#both of whom’s hamlets I enjoyed very much

[once-ina-blue-moon]

breaking: silly guy has dreams crushed by capitalism more at 9

[yowlthinks]

12 Months of Shakespeare: Hamlet (2009)

Finally watched Hamlet with DT and Patrick Stewart!

- DT is so young there, at the beginning there seems to be a lot of similarity with his delivery of Benedick there, in his more vulnerable moments, then once spoke to the ghost you cab suddenly see the decisiveness and mad understanding and formulation of a plan come through, which is quite reminiscent of the Doctor and frankly a little scary.

- The scene where he scorns Ophelia is so sad... Apart from the obvious compassion for Ophelia and sadness for Hamlet, it made me think how an old man's meddling into the affairs of his daughter and the Prince has actually robbed him of the solutions to a lot of problems. Had Hamlet been allowed to develop a deeper bond with Ophelia, he would have probably come to her not just to say goodbye as he embarked on his quest, but to actually talk to her. He would have been able to share his worries with her and the story would have been a very different one, likely that of conspiracy. Or maybe she would have managed to get him to reconsider (although, I do think it unlikely). Her marriage prospects were quite good, but now the Prince has repeatedly told her to go to a nunnery, so again, not amazing news for the father who probably would have quite liked her to be Queen. Point is: don't meddle into other people's love affairs!

- The way in which Hamlet talks to his school 'friends' vs his actual friend is stunning... the difference is so obvious, it seems like you can see his heart breaking from betrayal in real time.

-DT in a crown. Damn, he is stunning! He wears one in Richard II, he puts one on in Hamlet and while he looks exceptionally royal / princely these are two very different qualities to it, the mood is different, the characters are very different and so the impression of DT in the crown while always amazing is so different. The only thing in common is the undertone of fragility in both roles, I think this is really makes the delivery. In fact, it is perhaps what makes DT such a good actor: you can feel that internal softer core, that fragility in his roles. It may be closer to or further from the surface, but it is always there, and god, it makes me want to cry.

- Patrick Stewart is acing it too as the Ghost and the King's brother. His acting style is quite different, but what he does with his eyes... wow.

- When Ophelia goes mad after the death of her father... it is silly, really, but I have never thought of it as a parallel / mirror. They are both striken by grief at the death of their murdered fathers, but their approaches to dealing with it are different: Hamlet seeks to right the wrongs, his anger and despair is not so much for his father, but for the way his memory is treated by those he thought loyal. For Ophelia it is just grief, she has noone to lean on, no action she wants to persue, she goes mad with it... again, back to the point of having someone close on whom she could lean would have made her story so different.

- Hamlet and Horatio - I really liked the dynamic there

- It is silly that having seen multiple Hamlets over the years I always forget how exactly it ends. Somehow this again was a surprise (as in, I knew that Hamlet dies, I was just surprised that so does everyone else!)

Overall, I really liked it, certainly one of the best productions I have ever seen. It was touching and again, surprising how much it made me feel, given that I know the play and have seen it before. The acting was phenomenal, the staging... I am still unclear how they filmed it and what it looked like in the theatre, but it doesn't matter, I enjoyed it a lot. A definite 9/10, maybe even 9,5.

[pedropascalunofficial]

My Cousin, Pedro Pascal

Ximena Riquelme

16 NOV 2017 12:53 PM

Before being the protagonist of Narcos or filming with Colin Firth, José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal (42) was a child whom I knew very well because we are from the same family. A man who today looks with nostalgia and some perplexity at his place of origin and his history and who still does not answer what would have happened if he had stayed here.

The first memory I have of Pedro is in the arms of my mother during his baptism, in the garden of my house. She was a weeping bus and had huge black eyes. I was 9 years old. It was cloudy. Years later I learned that the priest was Gerardo Whelan, the legendary rector of Saint George's College. Pedro's parents were not at his baptism: my uncle, José Balmaceda, my mother's only male brother, and his wife Verónica Pascal were asylees at the Venezuelan embassy, which was on Bustos street, near my house. Pepe, as we used to say to my uncle, who years later would become a famous gynecologist, an expert in fertilization, was then a 27-year-old young doctor, in those days wanted by Dina. Some time before they had hidden Andrés Pascal Allende, Mirista and his wife's uncle. One day they came to take him to the José Joaquín Aguirre Hospital and he managed to escape by jumping through the roofs. It was October 1975.

Like most of the Chilean families, there were supporters of both sides in mine: for and against Pinochet. Trying to help Pedro's parents, my dad called a relative who held a high position in the Army. "Tell the children to get asylum, because I cannot guarantee their lives or that nothing happens to Veronica," was his reply. She was 22 years old. Then began the journey of my uncles and with them that of my cousin José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal. Pepe and Verónica had to start living secretly in different houses. Pedro, who was only 6 months old at the time, and his 3-year-old sister Javiera were left in charge of my mother's older sister, "Aunt Juani."

The second memory I have of Pedro is when I accompanied my parents, who carried him and his sister in their arms, to stand on the sidewalk in front of the Venezuelan embassy so that their parents could see them through the window.

My uncles left the Venezuelan embassy for the airport in January 1976, Pedro was 9 months old and obviously does not remember anything. I just remember that they didn't let me go. Pedro could not record the image, which I could not see, of his grandfather Luis Pascal Vigil - a very prominent lawyer - singing the National Anthem on the balcony of Pudahuel. A memory that is not mine but that I adopted, for cute.

As the people of the International Red Cross advised our family on time, Pedro and his sister did not leave the embassy with their parents, but arrived directly at the airport: this allowed their passports not to be stamped with the "L" for " limited to circulate "that stamped on the exiles who left. Therefore, the years that Pedro and Javiera came could come to Chile without problems. And for that reason, the choclón of cousins, we were able to share long summers in Pucón and some winters in Santiago.

The Balmaceda Pascal first arrived in Aarhus, Denmark, in October 1976. A year later they left for San Antonio, Texas, where Pedro's father was able to continue improving himself thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Veronica earned a PhD in Child Psychology.

________________________________________

"But Denmark is invisible to me," Pedro writes me by email. A while ago I proposed to interview him at a distance to travel a little about his history, and here we are, in front of the computer, sharing memories. "It is invisible to me, like everything that happened before. Although once, after telling him about my childhood, a doctor told me that the temporary separation with my mother was trapped in the memory of my body and that I could remember it through the senses".

My cousin, far away

The third memory I have of Pedro is a summer in Pucón. It must have been in 1978. "Pepelo", as we said, was no longer a guagua but a restless, very blond boy, who was so impacted by poverty in Chile that when he went out on the street with his gringo accent, he asked any person: "Are you poor?" He took food out of the pantry and gave it away. With my cousins we rented a warm wooden house, colorful, with the door frames out of square. It was summers with trips to those black sand beaches that burned the feet and picnics in Caburgua with lamb on the stick. They took us to mass and Pedro sang very inspired.

"This is where the memories become more vivid, like dreams," he writes. "I remember so many details: my older cousins, children my age who were like family. The beach seemed endless. I also remember running down the hallways and stairs of Aunt Juani's house looking for Santa Claus at Christmas."

XR: What was it like leaving your parents in the United States?

PP: "I think the trauma was going back to the States, although I obviously wanted to be with my parents. But childhood in Chile, with the Balmaceda and Pascal, was a dream, a world where nothing was missing, pure adventure and love."

Now that he tells me that, I remember that image of Pedro hanging on the neck of our aunt Juani, crying in Pudahuel because she did not want to return. At that time going to the airport was a panorama: we were going en masse to leave him and his sister, who traveled in charge of the stewardesses.

In 1981 I went with my parents and my two sisters to see the Balmaceda Pascal in Texas. I remember an eternal road trip from Miami, I remember Pedro's house, in a middle-class neighborhood, comfortable, beautiful, lovingly arranged by his mother. I remember the tears of my mother and Pedro's mother when we said goodbye to return to Chile. We still didn't know when they could return. Although Pedro never fully returned.

In December 1983, Pepe and Verónica were able to enter Chile. The whole family was packed on the terrace of Pudahuel, waiting for them. I remember the Balmaceda Pascal walking from the stairs of the plane to the International Police. I remember them happy, triumphant. Pedro was 8 years old and chose to stay in my house, in love with my girl sister.

We all went to Quintero, to the house of our grandfather Pepe, a great smoker, tennis player, and fanatic fanatic who took us to the town cinema to see double Tora! Programs, Tora !, Tora! More Bridges on the River Kwai and other old movies. Surely Pedro had to see several. Since he was a boy he said he wanted to be a "director". He liked horror movies and was a big movie consumer, like his dad.

PP: "I remember going to the movies with the cousins and the grandfather to see anything with Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone. They leased me VHS movies to see alone and happy."

XR: You once recited Hamlet on the beach with Grandpa.

PP: "No, it was Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. I was about 14 years old. I videotaped it and lost the fucking camera on the trip back to the United States."

After that summer, Pedro began to come more sporadically. He was already grown up, at school and then at university. They had moved to Newport Beach, California. His father was doing very well. But Pedro, not so much.

PP: "I think that the way the family supported me in Chile was the opposite of what I experienced in Newport Beach. I started well in California but at 13 years old, very involved in the cinema, reading plays, books, TV, TV, TV, obsessed with these things, I had the bad luck to find few like me. It was a world very attached to conservatism and its privileges where not fitting was punished. There was a group of shitty goats who were my friends the first year and became my terrors thereafter. I don't enjoy remembering that time, but there are deep connections from back then. Friends of my parents who are like parents until today."

Pedro's mom soon found a performance arts program at a high school in another district. A more inclusive school compared to Corona del Mar, the neighborhood where they lived in Newport.

PP: "My mom and my driver's license were my salvation. There I was able to unleash my appetite for movies and theater without limits."

As time went by Pedro became a fun, provocative teenager with character. He said he was "lazy", but he went to study Theater at NYU in 1993 and he loved it. I started to see it less. When he came to Chile he went out with his friends, I was already married and having children.

XR: Did you find that our way of life was very boring?

PP: "Bored, no. But overwhelming regarding life's permanent decisions. I didn't have the Catholic structure, and I felt there was no room for a young guy like me. Like suddenly, from one trip of mine to another, you had lives that included marriages and children, and pleasing the visits of the gringo cousin was no longer an option for all of you. I had to duel, because I was jealous of his inattention."

XR: Do you find us very conservative?

PP: "Yes, but it is a major contradiction for me. I come from the perspective that no one can decide how someone else should live their life. And well, in our family there are social rules that are very firm. I think that a person has the right to live his life conservatively or wildly as long as he does not negatively impact anyone or tries to embarrass others by his lifestyle. I don't touch these issues very much with our family for fear of hearing their perspective, but what I do know is that if I ever needed help I could ask any member of our family by the name of Balmaceda, and I would get it."

In 1995, Pedro's parents returned to Chile with their two youngest children, Nicolás and Lucas, who had been born in California. Javiera also came for a couple of years. Pedro stayed in the United States.

PP: "It was a very scary period. I grew up with my family in the United States and from one day to the next there was no home to return to. Suddenly the idea of the safe nest was gone. It was shocking because in previous years I took for granted the privileged life we had in California. I never thought that this could change as suddenly as happened to my parents when they became exiles. Everything felt fragile. Also, I knew that my parents' marriage was wrong and that the tension of those circumstances was hardly going to end. My mother's life felt in danger and the line between needing her, being there for her and finishing my studies and pursuing a career was a horrible conflict. I knew that my mom wanted me to continue doing mine, she never would have wanted me to sacrifice it."

XR: Did you really resent the failure of your parents' marriage?

PP: "For me it was the hardest time. I have not been able, and I do not know if someday I will be able to reconcile completely how my parents separated and the tragedy that came after that separation. The circumstances of my mother's death made it very hard for us to keep her memory of who she was. It hurts so much ... Sometimes I feel distressed and try to face it in the best possible way, because I know that my mother would not like me to do it in any other way."

Pedro lost his mother when he was 24 years old.

PP: "It's hard to say what I remember most about her. You met her, so it is easy for you to understand that she was the love of my life. I think of her every day. Since I don't pray, I can't say that I have a practice to feel her close, but I live for her even though she's gone, and that makes sense to me."

From Alexander to Pedro

XR: Do you believe that pain makes us stronger or does it seem like a horrible cliché?

PP: "I don't think it's a terrible cliche but a profound reality. In some way, losing the most important person in your life, discovering that something like this is possible and that what you fear most in life can happen is an identifiable and permanent moment. There is a before and after after his death. I think, yes, that old age would not have been for my mother, there would have been no footwear with her. Of course, no one wants to grow old, but others can handle it better. I would not have liked to see my mom struggling with it, but at the same time, I wish I had her every day still with me."

It may have been the summer of 2012. Pedro said to our aunt Juani: "I am 37 years old and I still can't get what I want. And it's the only thing I know how to do." It had been a long time since the death of his mother in the summer of 2000 that Pedro had changed his name. From Pedro Balmaceda to Pedro Pascal. He had been searching for years, years of casting where, by being called Pedro Balmaceda in the studios, they hoped to find a Latin or classic Mexican phenotype. He had only made minor appearances in some series.

XR: Although you did not regret it, you did wear Alexander at some point. Why?

PP: "That was a desperate period and directly related to having lost my mother. I was desperate to work, to fill my days with something more to suffer. To eliminate the confusion that casting directors had with this guy named Pedro with European or Caucasian traits, I changed my first name to Alexander and took my mom's last name, Pascal. That only lasted a year, until I was able to find a job and be selected for an Ibsen theatrical classic. But it was too late for people to identify me as "Alex". Also, my mom named me Pedro. So the decision was to call me Pedro Pascal, a name that fits with me more than any other."

