In which our Diva impersonates the Founding Mother of smarts and sass
A couple weeks ago, a friend alerted me to Drunk History's "Stumble Into History" contest, which called for videos of fans posing as historical figures to react to their portrayal on the show. It sounded like fun (and getting flown out to warm, sunny LA to do a walk-on in Season 3 sounds particularly good right about now!), but I've had other priorities, so it wasn't until this past weekend that I did anything about it.
At which point, I pulled it together in less than a day, with resources I had around the house, and uploaded my entry a comfortable three hours before deadline. I'm pretty pleased with myself for that. :-)
I spent a fair amount of time waffling among the awesome ladies on the list -- Mary Dyer? Dolley Madison? Nellie Bly? -- but ultimately Abigail Adams and her legendary letter-writing were always going to prevail. (I am rather sad nobody represented for Nellie, the original intrepid girl reporter.)
So, interspersing some of Mrs. Adams' famous words with a few of my own invention, I took pretend quill pen in hand and threw my mob cap in the ring.
You can check out the results here and (if you feel so inclined and if you have a Facebook account, on which the voting mechanism unfortunately depends) vote for me once a day until next Monday, March 2. Comments and sharing are also most definitely welcome, and thank you!!
In which our Diva is witching it up, and she's not alone
Exciting day in Diva-land! Witchfinderpremiered today on Popcorn Horror and MyIndieShow. Popcorn Horror is a free app for Android or iOS and we're their "Short Fright Friday" selection for this week. Check out the nifty minimalist poster they made to go with it!
Over at the MyIndieShow link, you can stream or download Witchfinder, as well as a growing catalog of other indie creations. (And you can "show love" by clicking on the little blue heart/reel thingie at the top left of the main movie graphic, even if you don't watch on the site.)
When we were shooting last November, we had no idea we were contributing to something of a zeitgeist moment, but by the time Pamela J. Grossman took to HuffPo to declare 2013 "The Year of the Witch," they seemed to be everywhere. Just a couple weeks after her essay was posted, I watched Oz the Great and Powerful on a flight out to California and Beautiful Creatures on the flight back. I'd already caught the former at the cinema, but missed the latter, which turned out to be well worth seeing for more than just the jawdropping adult cast (Emma Thompson, Viola Davis, Jeremy Irons) the filmmakers lined up. The metaphor might not be the subtlest ever, but I'm all for a teen audience seeing a girl stand up and refuse to be irrevocably branded either madonna or whore.
As Grossman noted, the fall TV schedule is downright witchtastic. Her sampling didn't even include the new series I'm having the most fun watching so far, Sleepy Hollow, whose reinvented Katrina Van Tassel Crane has done most of the explaining about her faction of witches and their evil opponents despite being trapped in a spooky interdimensional limbo. (And this is the supporting female character. The made-entirely-of-awesome-ness of Nicole Beharie as Abbie Mills is off the witchy topic, but can't go unremarked.)
I feel a certain kinship with the tween fans of book serieslike Beautiful Creatures; my own favorite book through middle school was The Witch of Blackbird Pond. (Even though -- spoiler alert -- it involves no actual witchcraft.) My first (and probably favorite) directing gig was The Crucible.
So in the Year of the Witch, it's pretty darn cool that there are witches, witches everywhere... and one of them is me!
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 Infernois 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...
In which our Diva plugs a few of her favorite things
Watch: I'm a little behind with this recommendation, since the season 1 finale aired last night on Syfy, but Continuumsort of snuck up on me as a favorite, while proving one of my favorite points: A story doesn't have to be super-innovative and groundbreaking to be worth telling. On paper, it certainly seems like we've seen all this before: Members of a terrorist group escape execution in 2077 by traveling back in time, and a rank-and-file cop is inadvertently carried with them and dropped in the middle of 2012. Cue potential pardoxes, mysterious clues, and shocking revelations about the future of apparently ordinary people.
It's smartly written and beautifully designed and shot, with a solid ensemble peppered with familiar Vancouver-based faces, including Lexa Doig, Roger R. Cross, and Tony Amendola as the charismatic and enigmatic revolutionary leader.
The glue that holds it all together, though, is Rachel Nichols as Kiera Cameron, the cop forced to navigate an unfamiliar world and driven by the twin -- and sometimes opposing -- motivations of stopping the revolutionaries from reshaping the future to their liking, and getting back home to that future and the husband and young son she left there. If you've only seen Nichols in GI Joe or Star Trek, you've only scratched the surface of what she's capable of. Kiera is as smart, tough, and resourceful as her role at the center of a sci-fi adventure requires. She's also a young mom ripped away from her family, an officer of the law forced to lie every day to the people she works with and depends on, and an idealist confronted with mounting evidence that the system she serves -- and the husband she loves -- may not be everything they seem. Nichols navigates all this with raw, breathtaking honesty, and breaks my heart every week.
Listen: All this week, BBC Radio presents a brand-new audio adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere with a gobsmacking cast ranging from rising young stars like Natalie Dormer to veterans like Bernard Cribbins to straight-up legend Christopher Lee. I'm a huge fan of the original 1996 TV miniseries (which many people don't realize came before the novel), and this new incarnation -- smartly updated for the cultural and technological developments of the last decade and a half -- breathes new life into Gaiman's colorful characters and places them in a flawlessly atmospheric aural environment. It's a great listen, and (unlike the BBC iPlayer's video content) you can catch it from anywhere in the world.
Follow: I ran across Grace Nuth's blog The Beautiful Necessity several years ago, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the Pre-Raphaelite and/or Arts and Crafts movements. But today I want to give a plug to her newer blog, Domythic Bliss, inspired by her ongoing mission to transform her home to reflect her artistic and story tastes (and, unlike what you tend to see in magazines, on an ordinary-person budget). Currently she's in the midst of a "Mythic March" series in which she and regular readers share current decorating, craft and art projects. If you want a practical way to live in a fairy-tale forest, get inspired by people making stuff, or just want to look at pretty things, you should definitely check it out.
