Ophelia, of course -- I could hardly help it even if I wanted to, up to my eyebrows in dramatizing a woman whose legacy is inextricably bound up with her. I still have the ghost of that "I need to add this to the site" impulse when I encounter a new expression of our enduring cultural fascination with her -- Emilie Autumn's tour de force album Opheliac; or a chamber opera entitled Ophelia Forever that features not one but three incarnations of the title role; or even a contemporary art piece involving a recreation of Millais' painting in bacteria, time-lapse photography of its decay, poetry collected via voice mail, and a musical composition based on the genetic code of digestive flora!

I think of poor drowned Ophelia, and also sweet hopeful Ophelia, and mad Ophelia struggling to make herself heard through old words and melodies and the language of flowers. I think of the reality of an old ballgown turned gossamer flotation device and glittering anchor by turns. I think of a role that can liberate or imprison, or paradoxically do both at once -- for Lizzie, one of its most famous exponents, or for unknown dozens of young actresses taking her on at any given moment.

I've never played Ophelia myself (barring reading from our desks in a high school literature classroom), and I've passed the "ingenue" phase of my Shakespeare career and into the "queens" -- though, despite having dived headfirst into Titania and Lady Macbeth, I somehow don't feel ready to tackle Gertrude. But she remains there in the background, somehow, well past the adolescent confusions in which one is supposed to identify with her.

For a fictional girl who didn't make it out of her teens, Ophelia really does contain multitudes. Like many characters, really, especially those of whom we learn tantalizingly little in their moments on the stage. Those whose shadowed lives we can illuminate with the experiences and questions of our own.

It's with this role I begin Unvarnished, with Lizzie offering a few typically wry observations hinting at how it has touched on the corners of her own life. A glimpse:



Three years ago, I witnessed in person the sensation Millais' Ophelia still creates in those passing her on the Tate Gallery wall. Lizzie was part of making something magical, whose appeal is impossible to quantify. Yet her experience of its making involved entirely earthly and practical considerations of cold water and needed wages. If anything encapsulates the contradictions of her life, that's it.

 The music opening the above video is from Helen Trevillion's "The Goose Girl"

Unvarnished vlog: Why Lizzie?

In which our Diva gets some use out of that phone tripod she got for Christmas

I've been bitten by the vlogging bug. (Well, technically I can call myself an early adopter -- all of these predate my even hearing the term "vlog" -- but it's way easier now.)

For those of you who prefer the written word, don't worry -- I still plan to do proper blog posts too! But thoughts come out differently in writing than they do in speaking, and of course once the Unvarnished process is more visibly underway, this way of sharing it should be even more fun.

I started simple today, with a few thoughts on why I'm so fascinated by Elizabeth Siddal and what inspired me to create a solo theatre piece about her. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably encountered most of these thoughts in one form or another, but I wouldn't mind your giving a listen even so. And, if you're so inclined, sharing with potentially interested friends? :-)

Unvarnished sneak peek

In which our Diva sends season's greetings from Lizzie Siddal in Nice, 1855

The first staged reading of Unvarnished has come and gone, followed immediately by a lower back strain that limited my time in front of the computer, and immediately after that by, y'know, Christmas.

The turnout was small but enthusiastic, I learned that it's still too long and I must kill more darlings (seriously, folks, even I don't want to talk for two hours straight on purpose!), and our hosts at Side Street Studio Arts were super helpful and supportive. Onward and upward!

One of my Christmas gifts was a nifty little flexible tripod for my smartphone, which leaves me with no more excuses for putting off that vlogging I keep saying I'm going to try. (Not sure the handful of video diaries I did with my old flip camera really count, though I suppose I could lay claim to being an early adopter, since I'm pretty sure they actually predate the term "vlog." *g*)  Now that Unvarnished is not only written but most of the way toward the final version that will be produced, I have plenty to babble about -- including far more detailed background than could ever have fit into a 90-minute show, and maybe some outtakes from earlier drafts!

In the meantime, a sneak peek at said script (though most of the words in this snippet are Lizzie's own):

Hope everyone has had a very happy holiday season, and looking forward to a bright New Year!

Mermaid-like awhile they bore her up

In which our Diva's much-delayed dream project draws ever closer to reality

It's been over a month since I scrawled the words "END OF PLAY" in a spiral notebook, and just over a week since I typed the same ones into Celtx. Over a decade since the idea first hatched in my little brain, Unvarnished: A Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal is finally becoming an actual coming-to-a-stage-near-you solo theatre piece.

It even has a Facebook page, for which the wonderful Pre-Raphaelite social mediasphere has already garnered 161 Likes. I'm in contact with a venue for the first public reading, which will likely be in November or December in Elgin, and mulling various logistical considerations for touring the fully realized production.

With all that going on, of course I picked today to have a eureka moment about Ophelia's dress.

That's not entirely out of left field. In my text, the dress is the springboard for a little flight of fancy while Lizzie poses in the infamous tub, and it's always been important to my mental image of the show. But the details craved by my obsessive little costumer's brain (which couldn't help being a bit disappointed by the sad greyish thing the mostly gobsmackingly gorgeous Desperate Romantics put on Amy Manson; the designer for Emma West's Ophelia short film seems to have given it a little more thought, albeit on a restricted budget), are tantalizingly thin on the ground. Millais himself recorded in a letter that "To-day I have purchased a really splendid lady's ancient dress - all flowered over in silver embroidery - and I am going to paint it for 'Ophelia'. You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds." (The Tate Britain educational info on the painting estimates that this would be about £250 today.)