Soon after that came Brothers and Sisters, other small roles, and later more important ones in The Good Wife, The Law and Order, The Mentalist, until Game of Thrones, Narcos in 2015 and now, filming Muralla china with Matt Damon and William Dafoe - last year we all went to see his cousins together - and then Kingsman 2 with Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry and Channing Tatum.

XR : Have you ever been excited acting with such powerful actors?

PP: "I have been thrilled with everyone."

With fame have come the new meetings of the cousins with Pedro Pascal. We all want to see him, take pictures of us, we ask him for greetings-chub for friends, we inflate ourselves by saying that he is our cousin. That Peña, the protagonist of Narcos and the sexiest guy in the world, is my cousin-brother. He laughs and humorously calls us "scoundrels" because now we remember him. In fact, that's what our cousin chat on Whastapp is called.

But there is also the modesty to disturb him. Know that you are busy. That while I'm sending you these questions, you're filming in Boston with Denzel Washington. And to feel that there is always a lack of time to speak to him calmly, a space to ask him questions like the ones that occur to me now:

XR: Exile changed your life. Can you imagine growing up in Chile?

PP: "I don't know, because I haven't thought much about it. I have been asked this question all my life and have never been able to come up with an answer. Perhaps my life would have been more complete and solid. What I am used to is that the past disappears as if it had been lived by someone else, in another time."

XR: Do you miss something from when you were Pedro Balmaceda?

PP: "You know? There is very little difference between Pedro Balmaceda and Pedro Pascal. As it is all part of José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal, I feel the same person. But with back problems and more money."

XR: Would you like to start a family?

PP: "Being a dad? I don't know. I have no fucking idea. I love being an uncle. It may just end there. But anything is possible."

XR: Marialy Rivas said something very nice about you on Saturday: that when you play a character, you pretend that this character brought a whole previous story, much bigger than what they are telling. And it's true: you carry a bigger story than you tell it.

PP: "I don't know, cousin. I am very confused trying to organize the past and see what turns out. It helps me understand the pain or be grateful for what I have. Sometimes I feel like I'm a fraud, living between waiting for fame and attention and completely embarrassed by these wishes.

In reference to what Marialy said, I think she means that I put all my confusion, joy and sorrow, ambivalence, hostility, rage, love, lust, greed, compassion, ignorance, knowledge either to indicate a map with the finger on Narcos, throwing an arrow in Game of Thrones, lashing out at Kingsman. Cool! But I think my experience in theater taught me that."

XR: Would you someday like your life to be a script?

PP: "No way." (in english)

XR: Do you still want to be a "director", as you used to say when you were a kid?

PP: "Yes! That will be my way of being a father. Father of a production."

XR: Is dreaming about an Oscar the dream of every actor, even if you don't confess it?

PP: "I confess that possibly… yes."

[esperwatchesfilms]

New Year’s Evil

I got the idea to start this challenge while stoned in the middle of the night and desperate for a goal. Something to put myself into. And I thought, “COVID has made me a shut-in who only watches films and talks to people. What better way to spend that time than to actually attempt to beat that world record I set out to beat so long ago. Unfortunately, I’m doing it very unofficially so only the people I talk to on a regular basis are likely to pay it any attention. I’ve got to point out here and now that my scoring system for films is arbitrary and is not a true reflection of how much I enjoyed watching a film. My scores are based on silly things that I give and deduce points for as I see fit. The Esper Scale of Entertainment (or the ESE) is understood by no one, but I will give a clear indication of why points were given and taken away at the end of each post. With those two things out of the way, I’ve got to admit I really enjoyed New Year’s Evil despite its 35/100 ESE rating. It starts off with a disappointing horror movie rule-breaking trope. There’s a woman of color in the first scene. Clearly, this means the killer is going to kill her. She committed one of the ultimate horror movie sins by being a woman of color, and thus, the movie gods decided she had to die, which was made even worse by her cliché killer-pops-out-from-behind-a-shower-curtain death. Then we get the opening titles. About eight 80s punk-rockers are packed into a convertible and blasting “New Year’s Evil” by Shadow, the video I attached to this post. So, from the word go, I have no idea what I’m watching, but I’m here for it. The song slaps, so I’m immediately all in. Earlier we saw the Yvonne (the woman of color) talking to a friend over the phone saying, “I’m on my way” before her horror-movie-trope demise, and once the credits end, we are more properly introduced to Diane, aka Blaze, a TV/radio personality who is hosting a party she calls New Year’s Evil, which appears to be a punk show where all the opening title convertible punks were headed. Before going out on stage and starting the show, Diane/Blaze’s son rocks up in fancy coat tails with blue jeans and a crumpled tie. He’s handsome as hell, but holy hell, I can’t deal with this look. I should have probably taken more than five points off for this look alone, but it’s too late now. Anyway, Blaze and Derek (Coat Tails) have a weird mother-son exchange, and their interactions are cringey at best, but incestual-feeling at worst. Anyway, the show Blaze is hosting is a punk rock show where there are some unexplained people on a stage answering telephones (is it a telethon? We don’t know. No one seems to be pledging anything. Are they making requests? It is not explained). So, Blaze is the host and decides to get in on the answering-the-phone action. When she does, a modified voice says to call him “Ee-vil!” He pronounces it exactly the way Mermaid Man does in Spongebob Squarepants, and I could only see the ridiculous face of Mermaid Man in my head any time he said it (because, oh, yes, friends. He can’t only say it once! Anyhow, the man says he’ll be killing one person on the hour every hour from 9 pm to 12 pm. (East Coast’s New Year to West Coast’s New Year) So, naturally, Blaze informs her agent that he needs to get ALL the police there to protect everyone. Meanwhile, there’s a mosh pit happening in a sanitarium, where they are watching the New Year’s Evil show live on television. While we are at the sanitarium, an orderly (I think?) and a nurse sneak off to have some fun. The orderly has a small radio capable of recording external sound (like an oversized Talkboy) as well as the sound being emitted from the radio. The nurse makes some mention of it, to which he responds, “I always come well-equipped.” She giggles, bites her lip and says, “I bet you do!” Which tells us, as the audience, that not only are they about to do the do... but this dude’s definitely the murderer. Because we’ve already seen one horror movie rules death. So, of course, we need to see another. Nurse lady has sex? Nurse lady has to die. From here on out, there are more killings as the police rock up and try to sort out what’s happening. They’re portrayed as very useless, very authoritarian/demanding, and very judgmental -- soooooo, accurately, I suppose, is the word I’d use. They’re portrayed accurately. We see the killer in the car with two women, one of which is a ditzy blonde who just cannot shut up. She talks about all the different types of meditation she’s tried. She tells the killer her friend tried one of the types, too, for her “nervous diarrhea”. You know, just the thing you tell a stranger you’re thinking about sleeping with... that your friend gets nervous poops. The ditzy blonde girl is our next horror movie trope. “The Fool”. Done in by her own stupidity. They stop somewhere for snacks or some such (I honestly don’t remember), and the friend goes in leaving the killer alone with the ditz, whom he strangles with a plastic baggie that is also full of weed. When the friend comes back, the car is gone and in its place is her friend’s shoe. She sees a nearby dumpster with a piece of fabric matching her friend’s dress poking out. She walks over while some generic horror music mixed with some Walmart Brand Jason Voorhees breathing plays, and she opens the dumpster, and the killer is inside with a lighter which he flicks on and grins menacingly at the woman, who is yanked into the dumpster, where we can assume she, too, was murdered.

I should note that somewhere before being murdered, the ditz says, “When a girl doesn’t have a date on New Year’s Eve, she’s in Shit City.” And ditzy girl? I hear ya. From here on out, there are some necessity injuries. He is being hunted down by bikers for what seems like no reason at one point, so he hides at a drive-in movie, where he sort of kidnaps a girl who was getting felt up by her boyfriend. He yanks the dude out of the car and throws him aside after stabbing one of the bikers who was chasing him. We don’t see him die, so I’m going to assume it’s an injury since he seems to only be interested in killing women. He then, later, knocks out a security guard trying to get into the punk party because the police have now determined that Blaze is probably the final target. The police and Blaze are about to check on Blaze's hotel room (the party is being held in the hotel in a ballroom or something, I’m assuming. Convention center? I don’t know. The place is connected to the hotel), where her son is, and they pull a gun on him. She yells that it’s her son, and they apologize and leave, and she apologizes to Derek saying she forgot he was there, and he storms out, “YOU ALWAYS FORGET ME WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH”. The police leave, and when another officer comes back, THE KILLER ANSWERS HER DOOR. PLOT TWIST -- THE KILLER IS DIANE/BLAZE’S HUSBAND!!!! He called earlier to say he would be late, and when he shows up? HE’S THE KILLER!!!! I have to admit, I didn’t see this coming. The husband was mentioned briefly, but my brain didn’t connect it, so it was a pleasant surprise that this 80s film done duped me. Good job, New Year’s Evil!!

Anyway, Blaze is seen in the elevator moments later flirting with the officer, who’s married and has two sets of twins, information to which Blaze comments, “What’s the matter? No TV?” Suggest, Blaze. Very suggestive! It sucks that your creepy murder-husband rigged the camera in the elevator, so he knows about your weird suggestive conversations with randos, something it seems his son has also alerted him to, because when he reveals he’s the killer to her, he mentions that ladies are evil in general. Okay. So, it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t speculative. Dudeski really does just hate women. The whole film is just, “Guy hates women. Guy’s New Year Resolutions include killing all the nasty womens.” He tortures her a while by handcuffing her to some chains underneath the elevator, and then making the elevator go up and down with some fuse box of some kind that happens to just be easily accessible and next to where the elevator is. At least I haven’t seen this form of torture in film before, so that’s fun. The end is relatively boring. The police sort out that the husband used to be in the sanitarium we saw earlier where the nurse died. They find him torturing his wife, and they chase him to the roof, where he runs to the edge of the building, quotes Hamlet, and immediately plummets to his death wearing a goofy mask that he’s only worn twice in the film, both for short periods of time. He dies on impact, and everyone goes to investigate the body. The son picks up his mask and ominously stares into the distance, telling us before he’s actually told us that he’s totally going to take up his father’s quest to murder the womens.

Blaze is put in an ambulance, and when it pans to the driver, it’s the son, wearing his father’s mask. The film ends, the credits roll, and I move on to the next one.

Overall, I laughed throughout. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this film, but if you’re bored on New Year’s Eve and feel like a “horror” film, this one isn’t the *worst* one you could watch. Below, you’ll find a breakdown of the ESE rating I gave it.

Quick ESE explanation: every film starts with 50 points for being a film. From there, I add or deduct points based on... my whim.

35/100

50 +4 for packed punk convertible +2 for New Year’s Evil 80s metal theme song +1 for switchblade comb -5 for coat tails with blue jeans -5 for creepy incestuous mother-son duo -2 for Mermaid Man pronunciation of “Ee-vil!” +10 for “I always come well-equipped.” “I bet you do” -5 for punks moshing to some funky blues -5 for predictable horror movie trope deaths +2 for maniacal punk laugh +3 for the “Oops” because he pissed off the bikers +5 for punks booing the police at the New Year’s Evil party -7 for the creepy incestual feeling of the interactions between Blaze and Derek +10 for PLOT TWIST!!!! -25 for the woman-hating killer +5 for creative elevator thing +2 for Hamlet quote -5 for highly predictable ending

[silverynight]

Thief

Crowley is not his name, that's the name all the demons of Hell gave him because they're too afraid to say Raphael out loud. The Archangel is just too powerful for a simple demon to handle and that's why Michael and Gabriel decided it was better for Raphael to be in charge of the apple tree.

That's why everyone in Hell thought Azirafell was going to fail his assignment spectacularly.

Although that's not the case at all.

He not only gives Eve the apple, he also steals Raphael's flaming sword.

And when the Archangel himself is pinning him against the wall, the demon knows he's going to die; Raphael is going to tear him apart.

"Why did you steal my sword?" The Archangel demands, looking just slightly irritated.

"I gave it away."

"You WHAT?" Raphael stares back at him, so fascinated the grip he has on Azira's hands loosens, giving the demon the opportunity to move out of the Archangel's way.

Why is he smiling? He should–he must be furious, right?

"Why?" Raphael realizes the demon has moved and in response he takes a step forward.

"She's pregnant and there could be beasts out there, how could they survi–" he stops, realizing that sounds awfully close to a good deed.

"You're very kind," Raphael smirks, trying to close the distance between them again.

Azira, on the other hand is ready to bolt.

"I'm n-not."

It starts raining, Raphael uses one of his wings to shield him from the rain, making Azira blush to the tip of his ears.

"I'm Raphael," the Archangel offers his hand, he's obviously waiting for the demon to take it and introduce himself in return.

Azira does neither of those things, he flees away from there, like a coward. He's not sure why the Archangel's kind behavior makes him so nervous.

They both end up on Earth; it's Azira's reward and Raphael's punishment for what happened in Eden.

The other demons think Azira won't last long because Raphael is probably going to kill him, but that just doesn't happen.

Azira knows he wouldn't stand a chance against an Archangel and does his best to avoid him, but Raphael always seems to know where he is.

"Hello, Azirafell!" He's constantly grinning, enjoying when he gets to startle the demon.

"You're a bastard, you know that?" Azira tells him once, tired of it all. After a couple of decades he realizes the Archangel is certainly not planning to hurt him anytime soon.

Raphael chuckles, takes Azira's hand and kisses it.

"Thank you, thief."

The demon is so flustered it takes him a while to react to what the Archangel just said.

"It wasn't a compliment!"

"You consider 'nice' an insult, so 'bastard' must be kind of a compliment among your people... Am I wrong?" He looks so smug, Azira decides not to give him the satisfaction of an answer.

Because he's right.

***

"You like Hamlet, right?" It looks like an innocent question, but Azira knows it's not. Raphael has been doing him favors, giving him things, helping him with temptations and the demon doesn't know what to make of it.