Listen some more: I ran across Sandra Joseph's blog around the end of her record-setting Broadway run as Christine in The Phantom of the Opera. Of everyone I encountered way back in Michigan State's theatre department, she didn't surprise me a bit with that high-profile success, but I would never have predicted the direction she's taken since then. First in the blog, and then moving into a second career as a motivational speaker and coach, she's been unfailingly candid about her own anxiety and insecurities, and made a mission of inspiring and supporting others in achieving their dreams. The latest iteration of that is a new podcast, Behind the Mask Radio, featuring in-depth interviews with fellow artists, which has promptly landed a permanent spot on my "cynicism detox" list. If you're interested in being a creative person and also having a happy, healthy, balanced life, it's very much worth your time.
And finally, Looky looky looky! The gorgeous poster design for Witchfinder makes me feel like a real movie star.
I can't wait to see the finished film. It's already been selected for Panic Fest in Kansas City, MO, where it will screen as part of the Short Film Showcase on April 20. If you're in the area, I'd love it if you'd check it out and let me know what you think! There's talk of a cast/crew road trip, but it's early days, and I don't know if that'll happen. But I'll definitely keep you posted if it turns out I'm going!
In which our Diva has two of one and one of the other
Ending the First: Final weekend of Macbeth at GreenMan Theatre Troupe! I couldn't have asked for a more amazing experience playing That Scottish Lady, thanks to director David Soria, my marvelous Mackers Carl Zeitler, and too many more people to list even though each and every one of them is thirty-one flavors of awesome. If you're planning to come out this weekend (and I hope you are!), a little box-office birdie tells me Saturday night in particular is filling up, and reservations are recommended for any of the three remaining performances.
Ending the Second: Also in the category of Awesome People I'm Glad To Have Met is the ever-affable Andy, host of the Being Human Cast podcast. I met Andy when we were both on the Being Human discussion panel at Dragon*Con 2010, and have had the privilege of babbling nigh-endlessly about that remarkable example of TV storytelling as guest host on several episodes of the podcast. After some soul-searching, Andy made the tough decision to close the podcast's three-year run with Episode 38, and kindly invited me to join him in a wrap-up discussion of the end of Series 3 and an overview of Series 4. We examine the resolution of Mitchell's tragic arc; take a moment to bid farewell to Daisy, my favorite free-spirited vampire and occasional cosplay alter-ego; give Nina, George, and Annie some well-deserved love; and spend a bit of time pondering where things are going with the newest denizens of Honolulu Heights. If you're a Being Human fan, give it a listen, and let us know what you think!
And a beginning! The moment I get home from post-closing festivities for Macbeth, I'll be packing my set bag to start filming Witchfinder the very next day. After all the detailed prep work, it's finally time for the dark historical world the crew have been building to come alive. I'll bet even my stunt double over there is looking forward to it, and she can't even stand up without a little help from production designer Arianne Clarke and costume designer Alisha Tyler! What a dummy...
In which our Diva's life imitates art imitating life
Yesterday I had the privilege of watching this brilliant young actor share a scene with veteran powerhouse Kelsey Grammer.
Rotimi Akinosho is a soft-spoken, engaging young man who's "still getting used to" being recognized on the street. As extras, anyone who wants to keep working knows to respect the actors' space and working process, and it's understood that we leave them alone unless they address us. Sometimes that's an awkward dance, like during yesterday's rain-enforced downtime, when twenty extras were instructed to gather in a building entryway where Rotimi's chair had been placed in the corner. He could have retreated farther into the building, but instead chatted with extras about his experience of the neighborhoods of Chicago, his college days at Northwestern, and how blessed he is in this role at the start of his career.
A couple weeks ago, I tweeted about looking forward to the impending return of Boss for a second season of production in Chicago, and was surprised by a reply from Rotimi -- who I hadn't even known was on Twitter -- that he was looking forward to being back too. Yesterday, between takes, he shook my hand and told me it was nice to meet me in person. He's down-to-earth, smart, and incredibly talented, and I look forward to watching him grow and continue to succeed.
At one point, the scene called for Rotimi to pull up his hood as he walked away, a perfectly sensible action on a rainy day.
And as this slight, baby-faced figure in the hoodie walked by, my stomach lurched. Because on another street, on another rainy day, unprotected by the bustle of a television crew and security detail, another bright young man's promising future was extinguished by a bullet.
As I drove home last night, there was another lurch, as a BBC World Service anchor quoted President Obama saying that if he had a son, he would look like this. The media and public discussion swirling around the Trayvon Martin tragedy is grappling with a dozen complicated and interlocking demons of the American social psyche, which will take months if not years to untangle and properly name, let alone really address. Many are how-could-this-happen?? shocked, while others are bitterly unsurprised, only heartbroken that it cost this teenage boy's life for the world to even begin to notice the minefield their children face every day.
In early coverage of the case, we were told George Zimmerman had stated that he thought Trayvon was "suspicious" because he was walking slowly in the rain with his hood pulled up. Earlier this week, I had to wonder what was going through the head of Zimmerman's attorney when he let his client publicly assert that this beanpole kid, armed with nothing more deadly than sugar and caffeine, attacked a stranger with ten years and a hundred pounds on him. Where on earth that line of defense is leading, only time will tell, but one thing is certain: They're banking on the justice system to believe it, and not without reason.
Black male in a hoodie. In any movie, TV show, or even advertisement, it's shorthand for shady dealings, gangs, drugs, violence. Even in a sophisticated context designed to subvert or deconstruct the trope, it works because the trope is already there. And where pop-culture images go, public perception follows. A casually dressed black guy can never be just a casually dressed guy.
