#“but alex you are italian and catholic” AND. AND FUCKING WHAT.

[rainbowgod666]

Better than the real thing honestly

Do you have more pictures of Soviet leaders in traditional Islamic garb

No, but I have Muslim Mao

[bardicbeetle]

pssst, hey, are any of your vampires your vampires religious? Not in the like "vampirism has religious elements" anne rice sending lestat back in time in his head to drink the blood of christ kind of way but more in a, did the characters have religious tendencies while human and did those stick around or shift or vanish entire? Did immortality change their outlook on g(G)od(s)? sincerely, a very old friend, ~bonnie

BONNIE!!!!!! Darling, delight of my long sleeping RP life, how have you been my dear?

I apologize now for the fact that it's gonna be a few days on this answer. It's a slightly longer one.

But hi, i love you <3

So.

This is another of those person-by-person answers. Because, yeah, all the answers are basically different. I'm gonna stick to the vamp!house, because otherwise this is gonna get horrendously long, but I'll touch on the chaos trio briefly.

Alex, Daniel, Jesse, and Tom all grew up varying flavors of religious and ascribed to it for a fair amount of time. Isaac and Carrie were both raised agnostic/atheist adjacent/religion free. Moira grew up in a religious household but both never paid any attention to it, and it was so background to the rest of her family life that nothing much came of it.

At one point she refers to the vamp!house pre-Alex as someone having walked into what amounts to "An ex-catholic, an atheist by design, and a witch." having to slightly amend her statement at the insistence from Daniel that he's not a witch.

So, Jesse grew up catholic in the way of are we gonna send you to catholic school? no. are we gonna make you sit in church for a gazillion hours? Yes. He decided roughly around the same time he got thrown out that religion was bullshit, and has not looked back since then. So he's been very solidly No Fucking Thank You since about age 14-15. Then he gets terminally ill, meets a vampire, and ends up immortal, that kinda cements his own worldview that religion is bullshit and he neither wants nor needs any piece of it.

Moira I think is the most indifferent. She gets that some people enjoy religion and ritual for whatever reason, but her alignment falls way more along the hedonism is a form of religion on its own kind of thing. She doesn't particularly believe in a god or gods, but really doesn't care either way. As far as she's concerned, it need not apply to her.

Daniel also grew up very catholic, in, somewhat of a different way than Jesse. He was an altar boy, he went to catholic school, he will tell you if pressed that he's been smacked by more nuns than he would care to count. However. His older sister Lucille more or less drags him into some family history studies and both of them end up practicing what is closer to italian folk magic flavored catholicism than anything either of their parents would ever have wanted to look at. Including ancestor veneration, saints-and-angels-as-deities, and all sorts of other delightful stuff. Hence Moira's occasional insistence that he's a fucking witch.

Alex's parents are... were, what you would call... extremist. Both ascribing to some degree to the quiverfull movement and deep in hardcore evangelical circles. I'm not gonna say a ton on this because I have a post about it brewing somewhere in the depths of my drafts.

Anyways.

Thank you for the question Bonnie <3

Love you.

[baby-brightmonster]

Leading Man: Chapter 3

But of a time jump here, a brief look into the busy bee that is Maya Tesoro. Special thank you to @littledanette, let me know if you want to be tagged. This thing is just something for me to lose myself in and blow off a little steam. 

On with the show! 

Alex went home that day in an utter panic. The cab ride home consisted him silently, rationalizing to himself that she was just pretty, she was nice; she was talented. He would be a fool. To give up all he had just because he wanted to kiss a pretty girl. He wanted to touch Maya, kiss her. He looked at the black lace she wore, her black wavy hair, her emerald green eyes. She’s just pretty. He reminded himself. She’s just a pretty girl, and you’ve always had a thing for alt chicks.  

He walked in his house to find it empty. Dropping his keys in their usual place, he took a few deep breaths. It’s fine, he thought. It’s all okay, nothing happened, you don’t have to feel guilty for looking at a pretty girl.

You’re okay… her voice cooed in his memory, You’re okay. He shook his head as if to shake her off. He had finally calmed down after a minute of breathing, putting his head in his hands, almost scolding himself for being so stupid. As usual, he thought. You freaked out for nothing. As if on cue, the door opened.

“Hey!” Jenny said. “When did you get in?” He didn’t answer he just walked up to her and attacked her with a kiss. She laughed into his mouth as she kissed back, nuzzling him as she stepped back to breathe. “Wow, good day?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think we got our Lydia today, Aaron and Rodney looked really excited.”

He got a call that night, that they were going with Sophia Ann Caruso, Alex breathed a sigh of relief as he hung up the phone.

“Good news?” Jenny asked, looking up at him from the book she was reading.

“Yeah,” he answered, looking at his phone. “Yeah,”

***

Maya spun and moved to Caleb’s voice. The music video was for Hellfire, from the Hunchback of Notre Dame. She did the choreography for it too, trying to lean more on modern since she had not done classic ballet in so long. Caleb sang beautifully, Jonathan was at the camera, and giving Hunchback a metal twist gave it the extra oomph the song really needed. As if it was not so perfect already, adding an electric guitar made it so much more intense.

“Now Gypsy, it’s your turn,” Caleb sang to her as she hovered above him, looking into her eyes. “Choose me, or, your pyre, be mine or you will burn!” They finished the song and Maya covered in sweat and exhilaration smiled at Jonathan, her old friend.

“Maya!!” Caleb said, hurrying over to her. “I haven’t seen you in forever!”

“I know!” She greeted, hugging him. “I missed you both so much! My cowardly lion, and my scarecrow,” No one mentioned how done up she was, thank God for straight dudes she thought as she took a sip of water, “I love this so much, the song is amazing Jonny you really did outdid yourself,”

“It was all Caleb’s idea. He said you would like the idea of ‘Holy Mary and my unholy boner’, as you describe it,” Jon explained. “You up for doing something else with us?”

“Oh? Like?” She asked, intrigued.

“We’re doing a cover album for the Prince of Egypt,” he offered. “You can be the girl parts?”

“Are you going to do Heaven’s Eyes?” She asked excited.

“Of course,”

“Can I dance on it?”

“I would be sad if you didn’t,” he said.

“I’m there,”

“Caleb! She’s in!” He called over.

By 2018, the album was downloaded an overwhelming amount of times. Maya had a minor panic attack because Jonathan had neglected to tell her that for the first two lines of Deliver Us she would be singing in fucking Hebrew of all things!

“I’m going to get such backlash,” she had fretted.

“I’m literally a Pharaoh,” he pointed out. “Does not get much worse than that, besides it’s two lines, and you know what they mean,”

“True and fine,” she admitted. “I just hope I don't fuck it up,”

She did at first, she could not pronounce the lines, naturally an Italian-American Catholic, she had never encountered this in her life. Yet, she dove in, like she did anything else. She looked up dialect on YouTube and worked diligently to not spit on an entire culture. Deliver Us was filmed, everyone in basic black, in a black set, with spotlights, very straightforward, very tasteful. Maya forgoing her signature red lip in the name of tact. Towards the end of 2017 she had gone through the audition process for Janis in Mean Girls. Most people thought it was a natural choice since she and Veronica had so many similarities.

Booked and busy! She tweeted out. In the meantime, I did a song with some of my guy friends. Go check it out. [link]

She knew it would lead to better things. She knew that it was something that she was so proud of in doing this album, she also knew that if she kept busy, it would only lead to good days.

Across the country, Alex danced with his wife for the first time.

[jacksonroseroth]

High Rant

Honestly, If I get at least ONE thing from this life...I want to go to Ireland. Spend like a week or something in Ireland. I want to go there so bad and see where my family farm is, explore Dublin, get the coastal shots that I’m fucking DYING for. I want to see where my strongest heritage is and what it’s all about. I heard the stories from my grandpa and the Aunties, seen movies that are set in Ireland, breathtaking pictures from Andy McInroy, my favorite photographer ever. Ireland calls to me in such a way that I feel like that’s where I belong and that’s where I should have always been.