Now, it didn't take too long to decide that a 20-something guy's idea of an "ancient dress" -- even if that 20-something guy is a genius painter intent on getting his masterpiece absolutely right -- is likely to be defined fairly broadly. In all likelihood, we're talking about something kept in a trunk for a generation or two before it found its way to the secondhand shop where Millais found it.

Which somewhat remarkably gives us more to go on than the painting itself, in which the distortion of the water makes it nigh impossible to discern much about the actual shape of the garment. That said, the shape does appear to be relatively simple, which lends further weight to the likelihood that it dated to the first couple decades of the 19th century.

The advent of machine-made net at the close of the 18th century paved the way for the early-19th-century fashion for gowns of muslin overlaid with embroidered net, often in gold or silver thread. So I've been working for a long time under the assumption that the Ophelia dress fell into that category, as typified by this gorgeous specimen at the V&A.

However.

The place I've always been tripped up is the neckline, which is clearly a couple inches higher than is typically found on this type of dress, appearing to cover Lizzie's collarbones. It's one of the few structural details we actually can see in the painting...

...or so I've always thought.

That eureka moment I mentioned? Follow the red dotted line:

Yup. Right there in front of me the whole time: the actual neckline of the dress, outlined in reflective bluish highlights.

At first I thought maybe he painted the actual neckline, then altered it to look more medieval and/or better represent Ophelia's virginal innocence for his contemporary audience. But the more I look at it, the more I wonder what that lace flounce around the top of the V&A dress would look like if it were flipped up and clinging to its sopping wet wearer. I suspect it'd look a lot like this.

So, that's that direction settled on. Too bad I hemmed and hawed just a little too long about that perfect vintage sari on eBay; I probably could even have used the choli for the bodice! Ah, well. I'll just have to look around some more. Darn. Shopping. ;-)

Houston, we have a draft!

In which our Diva reaches a noteworthy milestone

There's still a whole lot of work ahead of me before Unvarnished comes to a stage near you, but I cannot begin to tell you how sweet it was to scrawl these words this morning:

Meanwhile, another intrepid theatrical look into Lizzie's life is about to debut in New York. Be sure to check out Shakespeare's Sister Company and their imminent premiere of Kris Lundberg's Muse.

Nesting instinct

In which our Diva has been putting her winter restlessness to work

As you may have noticed, or at least heard (and heard, and heard, and heard -- the meteorologist on the local news sounds very tired of having to say this stuff!) it's been an awful lot of cold and snowy lately. Now, yours truly -- despite being made entirely of northern European barbarian DNA and having moved to Chicagoland on purpose -- is not a fan of this winter business. Not one little bit. Well, maybe a little bit. A couple weeks of pretty fluffy snow viewed from the nice warm indoors would be fine.

But what's going on this year is more than a little wearing, and I've been combating it by tackling some long-overdue rearranging and organizing and decorating. My house dates to 1908, an American Foursquare that the former owner (a contractor and carpenter himself) updated in all the right ways, keeping intact its beautiful Craftsman woodwork, including the dining room built-in with its original leaded glass.  I fell in love with it the moment I walked in the door just over nine years ago, and promptly dove into research, dreaming of how to bring out its historic character before even making an appointment with a home inspector.

Other pursuits always seem to take precedence, of course, and for the most part those dreams go unrealized. But in the last couple weeks, I've mostly finished overhauling the spare bedroom, a process that started several months ago with expanding the existing shelving to accommodate the lifelong collection known as Val's Personal Doll Army.

Along the way, I've done a lot of thrift shopping, a little painting of shelves thus acquired, some rejiggering of the closet configuration, and spent basically a whole day sitting on the floor devising a new filng system for sheet music that wll actually keep it neat this time, darnit! (That last resolution will be helped by the sad fact that Elgin Opera is no more, which means I'm not tossing another concert's worth of pages on the "I'll put that away later, really I will" pile every few months.)

Probably my favorite design inspiration is one that didn't cost a dime: A pair of vintage blue suitcases that belonged to my grandparents brought up from the basement and stacked into an instant nightstand that perfectly suits the height of the bed and the color scheme and quirky cottage feel of the room.

With only a few small details left there, I've turned my attention to the bigger challenge of organizing the basement, which includes my sewing room and new (and for the moment somewhat makeshift) recording studio for audiobooks. It's not as creative and fun as taking a room and making it pretty and welcoming, but it's the logical next step (at least in the way the house and the stuff in it all goes together in my head) necessary before making the rest of the rooms as pretty and welcoming as they deserve to be.

It'll be a while, for instance, before I can even consider anything involving paint in any way, let alone anything on the order of what latter-day Pre-Raphaelite muse, artist, and blogger Grace has created in her Catty-Corner Cottage. (Hubby and I have been saying from the beginning that this house deserves a name, but we've yet to come up with one. Maybe that'll finally arrive this year too!) Especially the Twelve Dancing Princesses (one of my favorite fairy tales too!) in procession around her dining room walls.

On both that blog and her wider-focused one Domythic Bliss, one of the things I love is how much of it involves making your home fairy-tale beautiful with everyday resources. The trade-off for not spending a lot of money is time, of course, but for many of us that's part of the fun.

When William Morris designed Red House, both money and time were involved, not to mention the talents of Morris' illustrious circle of artistic friends. Recent conservation work has uncovered ever more of the extensive decorative painting throughout the house, including some figures thought to have been painted by Elizabeth Siddal.

I'm not far from that phase of Lizzie's life in writing Unvarnished, and am just realizing how I've set up for it in some sections that talk about their paintings as a world of their own creation. Red House was a truly an entire little world of Morris' own creation, realized with the collaboration of his wife Jane and their friends. (A Twitter conversation last week with Dinah Roe reminded me that there's a great deal that needs to be said about Jane's artistry with an embroidery needle and how it gets largely ignored, but that's a tangent for another day.) What an amazing way to fill hours and walls! Sounds like a party to me.