On Wednesday, a grass-roots "Million Hoodie March" took shape in street demonstrations and online solidarity. One of those posting a picture for the latter was Elon James White, creator of the satirical webseries This Week in Blackness. As he recounts on Tumblr, this resulted in a commenter objecting that "This is a thug in a hoodie" and that it confused the message. The photo, of course, is of White himself, and you can see at the link above how the dialogue played out. And you can bet the farm that the commenter -- who did not back down from their original position -- would have said no such thing about an image of a thirtysomething white guy wearing the same casual outfit, facial hair, and appropriately sober expression.
On Boss, Rotimi's character, Darius, is by no means an upstanding innocent. Neither is he simply a "thug," though it would be easy at a glance to label him as such and write him off. There's a reason we first met him as the worried caretaker of an elderly uncle. Boss is a grim show, committed to throwing a harsh light on the worse angels of our nature behind the gloss of political maneuvering, rife with racial tensions and moral corner-cutting. I have to admit it's not something I'd regularly watch on its own considerable merits, if it weren't the proud flagship drama of Chicago's growing TV industry, produced entirely here and well stocked with local talent and crew. It's a little too grim for my taste, but I'm still glad it's here.
And when I watch the scene we shot yesterday, I'll be thinking about that hoodie, and what the costume designer knows perfectly well it symbolizes. And watching for how the visual code plays out, for Darius, and for Rotimi, and for a nation of young men with their lives ahead of them.
In which our Diva babbles about supernatural housemates for fun and no profit
I mentioned Being Humanbriefly in my last post, but in my other life as an Unapologetic Squeeing Fangirl, I've been known to go on at far, far greater length and in rather exhaustive detail. :-)
Fortunately for me, there are other people who go in for that sort of thing, including the ever-charming Andy, host of the "Being Human Cast" podcast. Recently he was kind enough to invite me back for a third time as guest host, to discuss "Adam's Family" (series 3, episode 2), and the episode is now live on their site and on iTunes. If you're a fan of the show, give us a listen, and please stop by the podcast website to leave a comment!
In which our Diva ponders leaves falling and cameras rolling
Long time, no blog, once again. Oops. Part of that I can blame on a one-two punch of a nasty summer cold and a sneaky computer virus that took out both my netbook and my desktop within 24 hours. I've also been auditioning a lot and doing a little bit of background work on a couple of TV shows.
Being an extra is a funny thing. I joke a lot about people thinking of actors as weird parts of the set that move on their own, but with background, that's almost literally true. This living room would look weird without a couch, so we put one in it. This party would look weird without people milling around, so we put them there. It's not really acting, but it can be a good time, and it's a great way to learn about how things work on a big-time set.
So far this year, I've worked on the new series Boss, which premieres on Starz in October, and the second season of Showtime's Shameless. Like a lot of shows set in Chicago, past and present, the latter mostly shoots in L.A., but they do come here for more than just second-unit establishing shots, bringing the principal cast a couple times a year for a week or so at a time, and that work is definitely appreciated by extras and local crew members alike.
The former, though, is part of what we're starting to see more of: A series filmed entirely in Chicago, studio scenes and all. That increased activity has been rendered feasible by several factors, including the renewal of the 30% tax credit for another ten years by the state legislature, but a definite linchpin has been the opening of Cinespace Chicago in the defunct Ryerson Steel complex. For a while there, it looked like the studio facility -- a new venture of a company that already runs a successful production complex in Toronto -- wasn't going to happen. There'd been buzz when they first made the deal for the Ryerson property, but then the estimated timetable for opening the first stage came and went, and I didn't hear anything more.
And then I did: In addition to Boss, the studio was home to portions of Transformers 3 and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Then, a day after Fox's gut-punch cancellation oflast season's The Chicago Code -- which made its home at the already-established Chicago Studio City -- local talent and crew got a shot of good news in NBC's pickup of The Playboy Club, which is now occupying pretty much every available inch of Cinespace through December. This summer has also seen visits from the superhero pilot Powersand (briefly) from the Man of Steelhimself. (But Batman went and abandoned us for Pittsburgh. That's just rude, Mr. Wayne.)
That's a lot of activity. We've got room for more! And it's especially heartening to see them casting minor speaking roles as well as extras locally, as well as opportunities for area natives like Jennifer Beals to come home to work for a while. On Boss, I lucked into a featured-extra spot with the campaigning governor, played by Steppenwolf veteran Francis Guinan, who has managed to remain Chicago-based while building a solid character-actor career. I'd love to be able to do that.
Everyone says you have to go where the work is, and there's no denying the truth of that. But here's hoping Chicago continues to be where more and more of the work is. We've got the people, and increasingly we have the infrastructure. The success of the productions that are already here will help that grow. Here's hoping!
In which our Diva is officially tired of the word "empowerment"
In the wake of The Playboy Club's moment in the spotlight at the annual Television Critics Association press tour, debate is bouncing around the internet about just what the show means. Personally, I think what it means is really damn complicated, and that's exactly what I like about it. Is what I'm about to say colored by the fact that the show is being produced in Chicago and employing some of my friends and colleagues? Probably. But that's not the only reason I want it to be good and do well.
Some people, notably Melissa Silverstein over at the indispensible Women and Hollywood, have zeroed in on the comments by cast members asserting that the position of their characters is proto-feminist and "progressive." There's more skepticism about this than I think the the comments actually warrant, though Silverstein is right that Amber Heard's attempt to explain her position didn't quite say what I think she intended it to. From my vantage point, sandwiched between Heard's generation and Gloria Steinem's, I can see both perspectives, and where and how they're missing each other. I've never hesitated to call myself a feminist, but it's not hard to see why many younger women do, and it's not quite the reason I've often seen put forth by their elders. Not so much that they think it entails various other political baggage, but that they have been repeatedly told that it does.