I’ve mainly been..Not obsessed? Per se. But more passionate, let’s say, for my Italian heritage. My Nonny died when I was young and I never really knew her, but she was the only grandmother I ever had. My Grandmother died when my mom was in high school, so not even my dad met her. There’s a lot of family I feel like I know because of how often they’re talked about or how many pictures I’ve seen, but sometimes, when I think about it in a different way I realize that I DO want to know them and it kind of pains to know that I can’t.

But I’ve never thought about Italy the way I think about Ireland. Ireland is such a different view in my mind; The myths, the legends, fae folk, and shite. It captures a side of me that I love and want that side to be my truth, my life, my whatever you want to label it. The only thing stopping me is I need to be there. See it. Smell it. Taste it. Live it. I know it will satisfy whatever is trying to get out inside me, but I need it to happen soon because it’s really the one thing that I want most in this world, when you get right down to it. 

Someone asks you, what’s the one practical, realistic thing you want most in the world. Well, you can’t say marry a celebrity. Everyone does. All my life I thought one day I’d meet whomever was the object of my affection at the time and I’d find a way to date them, be friends with them, marry them. And while that’s something I will always want, even just a DAY...It’s a daydream. I talk a big talk, that things are going to happen and this is how they will go and I’ll make sure of it. But when you get right down to it, it’s never been a practical thought I had of, ‘Yes, when the day comes I can die happy.’

I think of meeting Niall. Meeting Alex. Colson. A number of celebs and I always think, ‘Nope, I still have a few more people before I can die happy.’ I could meet all the celebs I want to meet...If I never go to Ireland, I don’t think I could die happy. Ireland is my happy place. Ireland, to me, is home.

I’ve had the ridiculously good fortune to sit for an actual Irish couple who, even themselves had said, it was your traditional Irish household and I loved every second of it. Because it reminded me of my family. Brady Family Christmas at either our house, my Aunt Patti’s or Cousin Frannie’s, once or twice even Cousin Carolyn’s. Thanksgiving between the two sisters, my mom and Patti. Easter at one of the sister’s house with an Easter Egg Hunt. St. Patrick’s Day was as big a holiday as them because that’s who we were. We’re Irish! My mother was raised the Irish Catholic way, the same morals, the way she was brought up by her parents and how she raises us. It’s all the same. So was that family. Every single thing I knew from my own family, I was able to connect with this family over. They had only been here for 3 years, they were a proper Irish family and it made my heart feel so full. Because it’s what I want.

My one wish, the one practical, realistic thing I want most in this life, at least; I want to visit Ireland and stand where my ancestors stood. I want to go home.

[diabolikotaku]

Vampire! Yui Komori Headcannons

Sorry it took me like three million years to answer you!

Vampire Age: 17

Human Age: 117

Her father is Seiji Komori, the Vampire King

Goes by Christian name in demon realm: Solomon 

The youngest of four

Her eldest brother Yusuke, her older sister Yuna, her twin brother (who was born 2 hours earlier) Yuito, then Yui.

Yusuke and Yuna are fully Japanese while Yuito and Yui are half East-European

Yusuke and Yuna had a different mother than Yuito and Yui.

Yui has an orthodox name: Anastasia (Anya) Vasiliev

Yuito is Aleksandr (Alex) Vasiliev

Yusuke and Yuna go by catholic names: Jeremias and Juliette Lazarus

Her mother is Natsia Vasiliev

She was a low-class vampire who was filled with greed, so she decided to become a handmaiden at Seiji’s manor in order to seduce him, have his children, and demand money.

After all of her plans failed, she drugged Seiji and raped him

Once she was pregnant, she threaten Seiji to spread all over the demon realm that he committed adultery with a low class demon, unlike his current wife Hanako (Helena Lazarus) if he didn’t give her enough money so she could be comfortable

She didn’t even want to keep her children once she got the money, so she ditched them with Seiji.

Alas, Seiji still loved Yui and Yuito. So he and Hanako kept them nd treated them like family.

She was born with Yuito on June 21, 1901

The reason why she was made the ‘heiress to the Komori throne’ was because Yusuke fell in love with a werewolf (violation of vampire law) and was banished to the Miasma islands in the demon world (it’s just really hot and everything at some weird black miasma around it he’s immune to, he and his wife Yuri are living happily together), Yuna loathed absolutely everything about Seiji and swore to never associate with him or anything involving the vampire throne, and Yuito just calmly passed the responsibility down to Yui.

She couldn’t say no at that point

She has many nicknames in the demon realm, such as: Anya the Blood Heiress, the Trinity Cross, the Rose, etc.

Yui lives by herself in the Komori Manor, with the exception of a few servants.

For someone who’s loaded, you’d think she wouldn’t have to lift a finger.

Nope, she does all of the cooking, gardening, and sometimes cleaning herself

She needs something to do to pass the night time

That’s why she was so happy when Seiji told her that she was having guest staying with her from now on...Until he explained her situation.

Basically, six people with pure blood are sent to the Komori manor as ‘food banks’, one of them is the true blood Adam and will help make her the Eve of the demon realm

She had to pick wisely on who her Adam would be

Nevertheless, she was still happy about not being alone.

Yui has the complete opposite demeanor of what a vampire should act like/are perceived to act like.

Most vampires are sadistic, cruel, unforgiving, wouldn’t look twice at a human, usually arrogant, thinks everyone around them are weak, etc.

Nah, Yui’s all like: smiling, giving kindness to others, being helpful, friendly, caring, motherly, nurturing, equal to everyone, understanding, etc

So that’s why the Sakamaki brothers brushed her off when they first met her.

But now we get into her Sadistic side.

Yui has a completely different personality in her that sleeps, only wakes up to feed or pretty much take control when she feels like it. Sadistic is very much like the typical aristocrat vampire.

Normal Yui hates talking about or when Sadistic wakes up because it means she’ll lose control and Sadistic will destroy the trust she built with her humans.

When Sadistic wakes up, Yui’s eyes turn blood red.

Yui has to watch everything Sadistic does and she can’t take it.

That’s why she tries so hard to get along, have people’s trust, and make up for Sadistic’s words

Yui has some control over Sadistic, that’s why the boys don’t die after Sadistic feeds on them.

she tries to drain them like a juice box!

Yui is very innocent while Sadistic is very nasty and so not innocent if you catch my drift.

Sadistic is fond of punishments

Yui cries as she watches in horror what Sadistic does to the boys.

Has a fox and an owl familiar

The fox is named Xian and the owl is named Fester

Yui’s favorite colors are dusty rose, lilac velvet, pink ruby, and cream.

She’s quite up to date with what’s happening in the modern world.

switches between old-time clothes and modern clothes if not at school.

will sometime say old-time things by accident

still doesn’t own a phone (and Seiji didn’t put a land line in.)

When the Sakamaki brothers first discovered she was a vampire, Subaru was the one to pull out a trinity cross (gift from mother)

She dead ass pulled her rosary from under clothes and smiled, “You have one too? I figured you weren’t too deeply involve with religion by how you act!”

This confused the brothers and resulted in Ayato smacking Subaru up the head.

When she was little, she couldn’t bare to hurt a creature for blood, so she starved herself until her father make her drink blood via transfusions/cups of blood so she wouldn’t die on him.

She stopped doing that when she was around 13 in vampire years, but it always hurt her on the inside to hurt someone for blood.

She really does care for all of the Sakamaki boys, even if they brush her off because she seemed weak or she terrified them.

She helped Ayato find something around to Manor to do as a past time because there was no internet here...Or a phone line.

Gave Reiji the room with the largest study and always 

Showed Subaru where her personal little chapel was so he could pray.

(Even though he would always criticize her about not being right) She would bake sweets when she can for Kanato.