Funny thing -- when I was fifteen, and all this Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts obsession was still several years in the future, I got it into my head that I wanted to paint a full-wall mural in my bedroom. By that time we lived in a house we owned, after most of my Air Force brat childhood spent living on base, so it was technically not out of the realm of possibility.

Of course, no sane parent is going to turn a fifteen-year-old loose on an innocent expanse of white interior latex, but someone (I don't remember whose idea it was now) came up with the brilliant compromise of tacking up an old white sheet with plastic sheeting behind it. I spent a good chunk of my summer filling it with a rainbow, pot of gold, and flowers, and loved every minute. Once it was finished, I could wake up every morning, put on my glasses, and look at the big window onto a world I had made with my own hands and imagination. Kitschy and derivative imagination, sure, but all mine.

It was an amazing feeling. Making something special always is. I'm hoping to have that feeling a lot more by the time I've finished realizing the dreams for my grownup Arts and Crafts haven.

Speaking of making special things, here's a footnote more related to the previous post: Last week, on a Wombat Friday whim, I put together a "Wombat's Lair" Etsy treasury for the enjoyment of the Earnest Damsels Collective and other wombatophiles. One of the featured crafters, Isobel Morrell of Coldham Cuddlies, messaged me a lovely thank-you for the inclusion, and shared her coinage of the phrase "a wonderment of wombats," (as well as some nifty insights into her crafting process) having decided that the standard group noun, a mob, just wouldn't do for the purposes of her adorable plush creations. I have to agree, and have resolved to refer to our Wombat Friday assemblage as a "wonderment" forever more.

Lizzie steps out on stage

In which our Diva is only a little jealous that it's someone else's Lizzie, and is happy to cheer from the sidelines

It's been a couple months since a Tweet popped up in my timeline that made my heart skip a beat, announcing "Lizzie Siddal, a new play." I don't even recall now who I saw post it first, though it was likely the lovely Stephanie Pina, who has given us both LizzieSiddal.com and The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. But in any case, there it was in all its official glory on the Arcola Theatre website, complete with promo photo of its Lizzie, Emma West, in front of Ophelia with flowers scattered in her hair.

Damn, I couldn't help thinking in those first moments, somebody beat me to it. The irrational impulse of "Hey, that story is mine!" is of course completely ridiculous, but I'm as human and vain as the next creative person, so I'll admit I had to work through it for a minute there. I'll also admit to being greatly relieved when it became clear that, while Emma West was the only cast member announced right away, Jeremy Green has in fact written an entire play with other people in it, quite different territory from my solo piece in (slow-but-progressing) progress.

Even if it hadn't been, of course, in the end excitement about Lizzie's story being explored on stage had to triumph, and I very much wish I could be there. It's funny -- when I first had the idea for Unvarnished, over a decade ago now, when I first started getting mental images of stage pictures that have proven so challenging to build into words, the Pre-Raphaelite circle and their art were still just being rediscovered by the public -- especially here in the U.S. -- after decades out of favor.

These days, any given person with even a passing interest in 19th-century art is much more likely to know who I'm even talking about, let alone the lore of Ophelia's bathtub and that late-night exhumation. The images and stories have made their way back into pop culture, aided by an Internet that bears only the slightest resemblance to the nascent wilderness it was back when I happened upon a review of a one-woman show about Lizzie by Orange, a French multimedia artist who had worked with Cirque du Soleil (and whose somewhat generic pseudonym makes it impossible to find any hits for her on today's Google, if any still exist).  I was just starting my research then -- with Lucinda Hawksley's marvelous biography and so many other resources still in the offing -- and happened on an email address for Orange, resulting in a very kind reply that I wish I could still find, wishing me well in finding "your Elizabeth." I've carried that thought with me ever since.

I've not read or seen Kim Morrissey's Clever as Paint, but I've known it was out there for a while, and apparently there's also one from around 1999 called Dear Dove Divine. Still, it's thrilling to see a new play put Lizzie at the center of her own story, and to see it getting such great coverage, including this BBC News piece and Dinah Roe's interview with playwright Jeremy Green over at her great blog Pre-Raphaelites in the City. There's also this nice audio interview with Emma West from East London Radio.

April Love by Arthur Hughes

All this has also prompted a thoughtful blog post from Kirsty Stonell Walker over at her always-worth-reading The Kissed Mouth, about the ways in which the story is so often reduced to a few tragic episodes. It also puts me in mind, by way of contrast, of a couple conversations I've had recently regarding how little there is to read about Tryphena Foord. My conclusion that "that's what a long and happily married life will get you" might be facetiously phrased, but I stand by its essential accuracy. "Arthur Hughes married his muse and they lived happily ever after" is pretty much all we get.

After reading Kirsty's post, I feel a bit guilty always referring to Lizzie by her nickname, but I can't shake the familiarity. Anyway, guilt hasn't made me write Unvarnished any faster (as I've said before, I'm a busy actor and an unreliable writer), and in fact was pretty much what kept me paralyzed for a long time, for fear of what all these people I like and respect might make of my interpretation of events!

I've mostly managed to shed that, as about 75 handwritten pages of draft can attest, so now all that's left is periodic fretting about whether I'll still be believable on stage by the time the thing is ready to perform. *wry g* I don't have Emma West's uncanny resemblance to begin with (though I have had my share of unprompted comments over the years to the tune of "Hey, have you ever seen that Ophelia painting...?"), and I won't be carded beyond my time forever. (Though a hardware store clerk did ask for my birthdate before ringing up a can of spray paint last week, so I'm probably okay for a little while longer.) It will be what it will be; all I can do is forge on and hope people find it a story worth telling.