The moment Azira nods the Archangel disappears and the next thing the demon knows is that the play is a huge success.

"Thank you," he mumbles the next time he sees him, not even looking at him.

"You're welcome, thief."

***

"Hellfire? Are you out of your mind? I'm not bringing you hellfire!" Azira growls, telling himself he's not giving him that because he's not going to help an Archangel, but the truth is the possibility of losing him terrifies him. "It's a suicide pill!"

"I'm not gonna use it on myself, thief," he smiles fondly, trying to reach out to him, but the demon moves out of the way. "It's for protection."

The demon doesn't believe him though.

***

Raphael could be absolutely terrifying when he's furious and when he finds Azira dealing with Nazis inside a church he is practically fuming.

"What are you doing here?" He demands, golden eyes obscured by a shadow of concern.

"I'm... just screwing their plans," he says, a little bit embarrassed, not because he looks kinda funny trying not to stand on consecrated ground for too long, but because he's acting against the Nazis. Ruining someone's plans is something bad, no matter whom he's affecting, right?

But Raphael is still angry, in the blink of an eye he takes the demon in his arms and tells him to drop a bomb on the church, Azira is just too shocked to protest.

The Archangel keeps both their human bodies and Azira's beloved books safe.

"Thank–"

"Don't," Raphael hisses, still refusing to let the demon go. "Don't you ever do that again. There was holy water inside! You could've died!"

Azira gasps when he sees in those golden eyes what he has refused to see since the beginning.

The Archangel presses their foreheads together.

"I–I promise I'll be more careful," he mumbles, trying to forget what he just realized.

"You could just say my name if you're in trouble, my thief. Say it three times and I'll be right next to you if you need me," Raphael offers and even Azira knows that's huge coming from an Archangel. "Even if you're fighting against angels... I'll be there for you."

He tries to dismiss it, because he's not ready to deal with the implications.

"I don't have to say your name, you always appear wherever I am," the demon says, trying to make it sound like a joke.

"Yeah, but it'd be nice to hear you say it, to know that you want me there... to know that you need me too," Raphael kisses Azira's hand and that's when the demon starts panicking.

He's just not ready.

"I need to report back to Hell," he stammers, face completely red.

Raphael leaves him on the ground and the demon runs away... again.

***

Despite of his concern, Azira gives him the hellfire; Raphael looks back at him in awe, with hope and tries to take his hand. The demon shakes his head and gets out of the white Bentley.

They see each other a few years later, in Azira's bookshop; he'll keep using the place like a shop even though he never allows anyone to buy a single one of his precious books.

When Raphael walks in, Azira holds back a sigh of relief; he'll never admit he was completely worried about him since he gave him the hellfire.

The Archangel brings him a croissant filled with chocolate and the demon almost moans at the sight.

"How come you're always the one giving me these things?" he chuckles, not noticing the way Raphael is staring at him as Azira licks the rest of the chocolate off his own thumb. "I should be the one trying to tempt you..."

"You could, if you wanted," Raphael moves faster than Azira can blink; he takes the demon in his arms and sits him over his lap. "Tempt me, thief."

"I was just jo–"

"Tempt me, Azirafell," he whispers, leaning closer, tightening his grip on the demon's hip when said demon tries to escape. "Ask me to kiss you and I will... You only have to say it, please."

He can feel the Archangel's nose close to his, Raphael has a hand on the back of the demon's neck, pulling him even closer.

The Archangel has been punished once because of him, what if it happens this time too?

He can't. It's too much.

"You go too fast for me... Crowley," it's almost cruel the way Azira decides to use the name Raphael has been given among the demons.

The Archangel freezes, the grip loosens immediately and the demon is finally able to put some distance between them.

"Right... sorry," the Archangel nods and walks out of the shop, but stops to look back at him once more before mumbling again. "I'm sorry."

He looks so broken it makes Azira's heart ache. It's almost as ridiculous as it is painful... He knows he just hurt Raphael and that should make him feel proud (he's a demon after all, it's kind of his job to make angels suffer) but instead it makes him miserable.

It's wrong and he doesn't know how to fix it.

***

Kofi / Patreon

[recurring-polynya]

Bollywood Review Time!

Today, I am going to talk about Om Shanty Om, a very good movie that was Not For Me.

Let me back up. People recommend stuff to me a lot and I try to watch it and talk about it, and I always feel bad when I don’t like it. This one was recommended to me by my friend @serene-faerie​ I want to make it very clear that you, reader, may like this film very much! It was a strange perfect storm of Things I Don’t Care For, and I actually rather enjoyed the experience of picking apart what I didn’t like about from what I did, because honestly, I am always interested in the ways stories are told and what stories say about themselves.

Cut for spoilers and also length

First off the bat-- this is not a film for the Bollywood beginner. It’s sort of a meta-narrative, with a ton of cameos from famous stars and jokes about Bollywood tropes and directors and such. There’s a ten-minute dance number in the middle that’s just famous people showing up to get down and everybody cheers every time someone new rolls in. I have only actually seen a handful of Bollywood films, mostly made after this one (it was made in 2007), and I could tell that there were a ton of gags and references that flew over my head. I got the sense, both from watching it, and from reading reviews, that this was all very well done and funny, I just didn’t have the proper frame of reference to appreciate it.

The main character, Om, is played by Shah Rukh Khan, an incredibly famous Bollywood star whom I had never heard of before watching this film. In the beginning, Om is a somewhat-bumbling movie extra, dreaming of stardom, flipping his hair, and falling in love with a beautiful starlet on a billboard. I… was not taken in by his charms. I feel like I really missed out by not knowing who Shah Rukh Khan was ahead of time. That was sort of an interesting thought to me-- that a famous actor brings the good will of all his previous roles to a movie with him, and that it was very interesting to me to watch a film stripped of that context. I was literally shocked when halfway through the film, he rips off his shirt and had killer abs, I was absolutely not expecting it.

The deal of the movie is that, through a series of coincidences, Om meets Shanti, the actress of his dreams (from the billboard). She is played by Deepika Padukone, who I fell for immediately. She is gorgeous and had a ton of charisma. This movie seems like it’s going to be a love story, but it really isn’t. Shanti is charmed by Om’s sweetness, but she’s already in a doomed secret marriage with a scumbag director, Mukesh, who ends up murdering her when she wants him to publicly acknowledge her, which is kinda time sensitive, because she is pregnant. Mukesh had planned to have her star in a lavish movie spectacle called Om Shanti Om, but when she forces his hand, he burns the set down with her locked inside. Om witnesses all this; he tries to save her and dies in the process.

Om happens to die in the same hospital where a famous director’s child is being born, and he is reincarnated as the baby, and grows up to have the life he always wanted-- that of a Bollywood superstar. His name is still Om, but his nickname is O.K., so I am going to call him that to distinguish between 1977 Om and 2007 Om. He meets Mukesh again who is now a super-successful Hollywood producer. O.K. gets all the memories of his past life back, and decides to Get Revenge by proposing to do a remake of Om Shanti Om. He finds a wanna-be actress, Sandy, who looks exactly like Shanti, and has her haunt the set in order to make Mukesh think he is going crazy (and maybe also confess? It’s not a terribly clear-cut plan). You might think that Sandy is the reincarnation of Shanti, but Shanti’s ghost shows up in the grand finale of the film, so I guess she wasn’t?? You also might expect O.K. and Sandy to have some romantic feelings, but they really don’t, and in fact, O.K. is actually pretty mean to Sandy, even though she is extremely sweet and I don’t see how anyone could possibly be mean to her.

The movie is lush. The costumes are elaborate, the sets are lavish, the dance numbers are many and long. There is not a single scene without an off-screen fan to dramatically tousle the actors’ hair. I actually rather liked the last act of the movie where they were gaslighting Mukesh and it was over-the-top, scenery-chewing, Hamlet--play-with-in-a-play madness. A chandelier falls on someone. A lot of the end doesn’t even make a lot of sense or exist in any sort of linear time, cutting between the film-within-a-film and dance numbers and what’s “really happening” and I really had no problem with any of this. I actually really liked the amount of meta that was happening and the breakdown of boundaries, and I found the end to be reasonably satisfying.

So what didn’t I like about it?

The entire film relies on you being charmed by Om and I did not care for him. We all have this set of trope personality types that we enjoy and fall for, and “young person who dreams of making it big on the stage/screen” is a huge swipe left for me. Give me a stolid second-in-command who has been stationed at an ice wall for 30 years to protect his homeland. A incredibly tired dude muttering “fuck” as he wades into a swamp to fight a bog zombie, because who else is gonna? My dude turn-ons include duty and self-sacrifice and really good posture. I couldn’t watch Naruto because everyone spouted off about “their dreams” too much, and I thought Om should have cut his losses and gotten a real job. I am who I am.

There’s a weird fine line between “meta,” that is, stories about storytelling and presentation and media, and movies about being in love with making movies. I like the former a lot and I do not care for the latter one bit. I did stage crew for a high school production of 42nd Street and I have a very distinct memory of thinking “this is a play about putting on a play. Why on earth would anyone who is not an actor want to watch this?” I also hate books where the main character is a writer (yes, Stephen King, this is a call-out). I also hate biopics about musicians and actors. I honestly do not care about the craft, and the “magic of cinema” has never been a thing I have found remotely compelling. 

What I love about reincarnation storylines is the period where the characters recognize the feelings and memories that are tied to their previous lives-- where they see someone and can feel their old emotions for this person, but without knowing why. This is where I live. I eat this with a spoon. I want this to prolong the emotional burn, because the characters don't know what are their own feelings and what comes from their past lives, and that there are conflicts that must be resolved for both lifetimes. Alternatively, you can also use a reincarnation storyline to skip the emotional burn entirely, by just having the character “get all their memories back in one fell swoop.” This is… the opposite of what I want. This is what Om Shanty Om does. I felt deeply cheated.

Relatedly, the entire theme of the movie was "When you want something badly, the whole universe conspires to give to you", a sentiment I wholeheartedly disagree with. I love stories about the conflict between agency and destiny, I think this is a really meaty subject, but once again, the movie used it as an excuse to let the characters sit back and do nothing and have a solution to their problems drop into their laps. I am sure you could make an argument for the charm of this viewpoint, but it is not for me.

I like dance numbers all right, but they are not why I watch Bollywood films. This movie is over two hours long and a lot of it was dance numbers. I was very tired of dance numbers by the end. That being said, the titular song was a bop and I had it stuck in my head for days. “Disco of Distress” was my second favorite.

I do not really feel a lot of nostalgia for the late 1970s, which is when the first half of the film takes place. If noisy patterns and kitsch and big winks and goofy hair is your period aesthetic, you will enjoy this part a lot!

Here’s what I did like!

Sunglasses. There were so many good sunnies in this film. So many. A parade of excellent shades.

Deepika Padukone. She is so adorable, for one, and she charmed me in every way that Shah Rukh Khan did not. I loved her both as the melancholy starlet Shanti and the doofy, gum-chewing Sandy, and also the Angry Revenge Ghost at the end. I would say this movie is 75% Om and 25% Shanti, and I would have liked it a lot better if it were the other way around. Sandy had basically no agency whatsoever; the second half of the plot was basically about O.K. getting revenge on Mukush... mostly for himself? I liked that the first half of the movie didn’t make Shanti fall in love with the puppy-like Om just because he was devoted to her, but it would have been a nice reversal if the jaded O.K. had softened toward Sandy more in the second act, and that there had been a bit of a love story to temper the revenge plot.

The idea of the plot. The plot described in words is very cool to me, and there was a period of about 3 minutes in the film when O.K. recognizes Om’s mother when I got real excited about where this was going, and then I realized it wasn’t going where I wanted and was sad again. I think I might have liked it better if the movie started out with O.K. and revealed Om’s story slowly, through flashback, but nothing about this movie catered to my narrative aesthetic, so I eventually gave up with ways of trying to fix it.

Anyway, as I said, I can definitely see how someone could love this movie! If you are a big Bollywood buff and you love dance numbers and silliness and Shah Rukh Khan, I would recommend it in a second! It was strangely almost tailor-made to hit some of my pet peeves, and I was mad because I wanted to like it more than I did.

That’s my review! @serene-faerie​ I hope you still love me even though I didn’t like your movie. I am always trying to expand my movie knowledge and I learned a lot watching this one, and I don’t regret watching it, even though it wasn’t my fave.

[mahoutokoro-at-nagumo]

Japanese Wizarding Clans: A Brief History

The Four Noble Clans

The four most important clans in Japanese politics during the Heian period (794–1185 AD). The Minamoto, Taira, Fujiwara, and Tachibana clans held great power and influence over both wixen and mundane matters. Of the four, only the Fujiwara were completely unrelated to the imperial family at the time of its conception. The other three clans - the Minamoto, Taira, and Tachibana, were founded by relatives of past Emperors who were granted titles of nobility.

The Taira and Tachibana clans lost much of their power in the past to the Minamoto and Fujiwara, respectively. The wixen members of these clans fell alongside their mundane relatives, though several of the Taira escaped to small secluded hamlets, the clan’s former power and status forever lost.

The two clans that survived the power struggles of the Heian period enjoyed a much longer rule. The Minamoto clan, which wielded the most military might, would later establish the first bakufu at Kamakura and give rise to the Ashikaga, Nitta, and Takeda clans. The most notable of the Minamoto clan’s wixes practiced Buddhist schools of magic, several becoming monks. Although the mundane side of the clan would eventually fade into the tides of history, the Minamoto name lived on through its wixen side and they still hold some influence in modern wixen Japan today.