Introduced crossword puzzeles to Laito

Showed Shuu the music room

Yui actually used to play the piano when she was younger, but became rusty

Yuito and Yuna never learned how to play one

Yusuke was an excellent violinist and she always loved to listen to him play

That’s why Yui was happy to hear Shuu knew how to play the violin.

Yui is a hopeless romantic, when she just hit ‘puberty’, she spent all day in the library reading romance novels and dreaming of her ‘one true love’. When she gets the chance to, Yui buys romance novels in town and indulges in them.

Well, she sure gets a selection...

and they’re certainly no prince charming. 

For being this old, she’s bound to have at least one lover in the past, right? You’re correct! She used to spend her time with a human artist back in 1981.

His name was Takizawa Hayato

He taught her how to draw, or at least he tried too. 

Yui’s still pretty bad at drawing people, but she can draw landscapes pretty well.

It only lasted for a little bit when he found out she was a vampire (and he questioned why she stayed the same age as when she met him while he aged). 

Yusuke had to kill him.

Over the years, she learned how to crochet doilies out of pure boredom

And also learned how to sew a bit, you really have nothing to do after years of no internet.

Knows some Russian along with Yuito

Yusuke and Yuna know Italian.

Met Cordelia once

Yui didn’t really like her

Also that one time was when Seiji killed her because of some unknown reason.

If this were formatted like the actual games, then there would be a part in one of the boys’ route where she would lose a lot of her own blood and Seiji would give her a transfusion of Cordelia’s blood. Thus Cordelia becoming one with Yui.

Let’s get into some Otome Game shit :

(We’re going by Haunted Dark Bridal btw)

The best endings:

All: Marriage

maybe kids?

Becoming ‘Adam’

overcoming the shitty parts

Bad endings:

Ayato: Yui gets amnesia and doesn’t remember Ayato, making him crazy.

Kanato: Yui kills Kanato but keeps his corpse as a doll.

Laito: Sadistic becomes the controller of Yui’s body and abuses him for the rest of his days.

Shuu: Yui dies in a fire

Reiji: Yui is killed by Karlheinz

Subaru: Yui locks up Subaru and he is forced to become crazy like his mother.

Routes:

Ayato: Since he is main bae in the original series, there’s gonna be lots of cute things, 

Kanato: i feel like there might be a lot of bonding in this route, of course it’s eventual, but when the time comes Kanato just clings onto Yui. This can help out a little bit with his complex about being the ignored child and help him move on. Possibly help him grow up a little? But then again, we love our man-child.

Laito: ear porn This route could go either ways, it either helps Laito rip away the playboy act and get over his problems about his mother (and him being sexually abused) or it helps him become more...Child-like again? Like before Cordelia fucked him over. 

For the triplets, there might be a discovery arc about why their mother was involved with a family of vampires for some reason.

Shuu: I feel like Shuu’s route would probably be a healing route for him, from being cold, emotionless, tired, and shut-in, to someone who can get over his past. Even though it still lingers, I think Yui helps him out with his ptsd and depression and he gets better throughout the playthrough.

Reiji: The route that holds most of the actual plot. But there is still memorable moments between Reiji and Yui that satisfy the soul and goes over some of Reiji’s issues.

Subaru: Maybe a mix between a healing and a discovery route. Like Subaru finds out his mother was involved with the Komoris somehow and he’s trying to get the answer some how from Yui, the more time they spend together they fall in love and they have to come over some epic plot I can’t think of while he tries to heal after the ptsd of watching his mother suffer her days in that locked cage his father called her room.

All of them will have the main plot of the story, though.

In each route, Yui’s struggles will be revealed.

Ayato: Her mother, definitely 

Kanato: Sadistic’s origins

Laito: Her mother / Struggling with controlling Sadistic

Shuu: Hayato / the depression of being practically immortal.

Watching all of her friends grow old and die while she doesn’t change

being unable to friend humans because of this

generally has been alone her whole childhood besides her family.

etc.

Reiji: being maltreated because of her mother’s intentions

the  other servants knew about this and some of them maltreated Yui harshly.

Subaru: Her self-worth / the fear of hurting those weaker than her

Maybe some other alternative bad endings would be either Yui or one of the boys becoming Yandere over the other person???

There has to be saucy stills because is diabolik lovers, you cannot expect less.

Maybe add a rival to the boys were he’s trying to obtain Yui in order for her to love him or just kill her, idk.

The Komori family is filled with pure-blooded vampires that go back for several generations (well, except Yui and Yuito)

Has a summer home and a winter home. The summer home when the bounty hunters get into town and the winter home for when the war was happening in the city the summer home was located at.

Sadistic formed in her when the servants were abusing her, when Yui had enough Sadistic came over and killed the servants and hid them before Yui ‘woke up’.

The only kind of makeup Yui knows how to do is Victorian-styled.

Makes her own perfumes and makeup from flowers and such

Before this whole ‘Adam and Eve’ stuff, Yui was supposed to get married to a high-class vampire family’s eldest son, but he was killed by Yuito

The son wanted to kill Yui and sell her organs and blood to the lower-class vampires and demons for a price.

sleeps in a regular bed

Locks herself in her room when blood moon arrives because she doesn’t want to hurt anyone during that period of time. 

Sadistic doesn’t come out, this is a whole new monster Yui doesn’t understand.

2nd year

Considered popular by the students, but not ridiculously popular.

Has her fair share of fans

when some girls were trying to intimidate Yui about staying away from the Sakamaki brothers, she just scoffed and told them she can’t avoid them since they live with her.

And she also told them that they wouldn’t be into girls like them, it shut them up real fast.

Helps Subaru and Ayato study (even though it’s a difficult process)

Favorite foods are: fruit tarts, parfaits, and pancakes

wants to have three children

She’s afraid of turning someone into a vampire after the incident with Yuna and a past lover.

Still can’t swim

Follows her father’s orders without a fail.

Including keeping in 6 human boys for food.

Will occasionally take the boys out to the town next to the school.

Feels bad for the boys since they can’t go out often, so she places in vases of flowers to liven up the dark manor.

Somehow, she has met all of the sakamaki mothers one what or another.

Karlheinz actually tried to kill her once, however he was mistaken by Yuito and got badly injured.

That’s all I got for now~

[psi-groovin]

Support Turilli/Lione Rhapsody!!

One of my first major obsessions when I was about 12-15 years old was an Italian power metal band called Rhapsody of Fire. My brother gave my sister one of their CDs when I was around 10 and we’d listen to it all the time and draw and stuff. I think in like… 2004/5 my sister bought a pre-order of their new album (The Dark Secret) and it came with a shirt and we were STOKED. Also around this time youtube was becoming a thing so we’d find their music on there too.. stuff we hadn’t heard before and DAMN. It launched me straight into obsession. I’d try to get my Catholic middle school girl friends to listen to it with me but they were absolutely not interested and I was like “wtf why the hell not are you HEARING this?? Fuckin’ orchestras and choirs and killer guitar solos and singin’ about dragon slaying and demons from hell and epic battles holy SHITT.”

Anyways.. what I want to say is that these guys inspired the shit out of me and shaped what I like in music. Their music transported me to a fantasy land full of magic swords and dragons. They inspired me to write an epic that I’m still working on and like.. I cannot listen to Rhapsody of Fire without getting crazy inspired for that particular story anymore. They’re fuckn’ rad as hell. I mean.. they got Christopher Lee to be on one of their albums!!

They started to split around 2011 and I remember feeling crushed about it, and by 2016 the band had split up enough to where it was totally different than it had been. I’d still listen to their old albums but like… you get depressed when you’re like ‘damn, this is all there is’ you know? But guess the fuck what?? I just found out that most of THE ORIGINAL MEMBERS ARE GETTING BACK TOGETHER TO MAKE ANOTHER ALBUM. Past core members Luca Turilli, Fabio Lione, Patrice Guers, and Alex Holzwarth are sorta re-forming the band!