In the meantime, if they're in London starting next week (as I so very much wish I could be!) they can take in the story told by Jeremy Green, director Lotte Wakeham (of Matilda the musical fame), and a bright young cast who have been lighting up Twitter with their enthusiasm during rehearsals. It's been fascinating learning about the development of the project, and the collaboration of playwright and actress through a short film about the painting of Ophelia and on to this full-length play. I hope it's a great success, and look forward to reports from those able to attend!

Emma West and Tom Bateman  in rehearsal as Lizzie and Gabriel

Lizzie Siddal runs November 20 - December 21, 2013, at the Arcola Theatre in London. Click here for details and ticket info, and/or follow the production on Twitter.

Boo!

In which our Diva has a tale to tell and a song to sing

GreenMan Theatre Troupe, where I've had some great performing experiences in the last several years, sponsors an annual storytelling workshop with veteran storyteller Carolyn Thomas-Davidoff.  It culminates in a "Spooky Stories and Songs of the Season" program for one weekend only. This year, things finally worked out for me to participate, which means this Friday and Saturday, October 11 and 12, I'll be one of a about a dozen performers spinning traditional tales, urban legends, literary adaptations, and a few haunting tunes for good measure.

I have two selections on the program. One is a short story by Chicago writer Jenna Waterford, "Beata Beatrix," which was published a couple years back in the Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede. The title comes from the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- or rather, several paintings by the same name and of the same subject, one of which resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. With that in mind, Beata Beatrix got my "favorite" vote on #PRBDay, and I was far from the only one, since it ended up at the top of the list when the Tweets were counted. I'm looking forward to the next issue of the Pre-Raphaelite Society's quarterly journal, which I'm told will include an article on the various versions of the painting.

Jenna and I met online and bonded over our mutual love of Pre-Raphaelite art and Lizzie in particular, so I love having the opportunity to adapt her chillingly beautiful story for oral telling.

by Evanira on DeviantART

I'm also over the moon to have permission from fantasy author and singer/songwriter Seanan McGuire to sing her eerie reinvention of Red Riding Hood, "The True Story Here." I've been itching to perform it since the first time I heard it on her album Wicked Girls, and this is the perfect time and place. If you've seen Catherine Hardwicke's gorgeous film starring Amanda Seyfried, you might have an inkling where this Red is coming from, but Seanan's songwriting makes for its own unforgettable take on the tale.

Fingers crossed that I do both these terrific writers justice! If you're in Chicagoland, come and see/hear for yourself this Friday and Saturday. There's lots more spooky wonderfulness on the program -- ghosts and vampires and mythical spirits galore. Tickets are just $5, at the door or online. Hope to see you there!

The ghosts of Lizzies past

In which our Diva considers those who have walked a particular path ahead of her, on the occasion of meeting one of them

Okay, they're all alive, so "ghost" is rather a misnomer, but as Unvarnished continues to take shape (in longhand, making this Tumblr post a relevantly giggle-worthy observation), I can hardly help being a little haunted by them!

The one I saw first and know best is also the most recent: Amy Manson in Desperate Romantics. However fast and loose the series played with history, I loved its complicated and ambitious Lizzie, and Manson's performance made me an instant fan. I'm delighted to see her career growing, and wish I could have seen her well-reviewed turn as Nora in A Doll's House at the National Theatre of Scotland this past spring.

(Maybe someday we'll get something that gives the women of the Pre-Raphaelite circle the rounded portrayals they deserve without being quite so thoroughly ahistorical. A girl can dream.)

Mind you, the 2009 series' flights of fancy are nothing next to Ken Russell's take on the same events a generation earlier! His 1967 Dante's Inferno is unapologetically theatrical, veering at times into psychedelia (yes, you can do that in black & white, at least if you're Ken Russell) and at others into music-hall or panto (what even is going on with Annie Miller?). In that context, the paradoxical mix of strength and fragility in Judith Paris' ballerina presence serves Lizzie well, if the film's narrative doesn't always.

In a 2011 interview, Paris recalled that Russell cast her based entirely on her physical resemblance to Lizzie. "I saw Millais’s 'Ophelia' in the Tate and thought, 'That’s me!' It wasn’t about talent; Ken didn’t care if I could act or not. I did a screen test and I told him, 'I’ve never acted  apart from at school and a few lines in musicals and I don’t have any training.' He said, 'I don’t care. I’ll make your performance in the editing room!' I was thrown from being a dancer to playing opposite Oliver Reed on the BBC, which was one giant step for mankind!" I particularly cock my head at this apparent keenness to match Lizzie's physical appearance, when his Gabriel was Oliver Reed. (Actually, the fact that the same historical person has been played by Oliver Reed, Ben Kingsley, and Aidan Turner, all of whom work quite well for various reasons, makes me go full quizzical-puppy.)

Until recently, I had known her only from a favorite classic Doctor Who story (that's her under Eldrad's pretty blue scales in "The Hand of Fear"), but she's had a distinguished theatre career, and I've been particularly delighted to learn that she has written and performed several one-woman shows about historical figures over the years -- just as I'm trying to do with Lizzie!

Between these two, in 1975, came the most elusive dramatization (like the other two, from Auntie Beeb), the six-part The Love School. To this day, I (like the rest of the online Pre-Raphaelite community) have seen less than seven tantalizing minutes:



Yes, that Patricia Quinn, the one who created the role of Magenta in a certain "science fiction double feature" that was immortalized on film the same year.