However, it was the Fujiwara who were the most successful of the four noble clans. Although they did not claim descent from the imperial family, early on they gained power through marriage into the imperial family and the mundane side of the Fujiwara acted as advisors to the Emperor for many generations. But it was the magic side of the clan that thrived long after control over mainstream politics waned. Fujiwara wixes have always been leaders in the field of the purification rites right alongside the Abe clan, and long ago were granted the responsibility of governing all shrines across Japan.

Immigrant Clans

The immigrant clans were formed by non-natives of the Japanese isles, some originating from kingdoms in modern day Korea or China. Of these, the most important to the Japanese wixen world are no doubt the Hata and Koma clans.

The Hata clan claims descent from Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China, and its mundane and wixen members once worked together to help establish the capital of Heian-kyo as well as many famous temples and shrines across the country. Its mundane members acted as financial advisors and its wixen members helped import sericulture - the production of silk - and with it, numerous spells and magic associated with the process.

Although the mundane branches gave rise to several samurai families and later died off, the wixen branch of the clan led to clusters of Hata descendants in Osaka and influential families involved in Noh theatre. Notably, no descendant still bears the name ‘Hata’, as this was reserved solely for the main line of the family that has since died out.

The Koma clan was founded by a Goguryeo prince and came to inhabit a vast land in modern day Saitama Prefecture. Many of the original settlers were wixes, who helped develop the clan’s strong ties to temples and shrines that continues to this day. The Koma clan mostly kept to itself, thus surviving the major conflicts that would lead to the decline of so many other influential clans. Its wixen members are less obvious about their magic nowadays, but this community has always been quite secluded and open to the use of magic amongst its own.

Samurai Clans

Of the many samurai clans that came into existence, two promiment ones must be mentioned when discussing the history of wixen clans in Japan.

The first is the Ashikaga clan, descendants of the Minamoto who assumed the prestige that came with the Minamoto name after the mundane side of the clan declined. The Ashikaga would reestablish diplomatic ties with China, both its mundane and wixen governments. Although they were eventually defeated by Oda Nobunaga, enough wixen members survived to the present day.

The Tokugawa clan were also descendants of the Minamoto through the Nitta clan. Originally, Tokugawa Ieyasu was a Matsudaira, a clan founded by a Buddhist monk related to the Nitta clan. This relation led to the rise of the Tokugawa clan’s influence in wixen matters, and they clashed with the Fujiwara on many occasions. Their feud continues to the present day.

Defunct Clans

Although these clans died out long ago, they are credited in the history books for their important contributions to wixen Japan’s development.

The Soga clan was one of the most powerful in the Asuka period (538-710) and spread Buddhist magic throughout Japan and were always at odds with the priogenitors of the Fujiwara - the Nakatomi.

The Otomo clan were powerful allies of the Ashikaga shoganate, and were one of the first clans to make contact with the Europeans. They encouraged trade and interacted with both the mundane and wixes, citing the economic benefits of these exchanges. Christianity also spread into Japan from the Otomo clan, who were more open to it. Later on, this would cause considerable tension and end in persecution for its wixen members in the years leading up to the second world wars, as the Japanese wixen government became more and more nationalistic.

[This long post that I have been putting off since the very start of this blog is finally done. People have asked before how large each clan is, so I can now say with confidence that the Fujiwara, Abe, and Koma are the largest in that order. They are followed by the Tokugawa and Minamoto, some of whom do not necessarily have those surnames anymore but trace their lineage back to them.]

[princessparkerxo]

Just Like The Fairytales

(Hey! This entire fic - it might become a fic if you all like it - was 100% inspired by @prettyboy-parker and their beautiful moodboard, please go give all the love because it gave me all the ideas! I hope I did it justice!) 

Peter is of age and he’s just in higher education - and for the Anti’s yes this is very much Starker, enjoy!! 

Peter knows that Alpha’s exist. Though as of yet in his life he doesn’t think he’s really met one. Sure, his dad would have been an Alpha, but he remembers nothing about him and since he’s left for boarding school, he only has Omega or Beta’s for teachers. He also knows that Alpha’s come to the school often, they all leave after signing a contract and then an omega is whisked away in the next few days. It’s strange, really, the way the school teaches Omega’s about life… Because Peter finds himself hanging onto hope that he’ll be one of the next Omega’s to be picked on, to be chosen and taken to live happily ever after with his Prince Charming.

St Monica’s is the best of the best, which meant in turn only the best Alpha’s came to see the very best Omega’s around. To find their mate, as such. Peter’s head was filled with fantasies and dreams about it all from a young age. That by sixteen he will have found his mate, the person he was going to spend the rest of his life with. That he didn’t really have much choice in the matter, but the school would make sure it was the right one. The perfect one for each of their students. Though Peter was eighteen, going into his last few years at St Monica’s and then he’d have no clue where to go next and he hasn’t had an Alpha whisk him off his feet.

The young thing was enrolled by his Aunt and Uncle when he first presented as an Omega, of course they wanted the best for him, and St Monica’s was exactly that. So, though it meant not seeing his family – that what was left of it – or old friends, this was his new life.

The school taught him everything an alpha could ever possibly want from him. He now knew the perfect positions, by his feet, on his knees, legs spread just a little apart and hands behind his back. Head down, down look up unless he wants you to. Peter’s told that a good Omega will always do as he’s told, he’s also told that he’ll find it extremely difficult to not do as he’s told when his Alpha instructs him.

It was a Friday evening; classes today had been busy enough. Peter had not long left his last period when he heard the chatters in the halls. It’s rare everybody hangs around so much, but he heads straight up to his dorm.

“What’s going on...” He asked quietly, more to himself, realising the chatter continued right up to the bedrooms. He briefly hears something about an Alpha, a rich one at that.

He approached a few giggling girls, all gathered around a mobile phone looking at something with flushed cheeks and big smiles on their faces.

“Who’s—” Tony Stark. That’s who they’re all gawping at.

Anthony Stark was overwhelmingly gorgeous. An Alpha through and through. Even in the public eye he manages to always look calm, cool and collected. He’s the dream Alpha, but he’s never seemed to settle with an Omega. There was a brief thing Peter remembers reading about online, about a red head and a fake wedding but nobody else seemed to be able to hold Mr Stark down. True to his playboy name he’s often seen with pretty little omegas hanging from his arms – one on each side. Rich isn’t the word to even describe him, money isn’t even a question in his world.

“What are you reading?” Peter questioned, peering over the shoulder of a tall blonde.

“Tony Stark is coming here to pick an omega,” Another girl – Karen, Peter recalls – beamed across to him, bright white teeth shining.

Peter felt a hot burn tickle down his spine as he straightened up a little. Oh. His head even goes a little fuzzy at the idea of it. The idea of Tony Stark walking the halls that he walks on a daily basis and picking out an Omega from this very school.

Well, he supposes that narrows down him being picked to one in a thousand students, right?

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up—” Harley’s voice cuts through the girly giggles. “Head Mistress told me he’s looking for a male Omega.”

The grin on Harley’s face made Peter’s stomach twist and turn uncomfortably because it totally hit him that everybody else is going to be trying to get Mr Starks attention, that everybody is going to want to be picked. If he’s going up against Harley… Peter’s shoulders slumped a little. “Cheer up, Petey, I’m sure he’ll ask you for a private meeting too.” Hayley slapped a hand on Peter’s shoulder and Peter couldn’t help but frown.

“He’s asked… To see you?” He grumbled quietly, unable to stop the small frown from creasing even further on his brown.

Of course he did, Peter knew he did because of that smug little smirk on Harley’s face. Peter wasn’t sure who looked more distraught. Him, or the poor girls that realised that they stood even less of a chance than Peter.

“Yeah. In private. Tomorrow.”

He’s coming tomorrow? Peter knew that Alpha’s travelled from all over to come here but he didn’t think people would come on such short notice.

“I’m sure you’ll charm him, Harley.” Peter is almost sulking; he can feel the look on his face is anything but friendly, but he can’t help it. It’s got to be his turn soon; it has to be.

Peter left for his dorm room with a pout on his bottom lip and his brow creased into not so much of a pretty picture. He threw down his bag and slowly crawled onto his bed, loosening the tie around his neck. He knows he probably won’t even get the chance to meet Mr Stark, to even see him with how private they are with the Alpha’s here. They pick who they want to meet before they even get to the school, have a look around while all the classes are in and then are gone again by the time everybody is let out for lunch.

So as Peter is drifting off into a sleep, the last tiny bit of hope that he’ll get his happily ever after is quite easily ripped away from him, because who is he to compete for an Alpha that doesn’t even know he exists?

Peter wakes the following morning to the beeping of his alarm, causing a sweet little whimper to leave his lips. It’s too early for class, especially English, why did he decide to take further education in English again?

By 8:30 he’s already in his English class, glasses pushed up to the top of his nose and messy brown curls falling all over his forehead, even falling in front of his glasses every now and again. Peter’s half slumped in his seat, resting his chin on his palm as he gazes at the teacher already rambling on about Shakespeare so early in the morning.

He’s vaguely aware of the murmurs going on around him, because everybody knows that the Alpha is already on school grounds, you can tell. Everything just feels different; everybody is on edge. It happens often but most Alpha’s aren’t like Tony Stark, so something about this just feels even better than usual.

“Mr Parker—” His English teachers voice pulled Peter from his daydreams, he blinked at her a few times. “Peter?”

“Yes, ma’am?” Peter quickly answered, shuffling up on his seat with a gentle smile.

She smiled back at him, fond and soft. Peter can’t do much wrong in the eyes of the teachers, a bit of a teachers pet in that sense.

“Hamlet. Your book, do you have it open?”

Peter glanced down onto his desk and—Crap. He reached down quickly to hunt through his backpack but nothing.

“I haven’t—um,” Peter swallowed lightly, the same innocent smile as he looked back at his teacher. They both know it’s not worth running all the way back to his dorm to just get a book, besides the library is much closer.

“Library, Mr Parker. Don’t forget it again.” She spoke sternly but kind, nodding towards the classroom door.

Mumbling a few quiet apologises, Peter dashed from his table to the door, heading out and shutting the door behind him. The halls are deadly silent. It’s rare people are allowed out in class time, so nobody roams around.

Peter’s shoes are a loud contrast to the silence that it feels like they’re echoing down the entire hall as he picked up his pace towards the library. He takes a turn to the left, pushing the door open and giving their librarian – Mrs Tucker, an elderly Beta who is the sweetest women Peter thinks he’s ever met – an apologetic smile.

“I forgot Hamlet for my English class,” Peter explained gently, keeping his voice hushed.

“Back of the room, darling.” She cooed.

Peter went to exactly where she said, frowning when he found nothing at all to do with Shakespeare, so he takes a turn around the bookshelves to his right and---

Oh.

All of the hair on Peter’s neck tickled hot, stood up and sent a heavy weight through him, almost turning his legs into complete jelly. The scent that hit him was completely intoxicating, too much for such a young omega.

His brain short circuited when he tried to steady himself up against the bookcase, eyes frantically searching for what in the hell that smell was coming from; or in this case whom. Peter’s shaky legs manage to get him away to the nearest wall where he can slump a little, resting back. He’s more than aware of the sweat glistening on his forehead, heavy breathing leaving his lips and heaving his chest.

“Mr Parker, are you sick?”

Peter barely managed to lift his head to see his headmistress standing before him, aside her a few books knocked over which Peter must have stumbled into when his knees went weak.

“I-I don’t-“ He could barely muster a few words, throat a little dry.

With shaky hands, Peter dragged his fingers through his hair, pulling it away from his sweaty forehead and then tugging his glasses from his eyes, trying to refocus his vision. He felt hot, tingly and shaky.

When he attempted to take a step forwards, his left leg went, clearly not agreeing with his brain that he was ready to walk and then a strong arm wrapped around his waist, steading Peter and making sure he didn’t fall to the floor. Another arm around the back of his shoulders.

“Come on, kid, let’s get you to a nurse.”

It’s exactly then that Peter’s brain kicked back into gear – at the same time he loses all of his senses because he realised exactly who’s voice that is and the gorgeous scent that went along with it. He couldn’t help the pathetic little whimpers that left his lips, head falling back against the broad chest that steadied him.

Fuck, Peter can even feel slick damp in his boxers, just from the husky tone of an Alpha’s voice and he’s literally putty in his arms.

“Alpha.” Peter mewled, head tipping aside just a little, baring his neck in the most innocent way Tony thinks he’s ever seen anybody offer themselves to him.

The sweet little whimpers that left Peter’s lips are enough to drag a husky groan from Tony’s throat, almost protective as he squeezed him even closer to his chest.

Peter’s only half aware of the situation going on around him but he’s happy to have strong arms keeping him upright.

“Yeah, I think I’ll take this one.” Tony spoke softly, his warm breath tickling just against Peter’s ear.

Maybe it is Peter’s turn at being the princess.

[chiseler]

Eve Arden: She Knew All the Answers

“When men get around me, they get allergic to wedding rings,” says Eve Arden’s Ida in Mildred Pierce (1945), a film that won Arden her only Academy Award nomination. Ida is a good egg, a steady, loyal friend to Joan Crawford’s Mildred. “You know, big sister type,” she says, in that inimitably sardonic, wised-up, swooping voice of hers, as she pours herself a stiff drink. “Good old Ida, you can talk it over with her man to man,” she says, of those men who treat her as if she isn’t a woman. Ida says that men are “stinkers” and “heels,” but she doesn’t sound all that mad about it. There isn’t a trace of self-pity in her tone, either. Arden never asks for sympathy. In fact, she never asks for anything. Some things seem to confuse, or bemuse, her on screen, but she was usually just playing that for laughs.