They’re raising money through indiegogo.

Here’s the link!

It feels like my little 14-year-old self has awoken within me and I feel a renewed sense of life. It’s like finding out a childhood-beloved movie is getting a sequel with the original director and cast like !!!! I can’t impart to you guys how ecstatic I am about the prospect of a new album.

So.. I’m sharing with you their crowd funding link in hopes that you’ll support them. If you like:

grand orchestras

powerful choirs

crazy guitar solos

incredible vocals

film score metal

epic storytelling in a high fantasy realm

saving the planet from evil

long-haired Italian men

...you’ll probably enjoy Rhapsody of Fire.

I’ll share with you some of my favorites:

Epicus Furor / Emerald Sword

Unholy Warcry (feat. Christopher Lee)

Magic of the Wizard’s Dream (feat. Christopher Lee)

The Mighty Ride of the Firelord

Sacred Power of Raging Winds (feat. Christopher Lee)

Guardiani del Destino

Support them! And check their music out! And if nothing else, help me spread the word so they can get some support!! Thank you!

[genderrise3-blog]

What Went Wrong at New York City Ballet - The New Yorker

Probably the most cherished old tale about George Balanchine is the one in which the mother of a girl who had auditioned for him comes up to him later and asks whether her daughter will become a professional dancer. “La danse, Madame,” Balanchine replied, “c’est une question morale.”

You could say that he dodged the question, but many of his admirers would say that he answered it directly and accurately. Dance, by virtue of its energy and its precision—and, often, its mounting intensity—brings us close to what many people in the world once looked for, and many still do, in religion. Music operates in the same way, of course, but most dance includes music, and it has something else as well: the body. On the dance stage, human beings place themselves before us much as, in old Italian frescoes, souls came before God: without words, without excuses, without much covering of any kind. They are more or less as they were when they came out of their mothers: flesh and energy, now with the addition of skill. That composite stands for what they are as moral beings, and what, in consequence, they tell us the world is. The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché—the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line—the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world.

Such thoughts, however, are unlikely to have occurred to Alexandra Waterbury, a nineteen-year-old model and a former student of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate academy, on the morning of May 15, 2018. She woke up in the apartment of her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Chase Finlay, a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., who was away at the time, and thought to check her e-mail on his computer. What she found on the screen was a series of photographs of women’s private parts, including her own, plus a brief clip of her having sex with Finlay.

According to the complaint in a lawsuit that she later filed, there were text messages, too. Finlay, sending someone a photograph of Waterbury naked, asked, “You have any pictures of girls you’ve f*cked? I’ll send you some . . . ballerina girls I’ve made scream and squirt.” The exchanges included several participants, notably two other N.Y.C.B. principals, Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, and a young donor, Jared Longhitano. “We should get like half a kilo”—of cocaine, one assumes—​“and pour it over the . . . girls and just violate them,” Longhitano wrote to Catazaro and Finlay. “I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals.” “Or like the sluts they are,” Finlay rejoined. “Yeah,” Longhitano wrote back. “I want them to watch me destroy one of their friends. And they know they’re next. I bet we could triple team.” Finlay also reported that he had just “fucked a 20-year-old ballerina and her sister! That was my first threesome with family members. It was incredible!” In another thread, a former student at the ballet school thanked Finlay for sending a picture of himself and Waterbury engaged in a sex act: “I can’t stop looking at Alex’s tits lol.”

Waterbury got herself a lawyer, Jordan K. Merson, one of the attorneys who had just obtained a settlement in which Michigan State University agreed to pay five hundred million dollars to young gymnasts molested by Larry Nassar. Merson sought a settlement for Waterbury, but N.Y.C.B. refused, and there the matter appeared to rest, until the end of August, when the company announced that Finlay had resigned, and that it had suspended Ramasar and Catazaro after receiving allegations of “inappropriate communications.” A week later, Waterbury’s lawyer filed a lawsuit seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the pain and humiliation she had suffered, together with the damage to her reputation and, therefore, to her job prospects. Soon afterward, Ramasar and Catazaro were fired. (A lawyer for Finlay called the claims “distorted and inaccurate,” and Catazaro’s lawyer said that he would be seeking to have the complaint dismissed. Longhitano declined to comment, and a lawyer for Ramasar argued that one of the women had consented to having her photographs shared.)

Furthermore, Waterbury alleged that New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet knew about this misconduct, or should have. The suit described a party that Finlay and other members of City Ballet had recently thrown at a hotel room in Washington, D.C., inviting underage girls, whom they “plied with drugs and alcohol.” The damage to the hotel came to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But, according to the lawsuit, the hosts of the party, though they had to pay for the repairs to the hotel property, were not otherwise punished; instead, they were simply advised to confine such behavior to New York City, where “it would be easier to control.” This, apparently, did not mean control of the behavior but control of the repercussions—that is, damage control. By means of such tolerance, the suit claimed, N.Y.C.B. signalled to a group of male dancers “that they could degrade, demean, mistreat and abuse, assault, and batter women without consequence.” (An N.Y.C.B. spokesperson called the lawsuit baseless and said that, far from having “condoned, encouraged, or fostered” the men’s behavior, it had investigated the matter and taken “immediate and appropriate action.”)

Losing these dancers was a serious sacrifice for N.Y.C.B. Before the scandal, it had had only fourteen male principals. Now, in one fell swoop, it lost three, and two of them, Ramasar and Finlay, were stars. Accordingly, some people speculated that additional revelations might be coming, and that the company was trying to cover itself. Sexual misconduct in a ballet troupe, just as at the Metropolitan Opera or at Miramax or in the Roman Catholic Church, may be judged less severely by the public than the failure of those in charge to punish or remove the malefactors. The one confronts us with a bad person, the other with a bad world.

In other ways, too, N.Y.C.B. tried to prop up its reputation. At the company’s fall fashion gala, in September of last year, the curtain rose not on a ballet but on a large, loose collection of the troupe’s dancers, in street clothes—people like you and me, people who presumably did not fantasize about tying women up like farm animals. Stepping out from among them, Teresa Reichlen, a seraphic-looking principal dancer wearing a dress that covered her from neck to ankle, delivered a speech, reading it, modestly, from a printout. “We the dancers of New York City Ballet,” she began, in an echo of the Constitution’s We-the-People, “will not put art before common decency or allow talent to sway our moral compass. . . . Each of us standing here tonight is inspired by the values essential to our art form: dignity, integrity, and honor.” That is, what happened was just the work of a few bad apples. Management totted up the donations that Jared Longhitano had made to City Ballet and gave the money to the organization Women in Need. The amount was only twelve thousand dollars, but the institution was doing what it could to assert that it still embraced the faith of Balanchine. Dance is a moral matter.

There was much at N.Y.C.B. to suggest that this was not true—above all the career of the man who had been the company’s boss for the preceding thirty-five years. Peter Martins, a Dane who was trained at the Royal Danish Ballet’s excellent school, joined City Ballet in 1969 and was a sensation—beautiful of face and form, and with big, wonderfully precise feet. He was also six feet two, which meant that he could partner just about any woman in the company, and he was superb at doing so. Women danced better when they danced with him. His partnership with Suzanne Farrell, many would say, was the starring act of N.Y.C.B. in the late seventies.

Ballet historians still do not agree on how, or whether, Balanchine, as his health began to fail, chose Martins to succeed him as the company’s artistic director. Martins says that Balanchine telephoned him early one morning in the summer of 1978, invited him to breakfast, and offered him the job. But Balanchine never anointed him publicly. After the great man died, a number of his close associates—including Betty Cage, the company manager—questioned whether any such offer had ever been made and said that Balanchine’s choice would have been Jerome Robbins, whom he had appointed as a ballet master in 1969. The board of directors diplomatically named both men “co-ballet-masters in chief.” This arrangement continued—with Robbins working mainly on his own ballets and Martins looking after the rest of the repertory—until 1990, when Robbins resigned from the company and Martins became its sole artistic director, a position that he retained until last year, when he retired during an investigation of his treatment of the troupe’s dancers.