Which is how I came to meet her this afternoon, at the Flashback Weekend horror convention. I couldn't make it to the Rocky Horror Picture Show screening she hosted last night, but I made it over there today, and found a surprisingly short line at her autograph table. I had no idea if this was a role she had any particular fond recollections of, but when I opened my Lizzie journal to a page for her to sign and explained what it was, she lit up and chatted about it for a good ten or twelve minutes!

"I have it," she told me with a conspiratorial grin. "I have the whole thing." Apparently a friend who worked in the production office managed to get hold of it for her some years ago, a minor miracle for anything made in the days when the BBC routinely aired shows once and then tucked them away to (as any Doctor Who fan who knows about the legendary "lost episodes" can tell you) vanish into the storage abyss or even be taped over.

But The Love School is safe and sound in its Lizzie's home -- something that impressed even its director, who had never been able to get his hands on it! -- and apparently she got around not too long ago to watching the full series, instead of stopping after Lizzie died. After all these years, she's downright gushing about how marvelous a production it is, with particular notice of its William Morris.

My favorite bit of the conversation was the anecdote about the day she, Richard O'Brien, and another RHPS castmate (she mentioned first names, but I don't remember the second one) did some sort of Q&A session at the Oxford Union. On the way over, she happened on Ben Kingsley -- her Rossetti -- in the street, and chatted briefly with him. Then, at the event, she looked up at the murals painted in that infamous adventure of the late 1850s (Dear Gabriel: When working in an unfamiliar technique, research is your friend!), "and I thought, 'That's me!'" Apparently there was a sequence in the series where "we were all in there painting away" that I, for one, would give minor body parts to see!

Mind you, that was the point where I made the dubious step of mentioning Desperate Romantics (in the context of my disappointment at its eliding that whole process -- which could probably easily make a feature film in itself -- into Gabriel painting a single church panel alone), of which she is... not fond. And not shy about saying so. Partly because of its inaccuracies, but also, I think, a bit because "I was asked in for it, you know. They had me read for Ruskin's mother. And I said, 'Ruskin's mother??'" I cannot capture the indignation of that in text, but I'm sure you can imagine!

All in all, she is a thoroughly delightful lady, and I heartily recommend meeting her if you have the opportunity.

And now I have someone else I need to finish writing Unvarnished for, because she said she'd like to hear about it when it's finished. Best get back to work, then...

An exercise in absurdity

In which our Diva should have known it couldn't possibly be that simple

I should have sent off my entry to the Pre-Raphaelite Society's poetry contest well before today, since I'm now crossing my fingers that it will arrive by the October 31 deadline, but, well, no room in the brain for non-Macbeth things. (I still keep wanting to say that name WITH GREAT DRAMA, Geoffrey Tennant style, but I could never possibly give it quite the flair Paul Gross does.)

Regardless, I expected to make a quick stop at the post office to buy an international money order for the £1.50 entry fee ($2.40 at today's exchange rate) and a 95-cent stamp, drop the letter in the mailbox, and be done with it.

Instead, I discovered that, although I am absolutely positive I remember buying at least one UK-bound money order from the USPS and/or Western Union some 10-12 years ago (before online transactions became the norm for such things), the lady at the post office looked over the available list on her computer several times (and looked under UK, Great Britain and England), then called her supervisor over to confirm that no, they couldn't sell me a money order that could be cashed in the UK. Practically anywhere else (including the British Virgin Islands!), but not jolly old England.

At the Meijer customer service counter (which includes both USPS and Western Union services) the girl couldn't even figure out what I was talking about, and her supervisor (with what I'm fairly certain was a Swedish accent) regretfully confirmed that no, they couldn't help me.

The bank, as is to be expected in this age of electronic everything, was deserted but for half a dozen employees who gathered around trying to think of a way to solve the problem that wouldn't involve a $40 fee for an international draft. They didn't manage it, but I got the feeling it was the most excitement they had all day.

In the end, I pulled £1.50 in coins from the leftovers of last year's trip (having exchanged my remaining paper money at the airport but forgotten the change), taped them to a card, and put everything into a small padded envelope to make it less obvious. Halfway to the (different) post office, I realized that this meant it was now a package and would require a customs declaration. The very sympathetic postal clerk shook her head at my account of the afternoon up to that point, then asked if I had tried a currency exchange. *headdesk* D'oh! Of course not. And it was a little late to think of it now. But it'll definitely be what I try next time.

If I were feeling cleverer, and didn't need to render my house something resembling hygienic ahead of my parents' arrival tomorrow, I would have attempted to render this tale in the style of Lizzie's letter from Nice. It would only be appropriate, after all. Plus ça change...

A Year And A Day

In which our Diva has recorded a few more poems, and made a pretty video to go with one

And this is only earth, my dear

In which our Diva pauses to remember

One hundred fifty years ago today, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal Rossetti died of a laudanum overdose at the age of 32.

I had grand ambitions to finish writing Unvarnished, the one-woman show about her I first conceived nearly a decade ago, in time to be well on the way to production on this date, if not actually up and running. And, well, that hasn't happened for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that I'm both a busy actor and an unreliable writer. :-)

If finances and other obligations were kinder, I'd be in London right now, sharing the day with other admirers drawn by the memorial events scheduled at Highgate Cemetery with the participation of Jan Marsh and Lucinda Hawksley, two of the primary authors whose work has kept Lizzie's work and story alive in the public consciousness. I had the good fortune to meet the down-to-earth and gracious Lucinda for coffee on a whirlwind day in London last February. (So whirlwind, in fact, that I was appallingly late for our agreed-upon time, but she was very kind about it despite her own busy schedule).