If I'm honest, I have to say I have more sympathy for those young women's position, because I've listened to those who paved the way before me, and heard how often what they have to say sounds an awful lot like "We didn't fight for your right to make your own choices just to have you make the WRONG choices!" How it sounds like going any way but theirs makes you an ungrateful wretch who's setting The Entire Cause Of Women back by decades. Think that sounds melodramatic? Check out the three, count 'em, three indignant comments on the W&H post by judybrowni, who apparently considers childish namecalling to be the appropriate response here. There is no quicker way to send my estimation of you into the toilet than to call any other woman a "bimbo" -- hey, how about throwing in "whore" or "witch" while you're at it? -- and tossing in "know-nothing" and "anorexic" (people still think that's okay? seriously?) into the bargain, along with rampant ageism and repeated implications that acting isn't "real work" (And what possesses people from various walks of life to tell people from other walks of life that what they do for a living is invalid? It never, ever fails to sound petty and foolish.), pretty much seals the deal.
But I digress. I do think Heard's statement, as quoted in the post, was ill-chosen, and the whole spin of "it's all about empowerment" (although, has anyone from NBC actually used that overworked word, or is it coming from the press? h/t to Mizzelle for confirmation, via this NPR article, that yes, it seems to have started with executive producer Chad Hodge) is ill-advised. And Silverstein is right that the spin is what it's about at this stage of the game, but I'm a bit baffled as to why she -- who writes compellingly about the industry every day, and knows how the spin works and how little it often has to do with the actual product -- seems to be letting it color her impression of the show so much. I doubly scratched my head at this:
Me thinks this young woman better have a damn good show or she should just shut the fuck up and admit she’s on a show that’s about women wearing bunny costumes trying to get by in the world where it was really difficult for single women to get jobs that would pay a decent wage. You see if they framed it that way, I could potentially be interested.
I... really don't understand how that's not what's being said. I honestly don't. That's exactly the impression I get from the interview videos on NBC's website, and at the Twitter stream from the press conference, and NBC's own description of the show as "a sophisticated series about the transitional times of the early 1960s and the complex lives of a group of working-class women."
One of the places I've seen that last quote is in this article over at Fangirltastic, in which regular contributor Theron expresses skepticism that the show will ultimately prove to be anything more than a standard-issue prime-time soap. She also touches on the much-publicized call to boycott by the Parents Television Council. And while I'm skeptical of the PTC's "Playboy = pornography = unalloyed evil" position, it has raised in advance issues that are relevant, and which seem like they will actually be part of the show. I've seen several comments in various places pointing out the tendency of many people to conflate Bunnies (hostesses/servers in the Playboy Clubs) with Playmates (nude models in the magazine). With this important distinction in mind, I was struck in the trailer by Brenda (Naturi Naughton) bluntly and proudly declaring her ambition to be "the first chocolate centerfold." There are multiple thorny issues wrapped up in that one line -- the divide between Bunny and Playmate and what it means when one woman sees the first as a stepping stone to the second; our culture's unsettled relationship with a woman who chooses to trade on her sexuality as a commodity; the fetishization of race. (The last is particularly interesting in light of the way Naughton has embraced the "chocolate Bunny" label in her own press statements.)
"You're either the living, breathing fantasy that is the Playboy Bunny," admonishes senior Bunny Carol-Lynne (Laura Benanti), "or you're not." Hugh Hefner tweeted earlier this evening, "Was being a Playboy Club Bunny in the 1960s empowering or exploitation? Why not ask the original Bunnies themselves? They'll tell you."
I don't have one to ask, but it seems to me the only honest answer is "both." That's certainly what I'm looking forward to in the show, based on the glimpses NBC has given us. And if that seems nostalgic or irrelevant, take a look at this photo from NBC's mock Playboy Club at the recent San Diego Comic Con, of a Bunny flanked by two Tilted Kilt servers. Time warp, anyone?
So, bottom line: We're looking at a show about a very messy and complicated time and place for women. At least, I hope that's what they'll let it be. Because the messy and the complicated haven't entirely left us, and that's the story I'm interested in seeing.
I saw Black Swanthe other day. Like pretty much everyone else, I was blown away. Like Roger Ebert, I almost immediately wanted to rewatch The Red Shoes, something I haven't done in several years. That's partly because, though it's one of my all-time favorite films, it is -- for some of the same reasons as Black Swan, albeit not as intensely -- not always easy to watch.
(Here's where things get a bit spoilery, despite my best efforts to avoid it. If you haven't seen Black Swan and want to avoid preconceptions, stop reading and come back later. The post will still be here.)
As Ebert's review notes, Black Swan harks back to The Red Shoes in ways large and small, almost certainly deliberate, and not least among them the ending. There's a critical difference, though: The Red Shoes' Vicky Page has a life -- romance, interests, independence -- and the film follows the domino effect of choices she makes to sacrifice all of that on the altar of her art. Black Swan's Nina Sayers, as the film makes painfully clear within the first few minutes, has never had such a life. She seems barely conscious that such a thing is even possible; her entire world is the theatre, the apartment she shares with her mother, and the subway ride in between.
In a way, Vicky has been fragmented into two characters: Nina and rival (?) newcomer Lily. I put that question mark there for a reason, one that I'm not seeing discussed very much. There's rumination aplenty on Natalie Portman's performance, complete with deconstruction of the sociopolitical ramifications of what she put her mind and body through to achieve it. There's commentary on the creepily controlling mother and domineering artistic director. And all that is undeniably interesting, and I could get into it, but I'd mostly be saying stuff that's been said elsewhere.