People trying to assess Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If, at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissed-off person.

Even early on, there was a spirit of antagonism in his work. His first piece for New York City Ballet, “Calcium Light Night” (1978), to music by Charles Ives, was a severe, sarcastic, and also rather witty duet, with the woman and the man taking turns dragging each other around the stage on their bottoms. This was the opposite of Balanchine’s woman-worshipping duets. The element of aggression might have been put down to youthful iconoclasm, but, as the years passed, it did not diminish; it grew. In 1988, Martins premièred a new piece, “Tanzspiel,” to a score by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. In it, we see a lone man coming forward. As in a Balanchine ballet, a woman (or the ghost of a woman, or the memory of a woman) approaches him from behind. But then, instead of mesmerizing him, she grabs him, hangs on him, falls to the ground in desperation. He fleetingly responds, but mostly he recoils. Eventually, just to get rid of her, it seems, he strangles her, then dances around the stage with her lifeless body.

“Tanzspiel” was talked about long afterward. Part of what made it shocking was its apparent echo of the so-called “preppie murder,” two years before, which was given huge play in the New York press. In August, 1986, two private-school graduates—Jennifer Levin, who was eighteen, and Robert Chambers, Jr., a year older—were having sex in Central Park in the middle of the night when she died of strangulation. Chambers’s story was that she had pressed him for “rough sex” and was killed accidentally when he tried to stop her from hurting him. His defense team portrayed Levin as sexually rapacious, and, when the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charge of murder, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Less than two weeks before the first performance of Martins’s ballet, with its depiction of female sexual demands provoking male violence, Chambers received a sentence of five to fifteen years.

Presumably for ticket buyers in search of milder material, Martins later created versions of Russian classics. Each was curiously unsatisfying. “The Sleeping Beauty” (1991) was radically shortened, and it had a strange ending, in which the crowns of the King and the Queen are removed from their heads and transferred to the Princess and her consort—an action that was hard to interpret as anything other than Martins telling his audience that they should stop pining for Balanchine and get happy with his successor. In 1999, the company danced Martins’s “Swan Lake,” a ballet that traditionally ends with the Swan Queen and the Prince drowning themselves in the lake and, in many versions, going to Heaven together. Martins simply has the Swan Queen walk out on the Prince. The message seemed to be: Isn’t this the way it happens in real life? People get together; they have problems; they split up. So what? In 2007, Martins made a new, brutal “Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare’s play, Lord Capulet, furious over his daughter’s rejection of his marriage plans for her, says, “My fingers itch”—in other words, I feel like hitting you. In Martins’s ballet, Capulet actually did hit her, delivering a slap on the face that echoed through the theatre. (Within weeks of Martins’s retirement, the slap was removed.)

But it wasn’t just the revised stories—people deposing their parents and smacking one another around—that made Martins’s work look ruthless. More serious was the tone of the dancing in the company’s storyless ballets. Balanchine ballets that had seemed to be about the most exalted matters in our lives now sat cold and dry on the stage. The dancers appeared to be concealing their performances, as if they were afraid that we would see them defacing these revered works.

The situation was worse in Martins’s own ballets. The dancers often looked like body snatchers. When Martins had a success, it was usually with something fast and furious—for example, his “Harmonielehre” (2000) and “Hallelujah Junction” (2002), both to frenetic scores by John Adams—where the steps were so hard that no one expected the dancers to do more than get through them. The company rose to the challenge, and it was quite a sight—you felt as though your face were being scraped off. The experience didn’t stay with you afterward, though. I remember having a conversation about Martins in the late eighties with one of N.Y.C.B.’s female stars, who told me, “He hates ballerinas. He hates beauty. He hates Balanchine.”

In 1982, Martins began dating Darci Kistler, almost twenty years his junior, a tall, sweet-faced blond dancer from Southern California whom Balanchine had plucked from the School of American Ballet and installed in the company two years earlier, when she was only sixteen. She and Martins were together on and off throughout the eighties, and they married in 1991. One night the following year, the police in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.C.B.’s summer headquarters, got a call from Kistler, reporting that, after an evening out, she and Martins had had a fight, and that he had beaten her and thrown her into the next room, cutting her ankle. Martins was charged with third-degree assault, and spent the night in jail. Kistler later dropped the charges, though she never withdrew her account of what happened that night. Readers should bear in mind that Kistler was not only Martins’s wife; she was one of the leading female dancers in his company, and was often described as Balanchine’s last muse. And Martins damaged her leg, the thing on which a dancer dances. That’s like damaging a pianist’s hand.

Before Martins married Kistler, he had a relationship of legendary storminess with Heather Watts, an N.Y.C.B. principal. “I saw him pick her up and slam her into a cement wall,” John Clifford, another principal, reported. Gelsey Kirkland, in her 1986 memoir, “Dancing on My Grave,” recalled watching Martins drag Watts up and down a flight of stairs.

Given the notoriety of such episodes, it’s remarkable that it was not until December, 2017, that N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. announced that they had begun an investigation into Martins’s behavior. While this was going on, Martins took a leave of absence and a four-person committee was appointed to manage artistic operations. (He was also suspended from teaching his weekly class at the school.) Why was he finally being questioned? Because, the newspapers reported, S.A.B. had received an anonymous letter containing “general, nonspecific allegations of sexual harassment” by him. A good deal of Martins’s treatment of women was a matter of public record, so there was something odd about an investigation prompted by something as easy to discredit as an anonymous letter making unspecific allegations.

Soon, however, more dancers—and not only women—began to speak to the press about mistreatment by Martins. Jeffrey Edwards, a very refined soloist, told Robin Pogrebin, of the Times, that in 1993 he was physically abused by Martins. He said that he lodged a complaint with the company’s general manager and with the dancers’ union, describing the episode in detail, but that no real action was taken. Edwards soon left the company and now teaches at Juilliard. A former child dancer named Victor Ostrovsky recalled a rehearsal in 1994, when he was a twelve-year-old student at S.A.B. He was horsing around with some other children in the ballet when Martins grabbed him by the neck. “He’s yanking me around to the left and to the right,” Ostrovsky told Pogrebin. “I felt like he was piercing my muscle. I started crying and sobbing profusely.” He soon left S.A.B.: “I was depressed; I was embarrassed. He assaulted me onstage in front of the whole cast.”

In an interview with Salon, Wilhelmina Frankfurt, a tall, commanding N.Y.C.B. dancer from the seventies and eighties, recalled an incident, mid-performance, in which Martins, she said, “pulled me into his dressing room and exposed himself to me. And I had on a tutu. I mean, with an American flag on it, and I ran out because I had to do the finale.” Another encounter she had with Martins, she said, “is so big I don’t think I can talk about it.” The company had no human-resources department for her to go to, and, even years later, once the investigation was under way, she’d been unable to give her version of events. The investigators, she said, would not allow her to bring a witness unless both she and the witness signed nondisclosure agreements. (The company disputes her account.)

The accusations did not always involve force. A number of dancers have claimed simply that Martins slept around among the female dancers, and that roles were often allotted accordingly. This, alas, is a time-honored tradition in ballet companies—and Balanchine’s career was marked, even shaped, by serial infatuations—but it is no longer honored, and managements are now scrambling to institute codes of conduct.

N.Y.C.B.’s investigation had been in progress for only a few weeks when Martins, who was then seventy-one, seems to have tired of the whole business. (Or did the board finally tire of him?) In any case, on January 1, 2018, a few days after being arrested for drunken driving, he announced his retirement. He still denied all the allegations against him, and he expressed confidence that he would be exonerated, but he wanted, he later said, to “allow those glorious institutions”—New York City Ballet and its school—“to move past the turmoil that resulted from these charges.”