Earlier that day, with just an hour or so to visit the Tate Britain, I made the decision to spend essentially all of that time in the "Key Works From the Historic Collection" room, whose far end is home to a concentration of the Pre-Raphaelite favorites that have accumulated on my bookshelf for two decades. After giving each painting a few minutes' close examination, and chatting for a few minutes with the lovely middle-aged lady who was kind enough to take a snapshot of me with Ophelia, I took a seat on a nearby bench and scribbled a dozen-plus journal pages of observations, not so much on the paintings themselves, but on the way people approached and interacted with them. And, of course, specifically with Ophelia, so famous, and such a magnet for adolescent girls in particular. I heard a pair of friends, perhaps twelve or thirteen, chattering their way down the long room behind me, grow hushed and suddenly serious as they approached.

It's a modestly-sized work, placed a bit to the side in the composition of a wall dominated by Burne-Jones' King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid, which I had somehow never processed was quite that enormous. But nobody misses it.

I sat there for about half an hour, and at one point my journal scribbling became a poem, something I've dabbled in but never been at all serious about. I don't know whether I'll end up using it somehow in Unvarnished. I don't really see how, as it doesn't mesh in style with Lizzie's own poetry, or that of her contemporaries, that I'm weaving into my text. So maybe here is where it belongs...

                               22 Feb 2011
                               Tate Britain

Like Snow White in her glass coffin
I am encased safely behind a pane
A window into our mad bewildering
                    idealistic youth

They walk past me, speaking in
                    reverent tones, as if in church
Or in a graveyard

This is more my monument than that
                   stone at Highgate, where I lie
Among those who share my name
                   by marriage
But who never quite wished
                   to share that name
                   with me.

There I am difficult to find, more
                  difficult to reach

You must know where to look
                  and whom to ask
                  and hope it is not one of
                  those who guard me so
                  closely from those who seek
                  me there

Here, behind the glass, my colours
                  are undimmed

My face as fresh as they told
                 Gabriel it was when they
                  brought me up from
                  the earth

A pretty lie to assuage his
                  guilt, his turmoil
                  at recovering that
                  which he should never have
                  given me at all
                  I had no need of them

On a dark night in Highgate
The tale of my uncorrupted state
                  was a lie

Here it is the truth.

What you seek is this
The girl in the water
She's easy to find
She hangs on the line
Wouldn't Mr Millais have
                   been pleased by that?

Upon reflection

In which our Diva has been missing the obvious

If you've been around this blog a while, you might remember me mentioning that the whole Lizzie Siddal thing started for me with her self-portrait. It's been a solid twenty years now, but I still vividly recall flipping through Jan Marsh's Pre-Raphaelite Women in the bookstore at Okemos Mall (a relatively convenient bus ride from my Michigan State dorm) and stopping short at this image with a near-physical shock of something very like recognition.

Over the years, I've pondered where that reaction came from. It's not that I actually think she looked that much like me (though it's also not hard to figure out how a pale, skinny, redheaded dreamer promptly developed an enduring fascination for her). It's the expression that reached out and grabbed me, eloquent of concentration and minute examination.

Lizzie painted herself... painting herself. Studying, perhaps even criticizing. Descriptions of the portrait -- just nine inches in diameter, and Lizzie's first and most successful known work in oil -- usually contrast its directness with the downcast gazes and romantic glamor of Rossetti's many portraits of her. It's part of the reason my work-in-progress finally acquired the title Unvarnished.

The easy conclusion to draw is that Rossetti (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the other artists she sat for) projected a particular image onto her, and there's a lot to be said for that conclusion (hey, look, it's another Beatrice, and another, and Gabriel, honey, this is becoming an issue), but it doesn't necessarily follow that she painted The Truth in counterpoint to his romantic embellishment.

In fact, as occurred to me in a headsmacking moment the other day, it wasn't physically possible for her to do so. Which I knew, of course, but I hadn't quite thought through the implications this way before.

Like any self-portrait prior to the ascendance of photography (and, I expect, a good many even today), it's not a portrait of Lizzie as anyone else saw her. It's a portrait of her reflection. Which is not the same thing at all. But it's the reflection that spoke to me on that glossy page all those years ago. Sure, I could stare at Ophelia or Beata Beatrix all day, but that modest little circle still pins me like nothing else. I wonder if she ever held the portrait up to a mirror (as simulated here through the magic of Photoshop)? Did it shed any light on the connection between her "unvarnished" self and what others saw?

This train of thought brings to mind this blog post I read a year and a half ago, in which Cleolinda (who writes the sidesplittingly funny "Movies in Fifteen Minutes" recaps as well as the best good-natured skewering of Twilight you will ever encounter) states, quite clearly and cogently, what should be obvious but isn't necessarily, about what we see in the mirror vs. what everyone else sees.

And that's just in the purely physical sense, before you get into the mindgames we play with ourselves. And oh, do we play them. My own relationship with the mirror remains largely that of a dancer -- it's a tool for finding faults, but also for fixing them, and most of all for practicing and adjusting what I show to the world. I get along much better with my reflection than with most photos of me (which is probably why Cleo's post stuck with me), but still... Well, there's a reason that searching, critical look in Lizzie's eyes is so very, very familiar.

It's funny that, as Kirsty Stonell Walker pointed out in a post a few months back over at The Kissed Mouth, there's a metric truckload of Victorian art assuming women's relationship with the mirror to be all about vanity. But I'm inclined to think that then, as now, it was a whole lot more complicated than "Oh, look at how pretty I am!"  I can't help but imagine that within each painting where the viewer sees a glamorous nymph admiring herself, the nymph herself sees something a bit more stark looking back at her.