What I haven't run across, what I'm finding myself thinking about more and more in the day and a half since I sat staring, slightly stunned, at the closing credits, is this: Lily is the "black swan," the glamorous, insidious threat, because the drama playing out in Nina's mind -- and everything we see is through Nina's eyes -- requires it. And the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes to me that not only is Lily ill-cast in the role, but that she is in fact the one and only person in Nina's world who is not trying to co-opt her life.
To the extent that we can separate the actions of the real Lily from the hallucinatory construct who sometimes wears Lily's face and sometimes Nina's own (and there's a point or two where that remains ambiguous), the worst we can say is that maybe she wouldn't be making such an effort to befriend Nina if Nina weren't the freshly-anointed star. But it's also perfectly possible that she really just sees a colleague who's lonely, terrified, and in desperate need of a friend.
Lily's no angel, and we may well disapprove of her casual attitude toward drugs and sex. But while the "girls' night out" seems wild and utterly out of control from Nina's (and therefore the audience's) perspective, it doesn't take much thought to realize that she can't be doing that every night. She shows up reliably to work, dances well, seems to get along with pretty much everyone.
There are repeated assertions in the dialogue that Lily is charismatic and sexy because she's slightly "dangerous." This serves the point Thomas is trying to make about what Nina needs to bring to her Black Swan (and I find it curious that Odette and Odile are never referred to by name, but that's a ponder for another day), but I'm not convinced it's accurate. Lily is confident, healthy, secure. In a circus of extreme personalities, she's the unlikely poster girl for "everything in moderation." A concept so utterly beyond Nina's grasp that, through her increasingly fractured lens, it makes sense for Lily to be out to take away everything she has... which, at the end of the day, is pathetically little.
Nor does Lily have any need to do so, and it's this that Nina is particularly unequipped to understand. The shape of the drama requires that Lily be named the alternate. But it says something else, too, something that gets overlooked but which is critically important in my world: She has achieved a level of professional success very nearly on a par with Nina's without sacrificing the rest of her life. (Whether she did it without resorting to the casting couch is an open question, answerable only by knowing the sequence of events outside of Nina's perception and whether a particular event within her perception actually took place.)
The myth sold to Nina all her life, the one that's been romanticized in fiction as long as we've had fiction, is that true art is possible only through sacrifice to the point of abject misery.
It's a lie. You can be an artist and be happy. Lily is living proof, embedded directly in this latest iteration (and, to a great extent, subversion) of the classic storyline.
As for the other principal figure required by this play of archetypes, the tyrannical, abusive genius pulling the strings? He's a lie too, not because he doesn't exist but because he isn't necessary or excusable. And there are clues in the characterization of Thomas that we're meant to take some subversion away from that too. It's not as clear, maybe, but I don't think it's an accident that it's Lily -- that same voice of moderation -- who states matter-of-factly that he's a prick, and voices directly to him her concerns about how he runs his rehearsals. (Worth noting here are the stories Natalie Portman has been telling in interviews, about how Darren Aronofsky attempted to play her and Mila Kunis -- who've been close friends for years -- off as rivals, keeping them separate in ballet training and telling each that the other was "looking really good." But there's something in the amusement with which Portman relates this that makes me think Aronofsky knew perfectly well they would get together and compare notes, and that the whole thing was an oddly ironic game for all parties.)
Both of these myths -- told over and over again, and widely taken as truth by audiences -- are incredibly dangerous and damaging if an artist takes them at face value. Yes, we absolutely have to take risks. We have to sacrifice personal defenses and let strangers in where we fear to admit even those we love most. But there's a contract on both sides of that transaction, that the place we're taking that risk -- the studio, the stage -- will form the boundary of the storm, and that it need not rage beyond that boundary to wreck the rest of our lives. We have to trust those riding out the storm with us.
No genius, no results can excuse betrayal of that trust. There is no result that cannot be equally effectively achieved without such a betrayal.
All of which has tangentially reminded me of one of the reasons I adore Slings and Arrows, the acclaimed Canadian TV series about a beleaguered fictional Shakespeare festival. At the center of the series is artistic director Geoffrey Tennant, who knows a little bit about risk and loss in the name of art. That'll happen when you fall off the metaphorical tightrope and have a psychotic break in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, precipitated by failure of the two most critical strands of his net, his director and his girlfriend.
Seven years (the first several of them institutionalized) later, he winds up back at the same festival, inheriting in midstream the direction of another Hamlet. His Ophelia is a curious character named Claire, whose presence in the company despite her glaring lack of ability is never explained beyond "I think she's someone's evil niece." No one likes this woman, nor is there any particular reason they should. She's pretentious, gossipy, and smarmily duplicitous. If there were ever a situation where the audience would forgive a fictional director for launching a tyrannical tirade at a fictional actress, this is probably it.
Geoffrey does eventually reach his breaking point with her, and this is what he does:
Keep your spoiled-brat Lermontovs and Thomas LeRoys. I'm not impressed. This, my friends, is how the grownups do it.
In which our Diva alliterates, ruminates and collaborates
In modern popular culture, our modes of storytelling, and of talking about stories, place a high premium on the element of surprise. We're all about the twist, the stunning revelation, the "everything changes." Creators of hotly-anticipated projects pile safeguard on safeguard to keep their story details under wraps, the spoiler mill works even harder to get the scoop on leaks, and some fans eagerly snap up those leaks while others are hard-pressed to avoid them.
With all this going on, it's hard to remember the twist isn't everything. (Even when people think it is. I seem to be the only person on the planet who liked The Village on other merits and didn't care that I saw the "twist" coming a mile away.) Not every story is "ruined" if we know or can easily guess what's going to happen. Sometimes it's just as rewarding to watch how it gets to a place we fully expect.