Six weeks later, N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. issued a statement that the Martins investigation “did not corroborate the allegations of harassment or violence both made in the anonymous letter and reported in the media.” No report on the inquiry was ever published, so it is impossible to know how this surprising judgment was reached. And although certain important dancers stood by Martins, the news that he never did any of the things that others had reported was received with considerable skepticism. As Victor Ostrovsky asked, how was it possible that the rest of the cast could recall nothing of what Martins did to him, as a child, at that rehearsal? “They all knew what happened,” he said. Many people in the dance world were disappointed that Sarah Jessica Parker, the vice-chair of N.Y.C.B.’s board of directors and a vocal feminist, had remained silent throughout the affair. (She eventually texted the Times, saying that the safety of the company’s dancers “is paramount to me.”) It was a few months after all this that Alexandra Waterbury logged on to Chase Finlay’s computer and found the photographs of the dancers he had caused to “scream and squirt.”

After Martins left, the boards of N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. formed a search committee to find a new artistic director. Who that person should be is a mystery, not just to observers but also, no doubt, to the boards. N.Y.C.B. is different from other large ballet companies—the Bolshoi, the Paris Opera Ballet, England’s Royal Ballet—in that it has almost no history of succession. The company was created by Balanchine and his patron Lincoln Kirstein for Balanchine, to show his work. And though Jerome Robbins was eventually given significant space—perhaps a third of the troupe’s stage time—there was never any question of whose ballet company it was.

What everyone would want now is a great ballet choreographer, aided, as Balanchine was, by a superbly capable executive director and staff. But there is only one absolutely first-class ballet choreographer currently working in the United States, Alexei Ratmansky, a Russian, who is the artist-in-residence of American Ballet Theatre, across Lincoln Center’s plaza, whence he is unlikely to be seduced. Ratmansky had his fill of managing ballet companies in the five years, from 2004, that he spent as the artistic director of Moscow’s hidebound Bolshoi Ballet. His contract with A.B.T. allows him to do a good deal of freelancing at other companies, and he seems to like this.

But, however gifted Ratmansky is, no one is claiming that he is the equal of Balanchine. Furthermore, many people, for obvious reasons, have recommended that the new artistic director be a woman. The company, to its credit, has recently mounted ballets by a number of female choreographers. The executive director, Katherine Brown, is a woman. Would the audience accept an N.Y.C.B. run by two women? Why not? In the past, it was often run by two men. Lately, female City Ballet alumnae who have gone on to notable careers as teachers or administrators have been revisiting the troupe’s halls, and various names have been floated, but not on the basis of choreographic achievement. Whereas modern dance has been dominated, in large measure, by female choreographers, classical-ballet choreography is a career that in most Western countries has been all but closed to women, and this is changing only very slowly. To my knowledge, only two twentieth-century women—Bronislava Nijinska and Twyla Tharp—regularly made ballets for major international companies. So if it is hard to find a topflight ballet choreographer who is prepared to move to New York, it is even harder to find a woman who answers that description.

But a distinguished ballet company does not need to be headed by a distinguished choreographer. The example always cited is that of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Serge Diaghilev was not a choreographer at all, but he had the energy and discernment to foster young people who were. After he died, the graduates of his troupe more or less staffed the directorships of Western ballet—Léonide Massine and Bronislava Nijinska in Europe and America, Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois in London, Serge Lifar in Paris, and, notably, George Balanchine in New York.

This is no doubt the model that N.Y.C.B.’s search committee has in mind: someone with taste who is willing to share the throne or, periodically, to yield it. Peter Martins made no new ballets for N.Y.C.B. during the last five years of his directorship, and one of his virtues—they should be noted—was that he could spot talent in others. He was the first company director in New York to present a ballet by Ratmansky. He also cultivated Christopher Wheeldon, N.Y.C.B.’s resident choreographer from 2001 to 2008, who is now one of the leading lights of international ballet. Wheeldon’s successor as resident choreographer is the thirty-one-year-old Justin Peck, who, whatever his title, is increasingly emerging as the artistic face of the company. Peck, who still dances as a soloist with the troupe, is a man of great skill and productivity. He seems, however, to lack a subject. His casts, even when they are not wearing sneakers, and jackets emblazoned with protest slogans, as they did in his recent “The Times Are Racing,” often seem like teen-agers, a notion that is highly vulnerable to cliché and sentimentality. The audience claps loudly for his work. He was viewed by many people as a top contender to succeed Martins, but he told Gia Kourlas, of the Times, that he didn’t want the job. It’s not hard to see why. At this point, like Ratmansky, he can have pretty much any gig he chooses. Why should he narrow his ambit?

But the audience’s receptivity to Peck is touching. They like him, above all, I think, because he cheers them up and makes them feel, after all the scandals, that something good may once again come out of New York City Ballet. And if that something good is not, in addition, wise or profound—well, any port in a storm. After all, Balanchine never said what he wanted after his death, or how he thought the company should go forward. “Après moi, le board,” he once declared, and, boy, did he know what he was talking about. ♦

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/what-went-wrong-at-new-york-city-ballet

[iwilldevourthebodies]

Things people have said in my classes over the course of the 2016-2017 school year

“One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a military officer is try to invade Asia”

“Napoleon looks like he’s about to dab”

“Donkey!”

“No you have to do it in a Scottish accent. It’s Donkeh”

“Eric. Do you want carrots? Diced,,, carrots”

“How many couches do you have?”

“I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it”

“I think the cereal aisle is amazing. I do”

“I’m a hoe for Obama”

“So what you’re gonna make him turn into the next Bill Clinton?”

“Wow. The sass. Didn’t I say there was always one delinquent?”

“Is Neanderthalian a word?”

“It’s not a word, Sufana, don’t be an idiot”

“Can we just like… abolish death?”

“Let’s just take it and,,,, fling it into the sun”

“It’s not a race if I don’t care" 

"I didn’t know what you were asking me”

“Yeah, but you acted like you did so confidently. ‘Yes! Sí, señora’

"You’re Muslim? I thought you were Indian”

“Guys, I’m gonna take a spaceship… and I’m gonna land it on the sun. And if it gets too hot I’m gonna take a parachute back to Earth”

“No, no, they’re too dumb to think like this”

“You’re crushing my heart. The more you go on the more I know I did something wrong”

“So let me get this straight. You quoted Hamilton at dinner. At your boyfriend’s house. In front of his parents. And he’s still your boyfriend?" 

"You’re being a racism”

“Sometimes I turn my os and us into a single character. It’s because I’m efficient. /Not/ because I’m illiterate”

“It’s about personal growth! I like to challenge myself! It’s not because my brain’s broken!”

“It is the wagon void”

“Up until I was 5 I was a wanderer. I was raised by seagulls”

“Honestly I don’t ever try to be dumb. It just comes naturally”

“But we aren’t octopi, unfortunately”

“Wouldn't  be a Monday morning if I wasn’t ruining his life”

“My dad works so he escapes the living hell that is my house”

“Was it fine?”

“Yeah, I got food”

“Is that a 7 or a live chicken?”

“I’m not from America, but I’m from the United States”

“Oh yeah I drove a go cart with a wheel made out of a Quaker Oats container”

“What do you mean you’re not fluent in Indian?”

“Well I wasn’t about to eat the tampon”

“If Satan Spoon starts talking to you let me know”

“Did he just say blame the gays on the mafia?”

“Dude we should test arsenic as a cure for Alzheimer’s”

“You dated him”

“Yes, well that was before I learned he was racist. And gay”

“Get off me I need to make a meme”

“I’m going to be that one awkward person who ends up sexually attracted to pianos”

“I don’t kms, I pms”

“Put that in your quotes I think it’s a good one”

“I really meant people conception. Misconception is gender exclusive”

“So what’s your point?”

“I don’t know”

“If your results end up to be true, like yes”

“Adolf Hitler becomes the chancellor of Germany”

“Wait who?”