Jane Eyre painted Blanche Ingram as imagined perfection, on ivory with her finest pigments, before ever meeting her in person -- and depicted herself on plain paper with every flaw laid bare. All those dudes painting the girls in love with their mirrors should have checked with Miss Bronte or Miss Siddal for the real score.



(And on that note, back to my reflection of Lizzie, coming soon to a stage near you. Just as soon as it has a whole script. I'm getting there. This thought process is distilling its way in as we speak...)

She left the web, she left the loom

In which our Diva boosts a signal

If you follow LizzieSiddal.com and/or the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood blog, you probably know that the family of their creator, the lovely and dedicated Stephanie Pina, is going through some trying times involving large medical bills.

Enter WAG Screen, producers of the amazing-looking independent film version of The Lady of Shalott that Stephanie has been plugging on her blogs from the beginning. For the next five weeks, 50% of proceeds from DVD sales of the film go to benefit this family in need.

The online community of Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasts is far-flung, and Stephanie's sites are two of the key meeting points. If you've seen her posts or others about the film and thought about checking it out, or if this is the first you've heard of it, now is the perfect time to order it and help give back to one of our own.

Hey nonny nonny

In which our Diva is safely home and reacclimated to Central Standard Time

A few things I need to accomplish before writing up a proper blog post (or three) about my UK trip.

In this meantime, there's this.

Yes, I cried. I'm a sap. Deal. :-)

The persistence of poppies

In which our Diva follows a flower through a labyrinth of meaning

This week marks Armistice Day, more commonly referred to as Veteran's Day here in the US, and Remembrance Day in the UK, where its specific reference to World War I tends to be more noted than here. Digital poppies have been scattered through my Twitter feed for a week or more, adorning the userpics of Brits and Canadians, many of whom are presumably also wearing fabric ones in real life.

I didn't know until I was an adult that the tradition originates with John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Field," and it wasn't until a couple years ago that I learned of the alternate tradition of wearing a white poppy, signifying hope (specifically for peace) rather than sacrifice.

All I knew when I was a kid, living in England from ages 7-10 when the Air Force stationed my dad at RAF Lakenheath, was that the British poppies came out around my birthday and were manufactured completely differently from the wire-and-crepe-paper ones I was familiar with thanks to the American Legion.

Legion and VFW poppies come out for Memorial Day (end of May, for those not in the US), which originated with the Civil War, but which in my lifetime has tended to emphasize WWII. Perhaps especially in my experience, which included, at age 5, riding in the Memorial Day parade, on the back of a red convertible generously decorated with those crepe-paper poppies, as Poppy Queen for my WWII-vet grandfather's Legion post. It was quite the day for a little girl already inclined to show off, and I still have the red pageant-style sash, long white dress, and little white gloves. (Tangential factoid: I was quite small for my age until age 13, at which point some weird biochemical switch flipped and I shot up a whole foot over the next five years. Both dress and gloves -- which I clearly remember wearing for Easter and Memorial Day that year -- look impossibly tiny now.)

The American Legion figures prominently in many of my memories of Grandpa W. I even have my original membership card for the Legion Auxiliary, issued shortly after my birth, when I was among the first granddaughters admitted to the organization when the eligibility rules changed.  The point was rendered moot within months, when my dad's number came up and he became a Vietnam-era veteran, eligible for Legion membership himself.

The poppy-wearing tradition, at least in my adult lifetime (probably earlier, but I have next to no frame of reference for the civilian world during my childhood), isn't as ubiquitious in the US as in Britain and Canada, a fact that surprises me over and over again. (It shouldn't by now. It gets harder every year to find a Legionnaire to buy one from.) It happened again this morning, in a Twitter exchange with film writer Neal Romanek, an American living in London who was mystified by the poppies all around him this week until it was explained to him today.  And, though almost exactly two years older than I and the child of a Vietnam vet himself, he wasn't aware of the American poppy tradition at all.

As a small child, I was perennially puzzled by the Wicked Witch of the West using a field of poppies as a weapon to stop Dorothy and her friends from reaching the Emerald City. "Something with poison in it," she crooned to the captain of her flying monkeys. I'd never seen a real poppy before we lived in England, but I knew they existed, and I knew some plants were poisonous if you ate them, so that potentially made sense. But just walking across a field putting everyone to sleep? I have a vague recollection of asking my mom about it, around the same age as my pretend-royalty-for-a-day experience. I don't remember what her explanation was, only that I didn't really understand it. In retrospect, I suspect she was at a bit of a loss for something that would make sense without recourse to L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century vantage point, when opiate-based medications were still freely available but their hazards widely known. Fifteen years passed between the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and John McCrae's battlefield composition, and it's the latter that invokes the common European wildflower rather than its potent cultivated cousin.

None of which I knew when we moved into our housing unit at Lakenheath, with a lawn that was covered with tiny daisies in spring and early summer, and with wild poppies in late summer and fall, so thick that friends and I would run through them over and over again toward an imaginary Emerald City.  That profusion is the image invoked by Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine in his account of the famous opening of Lizzie's grave to recover the poems DGR had buried with her seven years before: "fresh poetry and new poets arose, even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness of poppies in autumn." Even so, as Stephanie Pina notes in today's blog post on LizzieSiddal.com, the choice of metaphor is striking in reference to Lizzie, for whom the cultivated opium poppy, processed into laudanum, brought relief, addiction, and finally death.