And sometimes it really does matter. Sometimes there's a mystery, a puzzle, a picture best built gradually, piece by piece. When you're part of telling that kind of story, you get really good at keeping your mouth shut, at keeping track of what you're allowed to tell whom and when.
For the second time this fall, I've been all cryptic lately about a new endeavor. The cryptic will be with us for a while, but I can at least stop typing Sooper Sekrit Project. (As amusing as that may be, if only to me.) Resonance isn't a whole lot shorter, but it does sound cooler. And, courtesy of a serendipitously-timed email I wasn't even sure anyone was going to read, I'm now part of its development team.
For the moment, that's all I can really say. But I was excited about the possibilities of the project before I was ever in contact with anyone involved in it, and now I've found them very much kindred spirits. I'm in, not quite on the ground floor, but certainly the first floor, of something that promises to be pretty huge. Perhaps more to the point, it's something I can't wait to see, and I get to help make it happen. Does it get any better than that?
Lots to do in the coming months, but before you know it we'll be asking: Will you help?
Look what I finally went to visit a couple weekends ago!
If you're not able to get to the Art Institute (which I highly recommend if you can), you can get a much better look at the painting on their website. For the benefit of those not mildly obsessed with the Pre-Raphaelites, it is of course Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix, famously regarded as a posthumous tribute to Elizabeth Siddal after a long engagement, a shortish marriage, a lot of drama, and an early grave. The one here in Chicago is actually the second of three versions in oils, and the only one with the additional panel at the bottom. There are also at least one watercolor and a charcoal sketch. (The significance of his returning to this image so many times -- not that it's the only time he did that, but it's probably the most consistent -- is an open question tackled by many a biographer and art historian, and well beyond the scope of this post. *g*)
If you've been around this blog a while, you know that I've been trying to write a one-woman show about Lizzie for... kind of a ridiculously long time, actually. If you have no idea what I'm babbling about, click the "lizzie" tag to catch up.
One stumbling block I keep hitting in my progress on the project (which has actually kindasorta been progressing recently, albeit in a few rather stream-of-consciousness chunks that remain light-years from performable) is that I have very limited patience for sitting and reading poetry. Dunno why, exactly, but it's exactly like trying to sit and read Shakespeare. Which is to say, mostly pointless.
So the other day it finally occurred to me that what I needed to be doing was listening to poetry. There are lots of bits and pieces of various people's poems -- Lizzie's own, Gabriel's, a few of Christina's, plus the Tennyson and Blake and Shakespeare and Dante that constantly hung in the air at Chatham Place -- that I know how I want to weave into my script, and I know there are lots more waiting to fire the right synaptic connections.
I would just like to take this moment to point out that LibriVox is AWESOMECAKES. Not that I didn't already know that, but I have discovered it all over again, and now I want to send all the volunteer readers pie.
Not quite as useful, but deeply cool in a spooky sort of way, is this YouTube channel I stumbled upon called Poetry Animations, where someone has digitally animated vintage images (mostly of the poets themselves) to readings of all manner of poems. They're less freaky than the talking baby on those e-trading commercials, though in some cases only slightly less so. F'rinstance, this one that uses Holman Hunt's portrait of Gabriel, which I've always found slightly freaky anyway. (Though I rather suspect the actual subtext happening on the day was less the apparent "I am looking right through your soul!!" and more "Bored, bored, for God's sake, are you done yet? BORED.")
All in all, I've had quite good luck... with everything except Lizzie's own poems. If anyone has recorded them, I can't find it. Looks like I'll have to do it myself. Woe. ;-)
In the process of my hunting, I had the idle thought that the BBC could probably make a bundle with an audiobook of Aidan Turner, who played Gabriel in their Desperate Romantics series last year, reading his poetry. Then I looked at the official site and discovered that they sort of figured that out, only they just put Turner on a windowseat in costume and filmed him performing six sonnets, one for each week the show aired. Like most BBC web media, alas, the videos are not available outside the UK, but if you're there, check 'em out.
The series has just come out on DVD Stateside, and I love it to bits in all its completely irreverent and historically-cavalier glory. I was already a fan of Turner's work on Being Human, and his Gabriel is highly entertaining as well, but it's always been the women of the Pre-Raphaelite circle I found most interesting, and the three primary ones in the series -- Lizzie (Amy Manson, who has since been great fun to watch as Daisy, the free-spirited and pragmatic vampire introduced in Being Human's second season), Effie Millais (Zoe Tapper, who had me at Nell Gwyn in Stage Beauty), and Annie Miller (newcomer Jennie Jacques, who could not be more adorable if she were made entirely of puppies) -- don't disappoint. I know some of my fellow PR-ophiles have insurmountable issues with it, but if you take it for what it is, it's a rollicking ride. And not without its moving moments too, genuine in spirit if not in the letter of the facts.
My favorite is unquestionably the montage near the end, after Lizzie's death, with Hunt and Millais contemplating their studies of her as Sylvia and Ophelia respectively, while Gabriel feverishly pulls Beata Beatrix from a blank canvas. I don't even care that the reproduction is pretty dodgy, bearing little resemblance to either the real painting or Amy Manson. (Mind you, the real painting is generally regarded as not a terribly accurate likeness of Lizzie either, so that sort of works in a weird way anyway.) I cried like a big ol' sappy sap, and don't care who knows it.
In which our Diva has finally posted a new video diary
I've been saying for years I should write up an "extra's survival guide," assuming someone hasn't beaten me to it. In the meantime, here are some top tips from my fellow background players during a recent four-day stint on the ABC pilot Matadors.
In which our Diva has been neglecting her blog again. Bad Diva. No cookie.