“It’s a giant concrete chicken in Vietnam. Read the fucking caption”

“At least it won’t be Cold War part 2 because Trump’s in bed with Russia”

“Wow that is actually hot”

“Well it is fire”

“Well let it be the best stick it can be”

 "I had an English muffin today. It just wasn’t the same"

“Doesn’t covering your head make it harder for God to hear you?”

“No that’s tinfoil, Michael”

“Publishificating is good”

“Out-publish Bill. Cause Bill is the devil”

“Why are cheeseburgers such sexist objects?”

“Illinois”

“Illin-wah”

“Wait I just drew the Canadian parliament building”

“He looks kinda like a mop and I like”

“I could never be a murderer it’s just so confusing”

“Alex stare at her chest not her butt. Will is already staring at her butt”

“Russia is Serbia’s sugar daddy”

“Did they convert to Muslim?”

“What other fairies do you know?”

“Twinkle toes! No wait. Tinker bell”

“Captain America is Wartime Propaganda”

“Yeah man that’s yogi bear! Wait what the hell?”

“What’s that brown potato?”

“That’s a squash”

“Bob Marley died and so should I”

“Melanoma’s a disease”

“That’s not a disease that’s a cancer”

“What was the turning point of WWI?”

“The Versace treaty!”

“Don’t put orange juice in your iPad”

“We’re making cubes and he’s talking about concentration camps”

“Where do you think the Paris peace conference happened?”

“Berlin”

“Anything’s a UFO if you try hard enough”

“Jesse what are you working on right now?”

“The ICarly theme song”

“Why are white people so extra?”

“Is it offensive to call Rasputin daddy?”

“Zoie can you stab me?”

“No, sorry, that’s a Friday activity”

“Are Israeli passports made out of couscous?”

“What’s that thing from BFG called..? Cumberbumber?”

“So my sister’s a Russian major..”

“Can you major in a country?”

“Mown, like freshly mown grass”

“You can tweet from dead people”

“Wealthy farmers have fists”

“So do other people”

“Hitler killed Hitler, so he can’t be that bad”

“Three billion fists died”

“Everything’s a sphero to me now”

“Hey kids wanna buy some zip-ties?”

“There will never be a time where both of you are in the boat.. /amphibious assault vehicle”

“Did you know Italians get 8 weeks of paid leave”

“You know what fuck Italians. Actually wait yeah let’s /fuck/ Italians”

“What’s worse than the Gulags?”

“Siberia”

“My favorite satellite station is Hitler and Stalin. Hitler played the bass, Stalin played the spoons.”

“Shit. I missed my ass”

“Are you gonna sue me?”

“No”

“Are you gonna sue my kids?" 

"Yes”

“How are you a Jew and an atheist?”

“I’m a jewthiest”

“He deserves to be hugged. By an 18-wheeler speeding down the highway”

“My talent is…”

“Deepthroating a cinnamon stick”

“Does anyone know what the 21 game is?”

“Is that when you turn 21 and get to drink?”

“What’s next year’s musical?”

“Connor Gale: The Musical, starring Lisa Liubovich as Connor Gale”

“Somebody just compared Germany’s republic to the republic from Star Wars”

“The darkest blanket of Bill Nye”

“And her beauty was that of Medicare”

“Alright homework tonight, research vampires”

“Well I wasn’t gonna follow his mom’s twitter”

“28 lockers is inside your gastrointestinal tract”

“My dad hates Jews. Not actively though”

“That sounds like a cat choking out a hairball. Catholicism.”

“We’re catholic. And we’re not batshit insane”

“It’s not crack, Ms. Wright”

“Do they even know what vegetables smell like?”

“Why is there a cabbage in your backpack?”

“Hannah. Egg”

“Nothing’s fun when donald trump is president”

“What kind of gum is that?”

“Doritos”

“I’m better than Justin Bieber at guitar. I’m Kurt Cobain now”

“If George Washington tried to rap his dentures would fall out”

“Why did he come over here was I not Jewish enough?”

“Alright so we have bird images, and we have death images”

“You just fuckin stabbed me in the leg with a plank of wood”

“I have a velvet Jesus in my cupboard”

“Cow vigilantes?”

“There’s a meat ban”

“What did they ban?”

“Meat”

“I’m wrenching, bitch”

“What were they on?”

“Judaism”

“This kebab guy looks like wolverine”

“We have a common Jew”

“That’s like Hannah being gayphobic”

“According to my zodiac I’m light, hot, and wet”

“Haroon dropped his wood”

“I’m not racist I’m just ignorant”

“Why do people even harvest organs when they could harvest corn?”

“I’m not saying that cone heads is super high quality but let’s be real here”

“It is almost May don’t talk about snow or I’ll backhand you into the fucking sun”

“People are hanged, pictures are hung”

“People can be hung too”

“Jello monster incest”

“I just hit myself in the head with a boat”

“Dentists are people too”

“Really? I thought they were just a bunch of teeth stacked together in a lab coat”

“An interloper is someone who interlopes”

“Guys enough with the atomic bombs”

“I had weaponized the name quiz”

“Sin is a polygenic trait”

“Revenge is a dish best served under a tree”

“There’s Vaseline.. but it looks shady”

“Where’s the Cape? Is it in Maine?”

“The Soviet Union is cheese”

“Gets tetanus on boobs”

“Where’s that video of that woman aesthetically biting pickles into a microphone”

“I was too lazy to shave so my solution was socks”

“Anything is right if you can pull it off”

“Do Brooklyn have accents”

“Meme is my native language”

“When you smell me I don’t even feel uncomfortable anymore”

“That sounds like a great job. I’m gonna be a dick disector”

“My right pinkie is stronger”

“What if I just face slam on the keyboard, will my essay write itself then?”

“I wrote nyet instead of net on my paper. Figurative language dot nope.”

“Can I just remove both of my uteri?”

“Hannah you have one uterus”

“I’m dumb completely independently from the fact that I’m old”

“Why dinosaurs do not have the capacity to be fascist”

“Amanda and I are on team daddy”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hydra kink”

“My eyelashes are too short”

“Like your di- I mean, I’m fasting”

“Walmart brand eighth grader”

“Does anyone know who the daughter of Zeus is?”

“Hermione”

“Give your partner a hand-job from a million miles away for only $88 plus tax”

“The vase is thicc”

“Do you not recognize my supreme overlord?”

“Dr. Doofenshmirtz?”

“Stop sensually licking the mango”

“Triangular foot bath”

“I’d rather be peed on by a sheep than eaten alive”

“What’s the place where planes go?”

“Airports?”

“Oh yeah. I thought they were called plane stations”

“Did you say egg or dick?”

“They would give you a gallon of the white baby vomit and then you have to drink it”

“I have nightmares about Russian grammar”

“You could tell I was ignoring you, right?”

“I hear you talking about your grades in my sleep”

“Freshman salads”

“I wanna be a song… singer person”

“What do door locks keep out?”