Born Eunice Quedens in 1908 in Mill Valley, California, she was a child of divorce raised mainly by her mother, who encouraged her to drop out of high school and go on the stage. She toured with a stock company and made her film debut in Song of Love (1929), a creaky musical where she played a romantic rival to the heroine. She went back to the stage, only making a brief, uncredited appearance in the Joan Crawford vehicle Dancing Lady (1933) as a blond actress who gets fired when she objects to her treatment in rehearsal. She speaks in a thick Southern accent but then drops it: “I told you that Southern accent would sound phony!” she tells her agent in her own voice. There could be no such artifice for her. Even when she later did Russian and French accents on screen, they were burlesque routines and not meant to be taken seriously.

Statuesque at 5 foot 8 inches, she joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1934 and was encouraged to change her name. Spotting a perfume bottle in her dressing room with the name Evening in Paris and a cosmetics bottle labeled Elizabeth Arden, she came up with her new name: Eve Arden.  There were a few more years on stage before she returned to the movies in 1937 to play a girl called Eve in Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door. If that movie makes a religion of wisecracking, then Arden is its high priestess, lounging around the Footlights Club for out-of-work actresses with a white cat named Henry draped around her shoulders like a stole.

Eve has lines under her eyes and looks a little tired; she always seems to be reclining. She’s mainly an audience for the other girls, waiting out their carbonated and inventive complaining until the moment when she can add her own topper and make the whole place explode with laughter. “There’s no such thing as a fifty dollar bill,” she insists, and of all the girls she gives Katharine Hepburn’s society dilettante the hardest time. “Is it against the rules of the house to discuss the classics?” asks Hepburn, to which Arden replies, “No-o-o, go right ahead…I won’t take my sleeping pill tonight.”

I’ve seen Stage Door countless times, and so I know what Arden will say and when she will say it and how, but when I try to re-create some of her line readings by saying them out loud, I am unable to get them right. I think it’s because she weights every single word heavily as her reading goes playfully up and down the vocal scale but her overall delivery is still somehow airy, both throbbing with thick sarcasm and strangely light. “Olga wants peace, peace at any price!” cries one of the girls, to which Arden sharply cracks, “Well, you can’t have peace without a war.” That “war” comes out as “wa-a-er,” as if she likes to pick one word to spread her thickest sarcasm over.

When Hepburn asks her what she’s done in the theater, Arden says, “Everything but burst out of a pie at a Rotarian banquet,” a weird line, but one that Arden plays against with her facial expression. She seems to be signaling that Eve has done things like that, but she’s too tired now for chorus girl hanky-panky with jerky businessmen. “Never heard of him,” she says, when Hamlet gets mentioned. “Oh certainly you must have heard of Hamlet,” says a dim Southern girl, to which Arden replies, “Well, I meet so many people,” in a “nice,” polite, nearly ghostly fashion. It’s a profound kind of wisecrack in the very original way that Arden delivers it. She was capable of hitting a pure note of comic exhaustion, like a faded memory of a past life that does not touch her anymore.

Arden never signed to one studio for long, and she made a surprising number of poverty row and independent productions in the 1940s and early ‘50s. She wrestled with Groucho Marx in At the Circus (1939), meeting his aggression with her own, but she often found herself dead last in the cast list. In a bit in Raoul Walsh’s Manpower (1941), the 33-year-old Arden says to pal Marlene Dietrich, “I’m 25, look 35 and feel 50,” and this pitiless line got at something essential about Arden, because there isn’t much difference between her at age 30 or 50 or 70. Her type stays the same no matter what her age, a woman who is past it all and unimpressed and just making the best of things.

Weary of typecasting as sarcastic secretaries and good sports, Arden returned to the stage for a bit but soon went back to support glamour girls like Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944) and Ava Gardner in One Touch of Venus (1948), which is really a film about Arden and her deepening existential dilemma as she looks at gorgeous Ava and looks at herself and wonders, “Why am I me, and why is she that?” Arden flirted with prettiness whenever she opened her blue eyes wide, but she usually did this only for parody purposes. She seems uncomfortable as a promiscuous actress in The Voice of the Turtle(1947), as if she knew that her natural role on screen was to patiently listen to the Joan Crawford’s of this world and gently mock their emotional grandiloquence from the sidelines.

After years of playing support, Arden finally won a star vehicle of her own, first on radio and then on television, as schoolteacher Connie Brooks in Our Miss Brooks, which ran through most of the 1950s. Arden was consistently, tirelessly inventive in that long-running series, mastering the art and timing of situation comedy and providing a template for later players. In the twenty or so minutes of each Our Miss Brooks episode, Arden generally manages to get at least three to four laughs. The writing for that show was usually good or at least serviceable, and if it was ever a little less than that, Arden would still find her laughs in between the lines with little looks and reactions of distaste, disgust or dismayed confusion. She could get a laugh just by smoothing down her skirt, or wincing slightly.

She returned to the screen in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), wearing some grey in her hair as James Stewart’s loyal, kindly and largely unpaid secretary, a woman who will pour some more coffee for you in the middle of the night. It might do to say that Arden’s film characters are stoic or resigned, but that’s not quite it. There’s something else about them, something unclear but suggestive. There’s something even a little mysterious and unplaceable about Eve Arden on screen, as if she isn’t giving too much of herself away for us. She does her job, like her characters do, and we get to enjoy the sound of her helplessly skeptical voice, which enlivened many movies less classic than Stage Door, Mildred Pierce and Anatomy of a Murder, but we don’t ever really get the real her and how she actually feels. She and her characters have retreated somewhere private where they cannot be reached. Maybe that’s why she had such a long career, because audiences always wanted more of her.

She appeared on television a lot as an older woman, dryly reacting to the wacky Kaye Ballard in another series, The Mothers-In-Law, and matching her sour comic timing with Bea Arthur in an episode of Maude. She was still at school as the principal in Grease ( 1978), as if Connie Brooks had climbed up the ladder but still had to put up with inane students and low-level jokes. One of her last credits was as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella for Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series in 1985. Rather satisfyingly, the 77-year-old Arden is asked to gloat over treating the pretty young Jennifer Beals “like dirt” because she and her daughters have not been as well-favored by dissembling nature.

Arden married twice, the second time happily to actor Brooks West, and she raised four children, three of whom were adopted. After her death in 1990, her long-time publicist and manager Glenn Rose said, “She kept being cast as this sarcastic, acid-tongued lady with the quick retort and put-down. In real life, Eve would have never put anyone down. She wasn’t that kind of person.“

by Dan Callahan

[wolfpawn]

Life is a Game of Risks, Chapter 18

Chapter Summary - Alexianna and Lily are still at Tom's and Alexianna and Tom's relationship continues to grow.

TRIGGERS - Past domestic abuse, Past emotional abuse, Past sexual abuse.

Previous Chapter

Tags: @damalseer @hiddlesbitch1

Request if you wish to be tagged

authors Note - For the record, there will not be full sex scenes in this story.

Alexianna did not fall asleep the second night watching the television; instead, she found herself wondering why Tom had not ceased to stare at her every other few minutes. ‘What? Do I have food on me?’ she looked down worriedly.

Tom chuckled and shook his head. ‘No.’ Was all he said as he looked at her again.

‘Tom, you’re weirding me out.’

‘Sorry, I…’ he leant towards her and kissed her. ‘I can’t help it.’

‘Maybe you should see someone about that.’

Tom paused for a moment, smiling at the memory of younger Alexianna joking to him about something with those exact words, her face had the same mischievous smile on it as she did now. ‘Yes, perhaps I should. Or I could just continue to kiss you.’

‘Perhaps.’ she smiled, kissing him back.

Tom pulled her onto his lap, so that she was straddling him, and cupped her ass. ‘The perfect size.’

‘You have big hands, are you calling my ass big?’

‘No, I am saying it is perfect.’ They continued to kiss for another moment before he groaned. ‘I need to take a break.’

‘Have I…’

‘No.’ She looked at him worriedly. ‘I am having a bit of an issue with having my gorgeous girlfriend on my lap.’ That caused her to frown before he indicated downward. Looking down, it soon became very clear what he was implying when his erection was blatantly clear in his pants.

She bit her lips together looking at what was happening him before she looked up at him again, her pupils dilated and somewhat fearful. 'Sorry,' she removed herself from his lap and looked at him as though waiting for a reprimanding, all she got instead was a kind smile and a kiss to the back of her hand.

The evening continued with occasional kissing and many looks between the pair as well as light conversation. When a suitable time to retire occurred, they readied the house for the night, turning off appliances and such and made their way upstairs. When they got up there, there was a peculiar look on Alexianna's face. 'Are you alright?'

'I forgot my copy of the sonnets.' She commented. 'I left it at mine. I was so tired last night I hadn't noticed.'

'You read sonnets going to bed?' Tom asked, his eyes wide.

'Yes, and yes, I know I am weird.'

'That is not weird, that is incredible.' he beamed, taking her hand and kissing it. 'Hang on, I have my copy in my room.' he pulled her towards his room and opened the door. He walked her over to a pile of books next to his dresser, skimming through them until he got the book he wanted. 'There you go.'

'Wait, this is from your mum's house. I remember this.' she smiled looking at the book. 'Wow, it's really beaten up.'

'I take it everywhere with me.' Tom shrugged.

Alexianna smiled and looked around the room, after a second she scolded herself and looked down at the book shamefully. 'Sorry.'

'What for?'

'Being nosey.'

'You're being curious, not nosey, you are not going through my stuff or anything. I looked around your room when I was at yours, it is only fair you do so too. Though I apologise for the mess.'

Alexianna turned and looked around her, noting very little out of place in the room. 'What mess, I thought you said you looked around mine, if you did you would see what mess is.'

'Cluttered is not messy.'

'I suppose.' She shrugged, looking at him, noting the way he had readied his facial hair for Hamlet. she bit her lip as she looked at him.

Tom, noting the manner in which she was looking at him, tilted her head up slightly with his finger, leant down and kissed her again. They continued to kiss as they made their way towards Tom's bed, neither sure who was leading who. When they got there, both had begun to tug slightly on the other’s clothes. Tom pulled back slightly, looking at Alexianna to see her reaction. 'Do you want to...?'

‘I...please, I am not…’ Tom kept his face neutral, not wanting to have her feel forced into anything. ‘I don’t have a lot of experience.’ She admitted ashamedly. Tom’s brow furrowed, with a daughter, so he knew she was not a virgin, but for her to state she that startled him slightly. ‘I have obviously have....’

‘Do you want to?’

Alexianna nodded. ‘Yes, a lot.’

Tom gently kissed her, ‘If I do anything you don’t like or that hurts, promise you’ll tell me.’

‘I promise.’ Tom began to kiss her again. ‘Tom…’ He halted. ‘If I am no good…’

Tom silenced her by kissing her again. He gently moved her backwards so that she made her way to the bed before turning them around and him sitting on the bed, allowing her to take some control. Alexianna straddled him once more, though she allowed her groin to rub against his, leading to both of them to make noises of pleasure, Tom gave a light moan, Alexianna a whine. She repeated the action twice more before Tom became frustrated and gently coerced her to get off him and begin to undress her slightly. He removed her blouse and the pair of dark jeans she was wearing with little issue as she unbuttoned his shirt and pants, her hands finding their way to his ass fairly swiftly after the removal of his pants.

To Tom’s surprise, under her blouse was a cami top, which seemed to hug in against her skin, showing her ample cleavage to full effect. When he tried to lift it to remove it, however, she pushed back from him. ‘Lexi?’

‘I...please don’t.’

‘Is this another hang-up you have from the accident?’ He guessed, but Alexianna shook her head. ‘Then…Lily.’ She looked down. ‘Lexi?’

‘I shouldn’t have…’ She tried to get off the bed and leave, but Tom stopped her.

‘If you don’t want to, we won’t, but please talk to me.’

‘My scar…’

‘Yes, you told me, Lily was a c-section.’

‘But…’

‘But what? You told me already.’ She said nothing for a moment. ‘Is that all?’ She shook her head. Tom thought for a moment and came to another conclusion. ‘What else?' She said nothing. 'Stretch marks?’ Alexianna’s nostrils began to flare as tears came to her eyes. ‘Lexi,’ he pulled her to him. ‘You are aware they happen, right?’

‘But…’

‘No buts. Sarah has them from Sophie, Sophie has them from Kit and Hal, Elsa has them from the twins.’

‘How do you…?’

‘Because Sarah cried three weeks after Sophie with ‘Baby Blues’ that she now, and I quote, looked like “a child's manuscript copy”. Chris and I were working on the Dark World when Elsa came by, and their daughter informed us the babies made her mother’s bum have “crack marks”.’ Alexianna gave a sympathetic smile at that. ‘And Ben rang me when I was in the States for something else and asked me to post home some sort of miracle stuff that would work before Sophie got “anymore”. So Lexi, as much as you think you are special with your body’s methods to facilitate your growing child, I am sorry to say you are not and am also forced to remind you that many a man and woman without growing a child have them. I assume after four years, that they are somewhat faded?’ She nodded. ’Lexi, I know your body is not perfect, no one’s is.’

‘What’s your fault?’

‘Have you seen the scuba flippers I call my feet? Or my hairline?’

‘I like you just as you are.’

‘Yet you do not trust me when I say the same.’

‘Because you are Tom Hiddleston, surrounded by beautiful women.’

‘Many of whom are mothers, I might add.’ Tom added. ‘You are very beautiful, you just don’t see it. I am not interested in any other woman, I only want you. This.’ he indicated to the very predominant bulge in his boxers. ‘Is because of you, it is because you are here, looking as divine as you do.’ Alexianna looked at him, waiting for him to laugh at her expense, but he did not, causing her to wonder if he meant it. ‘I want you, Lexi.’ he kissed her again, Alexianna deciding to kiss him back. As soon as she did so, Tom’s hands went to her sides, enjoying being able to touch her as much as he wished. Finally, he decided to brave lifting her top again, when he did, she paused but did not push him away. He removed the garment and surveyed her abdomen for a moment. There were a few faint lines on her skin, mostly around her belly button, an interesting note, though he could not see her scar. ‘Where…?’