Watch: Being Human, the BBC series that sounds like the setup for a joke -- a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost share a pink house in Bristol -- but is in fact one of the more brilliant things to hit my TV in years. Anyone who knows me knows that my favorites list has always included various supernatural dramas, but the main thing that sets this one apart is its intimate scope. No Chosen Ones, no cosmic prophecies, no apocalypse-of-the-week. Just three people who happen to have some extraordinary problems, building their own weird little family. Even when they do inevitably get caught up in larger circumstances, the focus remains on protecting that family. Saving the world is a bit out of their league, just as it is for the rest of us.
Like all good fantasy, it isn't really about monsters. It's about how life is frequently and drastically unfair, but we find ways to make it worthwhile anyway. And how what really matters is looking out for the people we love. The three mid-twenties stars -- Russell Tovey, Lenora Crichlow, and Aidan Turner -- are individually superb, and collectively a perfect storm of ensemble chemistry. And creator/writer Toby Whithouse (who has written, among other things, the milestone "School Reunion" episode that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith to the revived Doctor Who) has a knack for defying cliche, and for acknowledging the absurdity in dramatic situations without lessening their impact. For those on this side of the pond, BBC America has already aired the first season, and has announced plans to run the second (which has just finished in the UK) and third (which will be starting production soon).
Eat: It's the time of year again for my two greatest vices: Cadbury's Creme Eggs and Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. I've already stocked up on the former, stashing boxes in odd corners of the freezer to be rediscovered throughout the year. The latter have thus far eluded me. At this rate I'm going to have to start going from grocery store to grocery store until I spot a table of earnest little girls. I need my fix!
Read: Currently I'm in the middle of Derek Parker's lively biography of Nell Gwyn, the most famous mistress of the famously randy Charles II. It's unpretentious, full of all kinds of cool incidentals about Restoration theatre, and generally a very enjoyable read.
Listen: The other day, my mental soundtrack randomly started running Clara and Fabrizio's soaring duet that closes the first act of The Light in the Piazza, so I've been playing the cast album a lot. Still bowled over every time by the heartfelt performances and the utter beauty of the score. Still cry at two or three points every single time. If there's a "the" Broadway composer of this generation, Adam Guettel is probably it.
In which our Diva waves on her way by in a bit of a blur
Whew! Since I last posted here:
Three auditions, one of which scored me a fun day-player part in an indie feature, shooting the end of February (more info soon)
Rehearsals for two projects (My Cousin Radu, which shoots next week, and Elgin Opera's upcoming gala)
One rush web promo video -- I submitted on it this morning, and shot it this afternoon! That last also means my first paid gig of 2010 is in the can, yay!
And of course there was still day jobs and electronic housekeeping (updates on my website...um...soonish) and actual housekeeping (life is never entirely out of control if you're caught up on laundry). With a couple hours' breather carved out for the Sanctuary season finale and penultimate Dollhouse episode, as well as the unaired pilot of the latter. (Which is way talky, and showed way too much of its hand too soon. The gradual and ambiguous way the true horror of the Dollhouse came to light may have made a lot of people very very uncomfortable -- because it took a long time for the show to be overt about saying yes, what is happening here is a horror -- but I don't think it would have been nearly as effective otherwise.)
The upcoming week includes more rehearsals and a callback I've been looking forward to, which will involve fight work as well as reading. The prospect of playing with swords remains the most reliable motivation for getting my behind out of bed and getting that morning workout in!
Song for today: "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?" by Felicia Day and the cast of The Guild. Just 'cause it's the earwormiest earworm that ever earwormed (seriously, I dare you to get it out of your head), and the video is hilarious if you know even a little bit about online roleplaying games.
In which our Diva wishes a merry Christmas to all and to all a good night
I would be headed up to my brother's house right now to meet my Shiny New Niece. Unfortunately, the common cold had other ideas -- I'm coughing and sneezing WAY too much to be anywhere near a nine-day-old baby!
Instead, I'll be spending Christmas Eve snug at home with my hubby, then my parents will arrive tomorrow afternoon. It'll be a low-key one, but I'm planning to enjoy the heck out of it. Sunday night I'll be singing at Elgin Opera's annual holiday party. Then next week starts a fresh round of busybusybusy, with more auditions, then gearing up for the Holiday Leftovers variety show and the pilot for the new webseries My Cousin Radu, from 812 North Productions.
I hope you're enjoying your holiday season, and will leave you for the moment with the latest gem from Muppet Studios:
In which our Diva finds new reasons to believe in people
You hear a lot about the "dark side of fandom," about unstable people who go beyond love of a shared story, sometimes to the extreme of threatening or even harming the storytellers.
If you're even casually around the virtual water coolers centered on TV shows or movies, you're also aware of the harmless bulk of fannish activity, the discussion and sharing of delight, and of creativity in the form of fan fiction or visual art or music videos.
What you probably don't hear enough about is the brightest side of all, the fans who harness that energy to make the real world a better place.
I was a smart kid. I'm a pretty smart adult, for that matter, and there are still people who think I'm wasting that gift in a frivolous profession. (They're just usually subtler about telling me so than they were in college.) Smart kids are supposed to cure cancer. Solve our energy problems. End hunger.
Save the world.
Here's the thing: I can't imagine spending my life doing any of those things. I'm not cut out for saving the world. What does hold my passion, what I wake up every day itching to do, is telling stories about people who do.
I'm the audience for a lot of those stories. Most of them tend to take place in worlds not our own - in the far-flung future, or across galaxies, or in secret underworlds of primal magic. But the challenges faced in those worlds are not as different from our own as you might think.