“Your insecurities”

“I’ve never been attacked by a gang member”

“The gays worship the Babadook”

“I love Joe Biden, he’s so cute. I want a pocket Joe Biden”

“Surrogate sneezing”

“Golfing doesn’t require ankles”

“You guys all have boners but you don’t have any notecards you’re all useless”

[42wallaby-way-sydney]

more conversations from domestic au

Vasya: Maddie, you're a better lawyer than me. Maddie: Okay. Vasya: ... Jamie, you're a better lawyer than me. Jamie: I know, sweetie. ~oOo~ Danny: Why can't you be more like Lucy?! She's meditating beautifully! Luke, pointing at Lucy: She's sleeping, Danny. Danny: ... well her form is perfect! ~oOo~ Darla: I'm going to be a bioengineer! Rikki: Psh. You nerd. ~oOo~ Bucky: Alright look here Sasha, yah lil shit! ~oOo~ Vladimir: Oh come on! Can't I just gauge my eyes out instead?! ~oOo~ Sam: It's okay! Dinosaurs are part bird right? And I speak to birds. So I can just go talk to them! Bucky: That sounds like a terrible idea... Sam, moving closer to the T-Rex, sweats: Okay yeah fUck this! Sam out! ~oOo~ Vladimir, kicking a dinosaur away: Don't fucking bite me you fucking heathens! ~oOo~ Sharon: Leila! Get off the damn table! ~oOo~ Matt: Look I'll lie to a lot of people but I won't lie to Jessica. Danny: Is it because she terrifies you too? Matt: It's because she terrifies me. ~oOo~ Sam: Hey Sharon! Your girlfriend is drunk and misses you! Leila, taking the phone from him: Shar bear! I miss you! Sharon: I miss you too sweetie! Leila: You should come home! Sharon: I can't right now sweetie! I'm on a mission! Leila: Oh... kick their asses, Shar bear! ~oOo~ Alex, trying and failing to kick Anatoly away: Bitch we just goin' to the store! Shauna, trying and failing to walk away: For god's sake, Anatoly! You are a grown ass man! ~oOo~ Vasya, amazed: Babe! You can kick my ass! ~oOo~ Jessica: Oh Dani! Danielle: Oh no what did I do?! Danny: Oh no what did I do?! ~oOo~ Natasha: Where are you going, dressed all nice like that? Nika: ... I’m eating Italian tonight? Yelena: ... was that some sort of euphemism? ~oOo~ Elektra: Helloooo, nurse! Claire: If you want to get laid, you're doing it wrong. ~oOo~ Vladimir: Yelena Jr.! Nika: That is not my name?! Vladimir: ... Natalia Jr.?! ~oOo~ Yelena, almost in tears: Natasha! Lisichka! We have adopted a monster! Natasha, holding three year old Nika: She didn't mean to eat your leftovers, lebedka. ~oOo~ Vladimir: Ugh I feel like I am carrying dead weight on my shoulders! Natasha: Well that may be the dead body you're currently holding. But that's just a guess. ~oOo~ Jack: Babe, what's your favorite kind of tea again? Marie: Jasmine. Why? Jack: Damn can a guy not ask his girl what her favorite kind of leaf soup is? ~oOo~ Michael: Oh bella! I bought you more leaf water! Jamie: You know 'tea' is quicker to say than 'leaf water', right? ~oOo~ Vladimir: Hold on. I am still trying to process that my children are alive and not in jail yet. ~oOo~ Jamie: I made you guys dinner! Michael: ... this is just a plate of red and green chili peppers? Jamie: I know what I said. Michael: ... thank you dear. Vasya: ... I'm so scared... ~oOo~ Luke: Ah yes my wife. One of the only people on this planet who can kick my ass. I love you, sweetie. ~oOo~ Vladimir: Your left! Left! No! Your other left! Matt: ... that would be my right, you idiot! ~oOo~ Shauna: So what'd you guys eat? Alexei: Well I ate Korean but Dad ate Indian. Alex, choking on her water: ... Anatoly: ... boy sometimes I just want to choke you... ~oOo~ Jamie: Go to hell. Go to hell, go to hell, go to hell! ~oOo~ Rikki: Sometimes I want drugs. But then I remember there's rehab and I go nah nah honey I'm good. ~oOo~ Michael: I'll write something nice on your tombstone, bella. ~oOo~ Yelena: We text like civilized people or we don't fucking text at all! Natasha: That is rich coming from you. ~oOo~ Jack, about Richard who won't shut up: Oh God. He's going to piss someone off and then I'm going to have to kill him and then everyone in this classroom is going to have to help me hide his body and I am too young to be dealing with this stress! ~oOo~ Alexei: Some dude was in our class smokin' somethin'. ~oOo~ Ian, striking poses: Take a picture of me! Take a picture of me! ~oOo~ Derrick, pointing to Richard: That your boyfriend? Vasya, scowling: No! Derrick, shrugging: You two look cute together. Vasya, gagging: No! ~oOo~ Darla: Rebecca. What is that on my bookshelf? Rikki: ... a cheeseburger wrapper... Darla: And why is it on my bookshelf? Rikki: 'Cause I missed the trash can... ~oOo~ Vladimir, holding a sleeping two year old Vasya: She uh... has your exact hair color. It's weird actually. Matt, slowly grinning goofily: You love me. Vladimir: Oh shut up. ~oOo~ Michael: Good lord sometimes I just want to kill all of you. ~oOo~ Michael: If I am succeeding let it be known it was purely out of spite. I hate my father and my older brother and I want them to be aware that I am better than them at everything. ~oOo~ Jamie: I want a cannoli. Vasya: Ravioli? Michael: Fucking hell... ~oOo~ Matt: I think my three year old just said he wants to fuck the dinner roll.  ~oOo~ Marie: No, I don't know kung fu! I do know how to whoop your ass though! ~oOo~ Peyton, fanning herself: Why is it so hot in here?! Jamie: Oh, sorry, Li. It's because I'm here. ~oOo~ Vasya: Daddy why is there a pretty girl doing your paperwork?! Matt: ... I didn't know she was pretty? Vasya: She's flipping gorgeous! I'm going to die! ~oOo~ Vasya: Ahhhhhh! Peyton: ... wow she has been screaming for five minutes straight. What a set of lungs. Nika: Should we stop her? Jack: Vas. Sestrichka. Stop. Vasya: ... the screaming wasn't internally? Jack: No, sis. It was external and loud. You've never been the best with keeping thoughts on the inside now that I think about it. ~oOo~ Richard, pointing to Jack: This is my friend. Jack, narrowing his eyes: Bitch you don't do this shit to your friends. You don't do friends like this. ~oOo~ Alexei: I just want to hit him once. Just once. Someone let me just fucking beat his ass! ~oOo~ Peyton: Well what do we do now? Jamie: We kill everyone. I'll start. Hand me a knife? Alexei: We are not killing anyone! You psychopath! Sit your butt down. ~oOo~ Fisk: Richard, you embarrass me. ~oOo~ Misty: Colleen! The girls are two! Why are you teaching them to play with katanas?! Colleen, shrugging: Practice for the future? Vladimir: Well I'm terrified. ~oOo~ Darla, yelling at Rikki: Oh yeah?! Well you're adopted! Sasha, pausing as he walks by their room: Well damn. No need to be rude! Rikki and Darla: Oops... ~oOo~ Jack: I don't think that's the proper use for a CPR dummy, Ravdí. ~oOo~ Alexei: No, I can’t even think a bad word or else my mom will descend from the heavens out of literally no where and begin beating my butt. Jamie: Yeah have you ever met our parents? I’d sooner jump in front of a train than think, let alone say, certain words. Peyton: I feel like I gotta clutch some pearls. Do that Catholic crossing thing. Pray for my soul. ~oOo~ Vasya: I got a scholarship. Matt: To Juliard? That's great, honey! Vasya: Uh no? Harvard. Matt, choking on his coffee: What?! ~oOo~ Nika: Hahaha! Suckers! ~oOo~ Sam: Oh her phone better be on or so help me god! Darla: She left it in her nightstand. Sam: Oh my god! Of course she did! ~oOo~ Lucille: Only child children unite! ~oOo~ Jack: Oh god! He's a thespian! He just gets worse! ~oOo~ Peyton: We can’t fight right now. Jamie: Ugh, you’re right. Not in front of the baby. Alexei: I love you two. ~oOo~ Darala: Rikki can you throw this away? Rikki: Psh, nigga nah. ~oOo~ Maddie: I... I think I'm dating Ian now? Like it started as rehearsal but then that kiss got intense. ~oOo~ Bucky: My child didn't run away to Europe! My child got a scholarship into science! Darla, studying and finally looking up: Huh? ~oOo~ Matt: Honey being a lawyer is hard. Vasya: What? No it's not. I've seen you work. ~oOo~ Jamie, forcing laughter: I will be on you like white on rice if you keep talkin' smack. So keep talkin'.