DGR painted three oil versions of Beata Beatrix. In the first, housed at the Tate Gallery in London, and the second, which I visited this summer at the Art Institute of Chicago, a red dove delivers a white poppy into Beatrice's open hands. In the third, completed by Ford Madox Brown after Gabriel's death and now in the collection of the Birmingham Museum, the colors of bird and flower are reversed.

It would be half a century later, on the other side of the war whose technology irrevocably changed what war meant in Western culture, that those colors would come to denote the hope and sacrifice I mentioned at the top of this post.  What they meant to DGR when he conceived the painting(s) is open to interpretation and debate. Beata Beatrix is often referred to as his tribute or memorial to Lizzie, but the more I think about his repeated execution of the design, the more it feels like an attempt to make peace with her spirit. Metaphorically speaking. (Or mostly; there are those seances with the Brownings to consider.)

But it's the inside of Lizzie's head I'm trying to explore these days. There's only so far I can or should try to puzzle out Gabriel's too!  (It was a pretty scary place for a while there. I don't envy him inhabiting it.)

Song for Today: When I bought Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles, my teenage mind was completely blown by the lyrical continuum from WWI's "lost generation" to the modern lives destroyed by the drug trade. Today, 25 years later, war and the drug trade occupy the same space, where opium cultivation appeases the Taliban and puts food on the family table.

Poppies for young lives. Bitter trade indeed.

November already?

In which our Diva wonders how the heck that happened

Halloween down (and much fun -- my first one in this house without a show, so I finally got to hand out candy and freak out the neighborhood kids as Zombie Tinkerbell), Election Day nearly done, and birthday just around the corner! This fall has flown.

Realized I forgot in my last post to mention one of my favorite moments in the Divine Comedy reading. In Canto 26, where we encounter Ulysses and Diomedes, Virgil turns to Dante and says, essentially, "They're Greek. Better let me do the talking." Seriously, I'm barely even paraphrasing there. I was sitting next to Racole Fisher, Storefront Shakespeare's executive director, and we looked at each other and (silently) cracked up. And nobody else seemed to get it! Yes, even in the Eighth Circle of Hell, there are geeky giggles to be had.

This coming Sunday I'll be back at Villa Verone with fellow Elgin Opera singers for our periodic casual cabaret evenings. Not sure yet what other Sundays I'm going to do, but we have six of them coming up: all through November and December, with Thanksgiving and Christmas weekends off.

Meanwhile, I'm hunkered down and bundled up (getting chilly out there, and trying to keep the ol' gas bill under control), making slow but reasonably steady progress on the Lizzie project and doing various electronic housekeeping.  Promo materials for Scarlet X are in the works; I'm excited to see  and share them. And as always, there are other potential projects swirling in the offing, and I'll keep you posted as any of them solidify.

I know that winter is inevitably on the way, but I'm holding tight to fall, with a little assistance from another animation Daryl made from the "Cemetery Girl" photoshoot.  Enjoy the pretty leaves while we got 'em!


Valerie - Cemetery Girl from Daryl Darko on Vimeo.

O lasso!

In which our Diva had a serendipitous week

Or most of one, anyway. First there was the reading of excerpts from the Divine Comedy, in the original Italian by classical actor Gian Paolo Poddigue and in the Longfellow translation by Storefront Shakespeare artistic director Nora Manca, who directed me as Titania last summer. I arrived to the reading a little late -- Benedictine could use a few campus maps! -- catching the first (English) pass through Canto V just as Dante and Virgil met Francesca da Rimini. I'd have been disappointed to miss that, not just because I didn't want to walk in on Nora's performance any later than I had to, but because the wallpaper on both my netbook and my Office of Doom computer is Rossetti's three-panel watercolor illustrating that very passage. (Perfect for a widescreen monitor! Lizzie's self-portrait works better on the 4:3 monitor on my home desktop.)

Something I read recently (can't recall at the moment what it was; I've long since passed the point where all the research sort of runs together in my head) asserted that DGR missed the point, that Paolo and Francesca weren't really in love, but just gave in to momentary lust, and were actually being punished by being trapped together in the second circle with the rest of the lustful. I thought at the time that that didn't seem quite right, but it had been too long since I encountered what Francesca actually says. Which certainly doesn't sound to me like it tracks with this person's opinion, whether in Dante's words or Longfellow's translation! Maybe they didn't like the idea of true lovers being damned just because of that pesky adultery thing?

I got to meet Gian Paolo briefly after the reading, and attempt to chat in my poco poco Italiano, but it's a bit too poco for much of a chat. It's enough to follow a bit of poetry with context or, better yet, a translation fresh in my head, so it was a lovely evening all in all.

In a similar vein, on Saturday I scored a side-by-side edition of Vita Nuova on clearance at Half Price Books for two bucks. \o/ Hopefully the translation is better than the one I picked up a few years back, which I was unable to read due to its being BORING AS LINT, and which went in the donation pile after three attempts.  Of course, if this one isn't better, I can jump to the Italian for a challenge.  It joins the gorgeous blank book, bound in red paisley brocade, that I picked up there on my last trip for Lizzie-related jottings and sketches.  It's been christened with a few of the former, but I haven't quite attempted the latter yet. It's been ages and ages since I was drawing regularly, and I need to get back in the habit.

The final bit of serendipity came this morning on Twitter, when I unexpectedly heard from Lucinda Hawksley.  She's the author of the biography of Lizzie that languished on my Amazon wishlist for about four years before I happened on Stephanie Pina's interview with her on LizzieSiddal.com, and discovered that it was available under an(other) alternate title. I was having a brief conversation over there the other day about the one-woman show project, and guess the mention of Lizzie's name came up on Lucinda's radar. So chalk up another interested -- and interesting! -- party looking to see what this thing becomes. Keeping me honest and keeping me working!