‘Under the panty line.’ sure enough, when Tom gently moved down the hem of her underwear, there was a white scar, reaching across like a small concave, about fifteen centimetres long.

Tom looked up to see her looking at him in terror before he kissed her hip, then the other and proceed to place kisses up her torso before getting to her breasts and then to her jaw and then her face. ‘You are beautiful.’ he reiterated before kissing her again.

[mandeepbentley-blog]

Information You Need To Be Aware Of Moving in Northern Ireland

Good value, a co-operative, skilled and enthusiastic workforce keen to find out investors successful, have emerged to produce Northern Ireland a nice-looking alternative for both public and private sector relocations. This is an equalling appealing choice for the sort of internationally mobile, high skills level people who are considering a move. This region, once marred by its good reputation for political instability and violence, is developing a new designer appeal. It is beginning to bring in the kind of internationally mobile, high ability businesses and entrepreneurs with whom it seeks to construct a far more positive future. Invest Northern Ireland, the area enterprise agency, indicates that it helps to secure annual investments of over ?150 million, well across the level one might expect for any population of just 1.7 million people. It's really a persuasive combination that has encouraged many investors like Halifax, Regus, Prudential plus a network of national government benefits offices to create and grow significant back-office operations in the area. Why has it been so successful? One very clear reason could be the cost of prime office space. In Belfast, the rental figure is definitely ?12.50/$24 per sq . ft . against, for instance, Glasgow's ?22/$41 or Birmingham's ?28/$52. Wages, too, are lower by about nine % an average of and Watson Wyatt research reveals that a senior programmer costing $120,000 in The big apple or San Francisco and $105,000 inside london will cost just $70,000 in Belfast. For young graduates, the visible difference might be as much as 29 percent while for more senior staff, it can be even wider. In the outlook during incoming labour, this is simply not necessarily a disincentive because the cost of property, telecoms and travel are lower whilst the quality of life is excellent. Operating costs and sick leave absence run at lower levels too. Northern Ireland also enjoys an outstanding historic record in industrial relations terms with strikes and associated activities a rarity. Public sector incentives are providing appropriate training and incoming companies can anticipate considerable support in up-skilling staff over the Training and Employment Agency. Inside a world in which the quality of the labour force is starting to become ever more important, Northern Ireland excels. The workforce is younger compared to remaining UK with almost 60 per cent younger than 40 as well as the exceptionally high standards within the education system give you a strong pool of available talent. Northern Ireland's schools boast to the next stage of university entrance than elsewhere in the united kingdom with more than 60 percent of faculty leavers achieving two A levels at grades A to C. Innovation, education and dynamism will be the key strengths. There two major universities spread across several campuses from Belfast to Londonderry and Coleraine. The Queen's University of Belfast is much older the other with the original four universities on the island designed by the Belfast-born architect Sir Charles Lanyon in 1845. Its intention then ended up being encourage college for Catholics and Presbyterians like a counterpart to Trinity College in Dublin. Now it is a centre of excellence both in the Arts and Science along with new technology and cutting-edge computer development. The University of Ulster grew out of your Ulster Polytechnic, established within the 1970s, and today carries a superb reputation across the fields of economic and new technology. Both institutions have globally recognised research centres across an entirely variety of disciplines, and are spinning out products, services and inventions that you will find there's keen commercial market. They are aggressively capitalising on these opportunities.

Technology transfer has become the main element driver with regards to relocation: knowledge based sectors included 76 per-cent coming from all foreign direct investment last year. Call centres and make contact with centres are flourishing - global blue chip names like Microsoft, Oracle and Yell possess a presence, along with other top notch publication rack seen in sectors for example engineering, health technology and aerospace. Another key sector earmarked for more growth is tourism. A stop to ongoing political violence provides a lift to have an industry that struggled seriously under the pressure of relentless news reports depicting bombs, shootings and street violence. Yet Northern Ireland includes a wonderful assortment of coast and country, city and hamlet, mountains and lakes. The re-emergence of tourism has again exposed Northern Ireland to the world. Guests are surprised by all of the its beauty, in the Glens of Antrim for the Fermanagh Lakelands so beautifully depicted in the art of TP Flanagan. You have the fabulous walking and climbing from the peaks with the Mourne Mountains spread across County Down making iconic because traditional song by Percy French, Oh Mary this London's an awesome sight, With individuals here working by day through night...however for all that I found there, I might too be in which the Mountains of Mourne sweep right down to the ocean." A substantial number of decisions on relocation have been taken after senior executives of companies have started to understand the total well being for themselves. Business infrastructure is additionally excellent. Any knowledge economy depends on telecommunications as its backbone, and Northern Ireland is now able to boast 100 per cent broadband coverage. Throughout the border from the Republic, telephone services continue to be considered being second class. This is true much more within the perception compared to the certainty, but old habits fervent has Northern Ireland is universally wired for online access gives it a definite business advantage. Needless to say, not all things in a garden is rosy. Communications between south and north are good - the trip from Belfast to Dublin takes couple of hours roughly by road and there are trains every half hour - and the Republic is becoming a financial powerhouse lately. Blue chip names which may have invested south with the border include Microsoft, Google and Dell, as well as the Dublin government provides incentives such as a low rate of corporation tax, that this north, with tax rates set with the UK Treasury, just can't match. The Republic can also be inside the Eurozone which can be seen by inward investors as a distinct advantage, such as since it virtually eliminates transaction costs. Faced with these challenges, Northern Ireland has become more going to succeed. There is certainly better co-operation between north and south now, specifically in areas for example technology and tourism and pragmatism sometimes dictates an all-Ireland approach is most suitable. The region of eire has tended to be perceived, like Scotland, as peripheral to Europe. It is really an unfair perception since there are good air connections from Belfast and Dublin plus naturally frequent ferry connections over the Channel and also to great britain mainland. Destinations throughout Europe and direct flights towards the States make Ireland you can forget difficult than any place in the united kingdom to journey to and from. in relative terms, Northern Ireland is a pretty small area, comprising of a sixth of the whole island or 14,139 sq km. Its diminutive size brings with it certain advantages - there is certainly less traffic and less congestion, for instance, in addition to more open areas and unspoilt country and coast. Roads are fantastic, the residential property companies are booming but nevertheless affordable and also the selection of leisure and shopping options is fantastic. For more info about dau tu dinh cu Ireland check out our new web site.

[tessa-quayle]

full text: 2019 Telegraph piece

check out the pictures here from @ralph-n-fiennes

the article by Hermione Eyre (official link - registration required for a free trial)

Ralph Fiennes does Ralph Fiennes so well. During our interview he delivers everything one might hope for: sensitive introspection, charm, pathos, a touch of mystery and even a (partial) defence of late Soviet Russia. ‘A lot of people didn’t experience it as repressive…’

This in the context of the stunning new film he has directed, called The White Crow, about the defection of Rudolf Nureyev from the Soviet Union in 1961. Oh, and he also impersonates a horse for me. Beautiful whinny. Sensitive nostrils.

‘It’s how I feel as the house lights go down and I can feel the expectation from the audience. You can see it in horses before a race.’ 

As we begin, in a Shoreditch loft studio not far from his home, he seems professorial, in a woolly cardigan, neatly arranging his spectacles, notebook and copy of the latest London Review of Books. When he is ready he gives me that trademark encouraging smile – half little boy, half crocodile.

Career-wise, he has it all. Family life, not so much. His greatest luxury? ‘My independence. I lead quite a solitary life.’ When I ask him if he’s a good uncle to his siblings’ progeny – Mercy, Titan and Hero, to name a few – he says flatly, ‘I could be better.’

His sister, the film-maker Sophie Fiennes, says her son Horace, now eight, really enjoyed the sword fighting in his Richard III, which is, if you think about it, a good outcome for a small boy going to see his uncle play Richard III.

His presence is a mark of quality in a film. Both the Bond and Harry Potter franchises, where he plays M and Voldemort respectively, brought him in for gravitas. Since Rada, he has run the gamut of Shakespeare, from Romeo in 1986 to his award-winning Antony & Cleopatra last year at the National, opposite Sophie Okonedo.

‘She was spectacular. I miss Antony. I found him very moving in his brokenness; his masculinity falling away and him trying to cling on to it. He’s male and middle-aged, and he keeps saying, “I’ve still got it, haven’t I? Haven’t I?”’

Does he recognise that? ‘I am 56 and I try to stay fitter’ – he does cardio and morning yoga – ‘but I can feel myself getting… old. Little shifts of energy and ambition, little impulses. You get tired more, you want to take it easy more.’ Then summoning mercurial energy in that actorly way, he explodes, ‘But I can feel myself fighting that, like, “I’m not gonna let go! Come on, come on. Yeah!” There are plenty of virile 56-year-old men.’

When I ask if he’s got a motorbike yet, like Ralph Richardson, he isn’t impressed. ‘No, my brother Joseph rides a motorbike. He can do fast cars and handle boats.’ Joseph, now 48, will for ever be the young Bard wooing Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, just as Ralph single-handedly made Herodotus hot, that spring of 1997 when we all went to see The English Patient and wept.

Antony gives everything up for sex. ‘Yes, he does, that’s a very real erotic connection, and it’s very emasculating for him.’ Does sex make the world go round? ‘Erm, sex produces more human beings, mostly.’ Nice deflection.

Fiennes married Alex Kingston, his great love from Rada, in 1993. Their marriage ended when he left her in 1995 for the actor who was playing Gertrude to his Hamlet, Francesca Annis, 17 years older than him. Although the relationship broke down in early 2006 amid reports of his alleged infidelity, they still talk, have a deep, mutual professional respect and go to each other’s first nights.

Kingston has since gone on to have a daughter, Salome, with her second husband and Annis already had three children; Fiennes has never wanted his own family. ‘Never say never,’ he demurs. ‘But I don’t feel that’s imminent at all. I love the family and community of plays or the cast and crew of a film.’

He recollects his lines from Man and Superman, the Bernard Shaw play, ‘where Jack Tanner [whom he played] rather brilliantly pours scorn on the idea of happiness: “No family, no marriage, spread your seed, but no marriage!” I love the mischief in that.’

He says, ‘I am the eldest of six,’ as if it explains everything. The Fiennes children were born within seven years. Martha and Sophie make films; Magnus is a composer; Joseph is an actor and his twin Jacob is a gamekeeper in Norfolk. Their foster brother, Michael, now an archaeologist, came to live with them when he was 11, Ralph was two and their mother Jini was only 24.

‘My wonderful parents [Mark Fiennes, a farmer, and Jini Lash, a writer] were pressured by tough financial situations and a very erratic income,’ says Fiennes quietly. ‘They were extraordinarily courageous in giving us love and a sense of home, but also a feeling, early on, of what it is to be a burden on your parents – somewhere I think that’s affected my choices.’

‘We experienced family life with bells on,’ says sister Sophie, who’s currently working on a new series of the brilliant Pervert’s Guide to… documentaries with philosopher Slavoj Zižek. ‘You have lived that and you don’t need to replicate it.’ She remembers that as a child Ralph ‘really liked getting away from us all and being alone’.

He adored his Pollock’s toy theatre and insisted his siblings formed an audience, ‘furious’ if they didn’t comply. He set up footlights in matchboxes. ‘It was magical, very Fanny and Alexander,’ says Sophie, referencing the Bergman paean to childhood.

Ralph always had ‘a love of practical jokes’, she remembers. When they lived by the sea, on the Sheep’s Head peninsula in Ireland, he stood on a rock at high tide and pretended to be drowning.

‘Gave our mother a fit.’ He also called their neighbour to say his wife had been changing a light bulb and was now hanging from the ceiling, twitching. ‘It was April Fool’s. Our neighbour was furious.’

As a young man Fiennes became, after Schindler’s List, the intellectual’s pin-up. Is ageing harder when you’ve been a heart-throb? ‘Look, there’s lots of heart-throbs out there. You see it in younger actors who are having their moment, there’s a new one and they’re written up, how beautiful they are… You see the waves and the breaks, that person had that moment, or that opportunity. There are a handful of actors and directors who stay [the course], but mostly it’s ups and downs.’ In other words, the challenge is to convert being a heart-throb into something more meaningful and lasting.

Such as directing. He directed himself in 2011’s Bafta-nominated Coriolanus with Vanessa Redgrave as his mother Volumnia; in 2013 he directed and appeared as a passion-struck Dickens opposite Felicity Jones in The Invisible Woman.

His latest is The White Crow, based on Julie Kavanagh’s biography of Nureyev. He spent months touring Russian ballet schools before finding Oleg Ivenko, a young unknown from the Tatar State Ballet company, who is devastatingly good as the dancer. Fiennes plays his mentor Pushkin.

I didn’t really want to be in it,’ he says. ‘But I felt this creeping pressure and although I had a cast of wonderful Russian actors and dancers, the Russian producer said to me, “If you want Russian investment then we need Western names, why aren’t you in it?”’

He will dig deep to make the films he wants to make: has he put his own money in? ‘I have done, yes.’ Would you again? ‘No! I’ve had to put money into all the films I’ve made. They don’t sparkle with commercial appeal.’ Did the money come back? ‘No.’ Harry Potter helps? ‘Definitely. I don’t regret doing it. I have the resources and I believe in the project. You get one life, so f— it.’

The script of The White Crow is by David Hare, who questions the view of Nureyev’s defection as a ‘leap to freedom’, showing instead a certain nostalgia for the Nikita Khrushchev era.

Hare and Fiennes spoke to friends of Nureyev from 1950s Leningrad, twin dancers Leonid and Liuba Romankov, now in their 80s, who appear in a lunch party scene alongside actors playing their younger selves. ‘Liuba said, “I felt free, I felt happy inside myself at that time.” Nureyev was so nurtured and nourished by the dance school.’