And some people, maybe even some of those who are cut out to save the world, look at those stories and decide they want to be like those characters. They want to face down that evil and defeat it -- not in the created world beyond the glass of the TV screen, but here and now. Sometimes it's a one-off -- fans of Blood Ties drumming up eyeglass donations to the Lions Club in honor of its vision-impaired heroine, blood drives by fans of every vampire show ever, and so on. Sometimes it's a little more ambitious.
Not a Doll is the newest such effort to come to my attention. Whatever you might think of Dollhouse -- and much as I love it, it's controversial for good reason -- for these fans it's an opportunity to educate about "the very real issues of human trafficking, poverty, oppression against women and children, the loss of self, and the negation of human rights." Sure, they're starting small. Writing a few articles and designing a handful of T-shirts might not seem like much. But the people who read those articles and find their eyes opened, the established organizations that receive the proceeds from those T-shirts? I don't think they're going to argue. And the site has just begun.
You might think this sort of thing would be a short-lived diversion, fading when the show that inspired it is no longer the flavor of the month. You'd be wrong. Just ask the folks at the Stuffy Guard Project Association, who've coordinated donations of thousands of stuffed toys and thousands of dollars for children in need since 2000. Inspired by Stargate SG-1 star Teryl Rothery, and embraced by her and her colleagues -- the show and its stars are associated with several children's charities, including Make-A-Wish and the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and various episodes focused on the effect of injustice on children -- they're going strong and continuing to grow.
This is just a tiny sampling. There are plenty more examples out there -- some were featured in an article on Firefox News a while back -- and more power to them all. I'll support them as I can, and keep dreaming of being involved in a project that inspires a save-the-world drive of its own.
Song for today: "Stranger" by Lili Haydn. I know I mentioned it just a couple weeks ago, but I can't think of anything more perfect today. "Goodness brings a chain reaction."
See: The Men Who Stare at Goats. Every time I saw a trailer or commercial, I said "I have to see that movie." I was prepared to be disappointed, because what lives up to its trailer these days? This does. Funny and earnest and irreverent and poignant and crazy in the best possible way. I don't know if they set out to make a modern-day Don Quixote on purpose, but they succeeded brilliantly.
Read: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. If you didn't know that you find a lot of the best fantasy in the YA section these days, this is a great way to find out. I picked it up totally at random because the cover design caught my eye and the jacket blurb held it. I'm a sucker for even halfway decent Victorian gothic; this is that and so much more. Not least of which is a refreshing break from the relentless tyranny of the romance. Sure, there's a boy, but he's far from the center of the (wonderfully realized) heroine's universe. The friendship of girls, in all its fierceness and flaws, is what it's all about. I just picked up the second book the other day, and can't wait to start it.
Listen: Lili Haydn. I pulled out her self-titled debut album for the first time in a while last weekend -- after the (fabulous!!) Emilie Autumn concert whetted my appetite for rebellious violin -- and fell in love with it all over again. "Stranger" particularly rocks my world.
Eat: Four-cheese mezzaluna with sausage at the Olive Garden. Grab it before it goes away. OMG.
Watch: Dollhouse, before it goes away too. I'm still surprised it got a second season, but thankful. Perfect it ain't, for a million and one reasons, but it's never been less than interesting, and occasionally brilliant. Joss Whedon isn't really God, but he and his team tell a mighty fine story nonetheless, and I for one will miss it. (Also, it's possible I have a wee bit of a girlcrush on Miracle Laurie.)
Come and see: Public reading of The Last Daughter of Oedipus at Prop Thtr in Chicago this Saturday. Final sneak preview of this fantastic new play before it opens Babes With Blades' next season, with wailing (where there is Jocasta, there must be wailing), grim determination, a few laughs, and of course snacks and a talkback. And did I mention it's free?
One more shooting day on Connections. Mixed feelings, as always when any project ends. Sad to see it go, excited for the next thing. Pretty much everything I've done this year has been whirlwind, with little time to get to know my colleagues, and this one has been a little longer and settled in a little more. I've gained some valuable friendships even on the small ones, though, and am that much more appreciative of the tools available to us online to keep in contact.
I understand where people are coming from when they worry that communication online is too superficial, too impersonal. And it's true that it's no substitute for real human contact. But it's a heckuva a valuable supplement to it, particularly for actors or anyone else who works on a project basis. My best intentions notwithstanding, cast contact lists of phone numbers and email addresses sit in folders in my hard drive gathering virtual dust. Meanwhile, five minutes on Twitter or Facebook will give me a snapshot of what's going on with people I might not have seen in person in years.
It also plays into something I've frequently tried to explain to friends, that growing up on Air Force bases with a constantly shifting collection of faces in the classroom and in the neighborhood makes it seem perfectly natural to me to operate that way as an adult. I don't go in much for big goodbyes, or fretting about making sure ties of friendship are tended to -- arguably to a fault. In my head, it makes perfect sense to run into someone after a week or a month or a year or a decade, and essentially pick up wherever we left off.
In between, I do miss them, in the sense of "Oh, so-and-so would have loved to see this." (And how much do I love being able to see something online and share it with so-and-so with a few clicks?) But I've gradually come to understand that it's not the same thing most people mean when they say they miss someone. The intensity, the acuity, of that is something that I still work hard to grasp. It's certainly an important thing to understand about human nature, which is of course what I'm all about as an actor.
This Wednesday, I'll say goodbye to my first TV series (a final count of three episodes is still a series!) experience, with all its ups and downs and the challenges of a very small-time environment. Goodbye to Michelle's desk, with all the little details it acquired. But the people involved are still there on my Facebook friends list, to see where they go from here and where we might connect up again.
First, though, I have the first read-through for Pride and Prejudice today. A completely different show, a completely different environment, with some of the same people I got to know during last fall's Dracula. I can't wait to find out which ones (I don't know all the casting info yet), to pick up with them where we left off, and take part in the alchemy of creating something new with them and with others I don't yet know.