The film doesn’t have anything to say about the propaganda and food shortages. ‘If you say I should have laid out a history lesson of the regime, I say no, I think that would have been heavy-handed. I think an audience is smart. You see the ideological pressure of the regime and the constant surveillance Nureyev was under.’

Do you feel the Soviet approach to the arts got something right? ‘I do, because that was, as I understand it, the philosophy of “we’re all a group”, though of course the individual is stifled. I’ve always been moved by what I feel to be the dedication of the Russian arts ethos, the discipline, the intense seriousness with which people take it.’

His love of Russia began in his early 20s, with him performing Chekhov and reading Dostoyevsky; he is now fluent in Russian, has ‘a lingering fantasy of buying a flat in St Petersburg’ and has been presented to Putin. ‘At the St Petersburg International Cultural Forum, which they hold every year. He was very quiet and listening.’

This was before the Salisbury poisoning. Does Fiennes believe Russia was responsible? Briskly, ‘Yes, yes. It seems to me like it was. Clearly there are problematic things with the current regime to our eyes and I do feel it’s been a tricky time since Salisbury, and that’s a shame and sad.’ Oddly enough he knows the town well, having been to Bishop Wordsworth’s grammar school.

‘I had a mostly happy time there. It was an extraordinarily shocking, cack-handed event, unacceptable and wrong in every way. And in reaction the Brits have made things harder with visas and it becomes tit for tat, and the Russians have closed down the British Council, which was a wonderful enabler of cultural interaction. I don’t know if the British Council is a cover for espionage, maybe it is…’ Bond bells are ringing. But you’re M, you must know! He replies, curtly, ‘But I’m not M, am I?’

We return to the topic of growing older. ‘There are pluses to ageing, you know? You can let go of some shit. The competition falls away. You can see the cycles of your own mistakes, hopefully you’re learning… All the things that have caused you upset:  I hurt that person, I got a bad review. You start to feel: did that really matter? The things you were so concerned about just drift away on the current of life. And your idealism is tempered and your vanity gets knocked…’

He brings up, as an example, the 2002 film he made with Jennifer Lopez called Maid in Manhattan, a comedy fairy tale in which he plays a US senatorial candidate who falls for his chambermaid. ‘I saw in the newspaper they had J Lo’s most successful films and’ – big smile – ‘Maid in Manhattan was there, and it came quite near the top’ – bigger smile – ‘and then I read: “Let down by the fact that Ralph Fiennes seems like a serial killer.” Ha ha ha! I had to laugh.

’Cos my vanity scrolled it and then… bam!’ He gives a proper belly laugh. Didn’t he get together with J Lo while they were filming? ‘No. No. I was set up by her manager and the producer. So a picture was taken of us saying goodnight after dinner and sold to the New York Post. It was a decoy, to take the focus away from the fact that she was going out with Ben Affleck.’ You didn’t mind? ‘I did, actually. I thought it was really crap.’ He shrugs, smiles. The things fame brings.

‘I give my agent all these neurotic phone calls, asking about reviews, who said this, who said that, but then, glass of wine, laugh it off.’

I feel I’ve had a flash of the blazing, naughty, fun side of Fiennes; we have known it’s there ever since we saw his suavely clownish Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and his irrepressible Harry in A Bigger Splash (complete with gyrating dance routine). There is a fun side to him, then? He smiles enigmatically as we say goodbye. ‘You won’t ever see that in an interview situation.’ 

[snowbellewells]

Run to Me (in the Dead of Night)

Hello Everyone!  I’m presenting the first installment of my second CSSNS offering: my werewolf MC.  The idea for this fic has been in my head a long time, but I really needed this event to finally make me put pen to paper and give it a try.  Though I love reading werewolves in stories, I haven’t really tried to write them myself before – so I hope I have done it justice.  Also, don’t think I’ve forgotten that this is a CS event, just because Killian doesn’t physically appear in this prologue.  You get a hint that he’s nearby, and I promise you’ll see him soon.

** Other things to note: Graham (and a few other characters from earlier in the show’s run) play larger parts in this divergence from early season two than they did in canon.  If it seems like there’s a lot of set up in this first bit, that’s why. I’m trying to explain how some of them are still around and how it fits together differently from canon. Basically – in most respects – we’re at very early season two, the curse has just lifted and everyone knows who they are again, except Graham is still alive (how gets answered as we go along) and Emma and MM don’t go through the portal to the Enchanted Forest.  Rumple never turns the wraith loose on Regina because Belle hasn’t been found; therefore the portal isn’t open for Emma to be pulled into.

I don’t hate Regina.  However, it did bother me that she never even had to apologize or show real remorse for what she did to Graham – nor did it makes sense to me that no one ever seemed to figure it out, even once the curse broke and they knew magic existed.  Since Graham is still around in this and has his memories, what happened comes out, and Regina does stay more of that conflicted, but still vindictive and dangerous, character we saw in season one and throughout season two.

I think that’s it for now…  I hope you will enjoy and come back next week.  I aim to post every Friday for the duration of the story, which as of now I am estimating will be around 10 to 12 chapters.  

Don’t forget to send @wingedlioness some major praise and flailing for her AWESOME art to go along with this.  The two she did for this first part make me feel like my fic has a movie poster!!  (I only pray it lives up to the hype!!)  She did others for me that I will post with the parts of the story they accompany.

Tagging: @cssns @kmomof4 @laschatzi @teamhook @revanmeetra87 @linda8084 @bmbbcs4evr @ps1473-4    (Let me know if you’d like to be tagged for this fic as well.)

 By: @snowbellewells (TutorGirlml on ff.net)

 ~~ prologue: leaves on the wind

           The crisp fall air of late September blew Emma Swan’s long, golden curls back over her shoulders and off her neck, tangling them together and causing a shiver to skitter through her as the chilly breeze of early evening glanced along her bared skin. Even as she clattered down the front steps of the diner, eager to get out of the rather close and over-warm space and the heavy, grease-scented air, she still felt it: the sense that had been following her around lately, more than any simple gossip or slander would account for, resting heavy on her shoulder, of being watched.  Glancing around the outdoor seating area of Granny’s and down the quiet main street, deserted but for a few leaves blown here and there and Marco tinkering with the sign that hung over the door of his repair shop and pausing on his ladder to offer her a friendly wave and doff of his cap.

           Emma tried to shrug off the troubling impression; eerie though it was, she wasn’t sure that it wasn’t just some manifestation of her own jumbled thoughts and fears, a tingling in her bones that had been discomforting her ever since the curse broke, almost a week ago now.  Willing her hard-earned nerve and bravado to reassert themselves, Emma rolled her eyes at herself and how she had just mentally referred to the curse that had changed everything she’d come to know on its head as casually as if it were laundry day or a trip to the movies – just a regular little life-altering occurrence – and gathered the still warm carryout bags Ruby had pressed into her arms just a moment before closer to her chest as she picked up her brisk pace down the sidewalk.  Something in her psyche wanted to kick her for running as she left Storybrooke’s most popular eatery behind her, but Emma honestly wasn’t in the mood.

           The tiny hairs along the back of her neck prickled as she crossed the opening of the alley between Gold’s pawn shop and the library.  She threw a glance down the dim space, but told herself to relax and blew out a frustrated breath before squaring her shoulders and moving on. Whatever sort of creepy premonition vibe she was picking up on lately, it simply had to be in her head.  For one thing, this was the smallest, sleepiest, stuck-in-the-eighties town ever; beyond fights at the local watering hold between whom she now knew were three of her mom’s dwarves and guys she had learned were Jack Sprat, Tom Thumb and a definitely not-so-little Jack Horner, and the occasional clichéd kitten up a tree, nothing ever happened here – or at least, nothing of the normal criminal variety.  Besides, she already knew who the supposed villains were – and she was well-acquainted with the fact that skulking around subtly wasn’t any of their styles.

           No, the sense she felt was probably that same one she had experienced some time back, when Mayor Mills had run her smear campaign trying to overturn Emma’s appointment as deputy. Then, it had been judgmental eyes on her back and whispers that ceased when she walked into a room; now it was awkwardly hushed awe and averted eyes or slight bows when she tried to approach a group casually, and still the constant scrutiny – ill meant or not – and whispers, probably about how unprincess-like she, as their long lost princess, had turned out to be. In any case, the way it made Emma’s skin crawl uncomfortably really didn’t change that much from one case to the other.

           Curling she and Graham’s dinner more protectively into her elbow, Emma sighed resignedly as she walked on, kicking at a stick on the pavement at her feet. Thinking back to those unpleasant weeks when she had almost given in, packed up, and moved on, the upheaval of the last several days didn’t seem quite so intense.  Back then, it had seemed as though she was clinging to her tenuous bond with Henry by such a fragile, thin thread.  Graham offering her the deputy sheriff position – and thus a legitimate reason to remain in town – had been a genuine boon, and when it had seemed as though that might slip through her fingers too – as good things always seemed to do in her life – Emma had almost hit the road once more. She’d been so close to taking off back to Boston, or anywhere really, it didn’t matter… she was always going to be alone.

           No matter where she went, people never truly changed that much.  Emma had learned that long ago, though Henry’s boundless optimism and the quaint little town’s charm had almost let her forget. It never got easier to ignore the labels that had followed her for most of her life – brought back to glaring focus by the newspaper expose Henry’s adoptive mother had ordered in her bid to see Emma ousted from her new town role. ‘Runaway’, ‘Thief’, ‘Orphan’, ‘Hussy’, ‘Teen Mom’, ‘Jail Bird’…those nasty words dogged her steps for the few days after the paper’s publication in the suspicious narrowing of eyes and disapproving pursing of lips as much as in any audible speech.  For all too many moments, it had looked as though the little berg she had begun to hope could be a real home was going to turn its back on her. No matter how far or fast she ran, the barbed tips of both truth and rumor about her never failed to pierce Emma’s hard-won armor.  She might be good at pretending the wounds didn’t sting, but she knew now more than ever that she would do well not to forget just how quickly the tide of public opinion could turn.

           Even now, with the curse broken, and her tentatively coming to believe that she had not been an unwanted infant abandoned carelessly on the side of some deserted road, the lost little girl inside her still flinched at cruel jabs both real and imagined; there would never be enough time passed to make that completely go away.  The childhood and adolescence she had weathered was an inner wound that would always draw blood – even as getting to know Henry, his forgiveness for her giving him up, his boundless blind faith in her, and meeting her parents after all the years lost, and learning how desperately they had indeed loved and wanted her, how they’d had no other choice but to give her what seemed her best chance and believe they would be reunited someday; even all those truths being brought home to her couldn’t undo everything else she had known before.

           Upon reaching the sheriff’s station at last, Emma raised her chin from where she had buried it in her collar against the chilly wind and her hair being whipped across her face and into her eyes.  She turned the knob and pushed into the station’s dingy and antiquated entryway, also finally shedding the odd sensation of eyes following her as she entered the squat cinderblock building.  She could feel her mood lift slightly almost at once.  In truth, this was the first job she had genuinely enjoyed doing in years – not only because she was good at it and got paid well, but for the fulfillment and sense of purpose it brought. Clearly, Graham had needed the second pair of hands; they’d be putting the filing back in order until next December, and the man couldn’t make a decent pot of coffee without somehow getting grounds in it to save himself.  Still, he respected her and they worked well together.  Emma was determined not to let down her guard and grow too comfortable again, but this sleepy little hamlet could almost feel something like a place to belong – not a description she would ascribe to any of the other places she had landed before.

           A wry smile curled her lips just before she called out to let Graham know she was back with their food.  She certainly wouldn’t take back Henry’s appearance on her doorstep and his bringing her here – whatever happened next.  And watching the first real friend – outside of her 10-year-old and her own mother – she had made in years muttering to himself in his office, rifling through the haphazard piles of paperwork stacked all over his desk and running an occasional frustrated hand to swipe his errant curls off his forehead, she grinned even more warmly. They had exchanged one kiss – some months back now – but had decided to simply remain friends rather than risk the comfortable working relationship they shared and Henry’s hurt, as he cared so much for both of them, if it failed.  They had somehow managed to simply go on as if it were a one-time gesture of affection and remain the partners and friends they were – for which she was constantly grateful.  Graham was warm, open, supportive, and just lighthearted enough to crack truly awful jokes simply to see her roll her eyes, snort, and smile, but he was also capable and as driven as she was, determined to do their jobs well and protect those in their charge.

           Stepping into the doorway of the lamp lit office, Emma had raised her hand to knock on the frame, but Graham looked up alertly before she could even complete the motion; hazel-deep eyes finding hers unerringly as if he had sensed or scented her presence before it could be humanly possible.  She used to marvel at the uncanny ability her boss possessed; be it hearing, smell, or some other awareness, it was impossible to sneak up on him or catch him by surprise.  Of course, now that the curse was broken, Emma knew, though she was still trying to wrap her head around it, that it was his werewolf nature allowing him that ability – his lupine senses were heightened and made him effectively alert and aware of everything. Smirking slightly she had to admit to herself that wasn’t at all a bad skill set for a sheriff to possess.

           Shuffling forward almost bashfully, Emma held out the to-go bag in explanation, even as Graham waved her in without question, a welcoming smile on his scruffy face and stood to pull the visitor’s chair facing his desk over to the end of it where they could eat together more comfortably.  Graham took the still steaming brown bag that Ruby had handed her with an understanding and apologetic smile not five minutes before and began to spread their meal out on his desk.  They’d shared their evening meal right there nearly every night they both worked since he had hired Emma, and it was a settling bit of routine normalcy that soothed her jangled nerves as she sunk into the seat before her.

           Graham looked up at her with a grateful crooked smile and the bright eyes that Emma would challenge anyone not to be charmed by (there was a reason she had kissed him that one time after all).  “Thank you, Deputy,” he quipped, a playful emphasis on her title.  “It was definitely time for a break.” He gestured at the stacks of files and paperwork all over his desk at those words.

           Once they had both settled into their seats, Graham didn’t hesitate to take a huge bite out of the Philly Steak hoagie he’d ordered, munching happily and even closing his eyes in bliss with a low hum of satisfaction deep in his chest. For a moment, Emma could only watch, trying to remember if her friend – for all that he looked so trim and wiry – had always had such a voracious appetite and she merely didn’t notice before, or if it was a trait of his recently reacquired wolf within.  She was still sometimes too stunned to believe that both he and his adopted sister Ruby, her two closest friends in Storybrooke beyond her parents (that was taking some adjustment too) could both shift into large wolves by the light of the moon. They had been born with the ability in the Enchanted Forest, and that side had merely been buried along with their true identities while under the curse.  It was why Graham’s birth parents had abandoned him in the woods – or so he had told her, as he could only assume when he didn’t even remember them – to be found by a preteen Ruby on one of her nightly runs and brought back to live with she and Granny, folded into their little family as simply as if he had already belonged there.  Emma had yet to see either of them transform, but she also knew in her bones that neither of them would lie to her.  She had simply attempted to reconcile this one more bit of her new normal in her mind and move on without treating her friends any differently; even if, in moments like that, she did gawp at them in wonder.  “That good, huh?” she finally managed with a chuckle, amused enough by his good natured enthusiasm and almost child-like joy to put aside her own cross mood and paranoia of being followed.

           Then, she bit into her own first taste of Granny Lucas’ unparalleled onion rings and let out her own ecstatic moan at the hot, crisp, greasy goodness on her tongue.  Graham laughed out loud in response, the whooping, uncalculated ring of it doing much to completely repair Emma’s clouded outlook.  “I don’t know,” the sheriff countered her previous jest saucily, “you tell me.”

           Emma nodded enthusiastically, her own eyes alight as well, and her mouth full of her first buttery toasted bite of Granny’s grilled cheese.  When she could speak again, she conceded gladly, “Yep, you’re right.  Granny’s is the best – and Ruby slipped bacon on here for me again.  It’s like Heaven between two slices of bread!”

           Graham snickered at her creative praise, and the two of them settled into a comfortable silence, busily munching on the food spread out before them and humming in pleased enthusiasm.  Once they were finished, Emma began gathering up wrappers and napkins as Graham sat back contentedly in his chair, wiping crumbs from his front with his hand and grinning at his deputy in full-stomached satisfaction.  “Well, that hit the spot,” he stated cheerily, eyes sparkling when she nodded in agreement with his words.  He paused a moment, as if uncertain whether he should voice what he was about to say or not, then added, “I’m glad.  You look a lot happier than you did when you first came back in here.”

           Though she truly attempted not to – had long since decided in the months she and Graham had worked together side-by-side that the good hearted sheriff was trustworthy – Emma felt herself stiffen and begin to close off.  She didn’t need any more concern over her emotional state and how she was dealing; her mother was doing enough of that to serve for a dozen people.  The barrier she threw up was almost involuntary, no matter how well-intentioned she knew her boss was.  Old habits were hard to break, and even more so when she felt half the time as if the town’s very borders were closing in on her, that she would never find “normal” again, and as if her every move was being scrutinized and probably coming up well short of what must have been expected in a long lost royal.

           To his credit, the soft-spoken lawman didn’t push and delve into further questions.  He backed up slightly, hands raised in appeal, before lifting a file from the stack before him and turning to put it in the corner cabinet, offering her a bit more space as if he had read her mind. ‘No, more likely he sensed the fear or frustration on me,’ her mind supplied unhelpfully, remembering his heightened shifter senses once more.  Though he had his foster sister, and Granny, and Henry blatantly adored him, trailing after the sheriff or begging him to ride along on patrols, Graham seemed like a somewhat reluctant loner himself.  Emma sensed he understood self-protective walls and keeping others at arm’s length all too well, even if she didn’t know everything he had been through. He might be willing to listen, but he clearly wouldn’t force her to talk.

           She could ask him how he seemed to know, seemed to be on the outside looking in, but it really wasn’t fair when she was unwilling to share in return. Ruby had explained to her once – on an ill-fated girl’s night that only she and Ruby had made it to the end of – Mary Margaret and Ashley ducking out embarrassingly early – that shifters like them could only be contained for so long, and that though he had loved she and her gran and been happy with them, he had mostly returned to the forest when he came of age, living off the land as a skilled huntsman with a wolf he considered his brother at his side.  It was only after a month when he hadn’t stopped in for even a supper or a quick visit, that they learned he had been commissioned for a job by the Evil Queen – and when he had failed to return, she had feared him dead.  It wasn’t until befriending Snow White and hearing she and Charming’s whole story put together that Ruby had learned the fate of her adopted sibling was much worse: he had been made into one of Regina’s heartless black knights, his very mind and will subject to her whims and control.

           Henry had told Emma all this as well, long before her waitress friend confided in her with newly-restored memories post-Curse, but Emma hadn’t truly believed him at the time, merely nodded along to humor her highly imaginative son as he’d flipped through his storybook not long after she and Graham had shared their single, ill-fated kiss.  Graham’s collapse just afterwards, her panicked 911 call and what the confused Dr. Whale had vaguely labeled some sort of isolated cardiac event, had given cooler heads time to prevail where taking the romantic feelings behind that kiss much further had been concerned.  At the time, Emma hadn’t questioned his awed “I remember” epiphany, chalking it up to disorientation from his impending health episode.  Now she knew that somehow his memories had been returned to him before the curse breaking did the same for everyone else in town.  Henry had been thrilled, and she knew that Graham had listened to her son seriously after that, truly joined his “Operation Cobra”, because he knew Henry was right, and wanted to help bring everyone back to themselves as well.  He just hadn’t attempted to share it with her, knowing she would think him crazy and that it would push her even further from the truth.  Instead, he had bided his time, and helped where he could, waiting and hoping and believing until the Savior could no longer deny who she truly was.

           It made Emma chuckle lowly, and shake her head in amused disbelief; their whole world had changed, and yet here stood her friend, patiently waiting as he always had.  He turned to look over his shoulder at her sound from where he stood at the open filing cabinet, head tilted to the side as he studied her curiously, until Emma finally admitted, “Yeah, I wasn’t in the best mood.  It felt like everyone in the diner was wondering how I could possibly be their Princess.  My parents keep fussing over me and trying to make up for 28 years in a week, and we still don’t know where Regina’s hiding or what she might be plotting next.  It’s just…it’s a lot….that’s all.”

           She blew out a breath, still not sure what compelled her to open up exactly. To her intense relief, Graham didn’t try to offer empty platitudes about it all being fine and not to worry.  He merely nodded in understand, adding, “I’d imagine so.  Our world back in the Enchanted Forest – your own family even – wasn’t real to you at all, and now it’s all been dumped in your lap.”

           Emma bit her lip to hide its almost quivering a little at the emotion he summed up so succinctly.  She wasn’t used to feeling so shaky and out of her depth – and she certainly didn’t like it.  That didn’t even begin to factor in the weird sensation of being watched that she had experienced repeatedly, nor of being followed, though she kept feeling it crawling up the back of her neck the last couple of days.  That had to be just a reaction to the other upheavals around her –if she could only convince herself of that fact.

           Suddenly, Emma had to get out.  The pressures of wondering what the Evil Queen might throw at them next, how to keep her son safe – while at long last getting to actually learn to be his mother, trying to reconnect with her own parents, and trying not to disappoint everyone else looking on, was overwhelming her once more.  The walls of the station seemed to be drawing in, along with the suffocating weight of all that responsibility mentally added up as well. It really was more than any one person – a sane one anyway – should be expected to handle at one time.

           Luckily, it had taken her long enough to fetch their dinner, that a quick glance at the clock back out into the main room over the coffeemaker and microwave showed that it was nearly quitting time anyway.  She needed to get back to her room at the loft – if only for five minutes completely to herself to put her head back on straight – before she hyperventilated.

           Before she could voice some excuse about the supper not sitting right or needing to help Henry with his homework, Graham looked up at her again, warm gaze concerned and voice soft in understanding, “Emma, you don’t look like you’re feeling well…”

           She started to protest, even as she had been about to claim just that, but she didn’t want to seem like she was slacking, nor for her distress to be so obvious.  She used to have a much better poker face.  Graham waved off whatever comeback she was about to voice anyway. “Seriously, this place is so quiet they shouldn’t pay both of us to be here anyway.  I’m closing up myself as we speak.  I’ll put the phone on rollover to our cells at 9:00, and then I’m heading out too.  You’re only gaining about twenty minutes.”

           Shaking her head at his once more almost unbelievable kindness, Emma didn’t even try to protest further. Instead, she slung her jacket back over her shoulders and nodded her acquiescence as she stood.  “If you’re sure,” she finally caved, “but make me return the favor sometime, okay?”

           “Done,” Graham assured her, his expression genuine and further comforting her that he didn’t resent the early exit or her needing some time to regroup.

           Another minute, and she was out the door, hesitating but a moment on the curb outside to button up her red jacket and pull her knit beanie down over her ears against the chill in the late September breeze. She stepped out briskly, crossing the street and picking up speed as the night had already lengthened into dark and the air had gone chill.  It was only as she passed by the storefront with Dr. Hopper’s offices above on the second floor that a scuffling noise caught her ears enough that she turned sharply, peering once more down a narrow alley between buildings.  She could have sworn the shadows shifted as something – or someone – drew further back out of sight.  Emma tried to focus on the area where she had seen movement, practically holding her breath as she stared into the hovering blackness.  Whatever had alerted her was clearly long gone though. She wasn’t running around in the night alone chasing what was probably a stray cat, nor was she going to let her jangly nerves imagine even more monsters than the ones she had already learned were real.

           Turning back to face the street, Emma made herself move on toward the home she shared with Mary Margaret – and now David and Henry too.  She couldn’t help the foreboding that skittered up her spine; no matter how many times she told herself she wasn’t being followed, that nothing was there, she was no longer sure that reassurance was true.

           As if to seal her unease, just as she closed her fist over the door handle to enter their building’s stairwell up to the loft, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end in the night stillness.  And it was then that a stark, shivering note rose on the chill air – coming from the nearby forest at the edge of town, but carrying in a haunting, wild cry, clear as a bell.  It was the howl of a wolf, letting them all know it was there.

[honouraryweasley12]

Fizzy Drinks

I felt like writing something, but I wasn’t feeling inspired to work on any of my WIPs. I asked @aloemilk for a prompt and she gave me “theatre”. Here’s a bit of Sunday evening fluff!

~*~

It had been Hermione's dad's idea, which was unexpected.

It had taken The Grangers a few weeks, several heated arguments, and even more tears to accept what Hermione had done to protect them, but they'd finally made their peace with it and resolved to rebuild their family.

However, the one thing that still seemed to be a point of unease was the fact that Ron and Hermione were dating. Of course, given that Ron had made the trip to Australia, and how much of a support he'd been to Hermione, they had quickly put the pieces together, prompting the young couple to confirm that they were officially together.

Her mum was pleased with the development, but her dad had remained eerily quiet on the matter. Ron had felt, more than once, that the older man was sizing him up. Not that Ron blamed him—he hadn't really been able to clearly articulate to them how much he loved their daughter.

Little did he know that it was obvious to her parents, especially after Hermione had explained their goings on during the past year.

They'd cried during those heart-wrenching moments at Malfoy Manor, hugging Hermione tightly as she recalled the intense pain she'd endured and how Ron's screams fueled her hope and allowed her to keep fighting. Mrs. Granger had even hugged Ron after that, thanking him profusely for saving their only child.

All of this flew through his mind when her mother piped up during dinner one mid-June evening in Sydney, asking Hermione about their first date.

"Honestly, Mum, between everything at the end of the war, the… the funerals, and then coming here to find you, well… we haven't really gone on a date."

Her parents were surprised, seeing how that was usually the first step in establishing a proper romantic relationship.

Ron gulped, not wanting to seem like a disappointment. He badly wanted to take Hermione on a date, hundreds of them, really. It was something he'd been dreaming about for years, if he was honest with himself. Hermione was right, as usual. Between the weight of everything they'd done since Harry beat Voldemort, their moments together had been filled with grief and support. Yet he still worried; he wanted so badly to make a good impression.

An awkward silence descended on the group.

"The theatre," Mr. Granger suddenly blurted out. "You should go to the theatre. That's where I took your mum on one of our first dates. Hamlet, wasn't it, dear?"

Her mum nodded and smiled, a faraway look on her face.

Ron paled. He remembered Bill talking about the theatre once when he was taking Muggle Studies. A bunch of poncy gits dressing up, acting out a story, and speaking a bunch of nonsense. It sounded ridiculous. He was also aware that it could be rather pricey, and his funds were rather limited. Of course, he knew well enough not to say anything out loud.

Hermione spoke up, after noticing the subtle change on Ron's face. "Thanks for the suggestion, Dad. I think maybe the cinema would be a better option for Ron and I."

Blimey, he loved this woman.

Ron nodded excitedly. "I've heard a bit about the cinema from Hermione and some of the other Muggleborns at school. It sounds brilliant. But…"

"But what, Ron?"

"I… I wanted to do this properly." His ears flared red as he focused on his girlfriend. "Hermione, would you go out with me?"

Ron heard Mrs. Granger sigh, and Hermione beamed. "I'd love to."

Ron even chanced a glance over to Mr. Granger, who had an odd look on his face. Making eye contact, he gave Ron a genuine smile and a slight nod, approving of his actions.

After finishing up their dinner, Ron looked up at the clock. He had no idea what time the cinema closed.

"Well, I guess we'd better get going then."

"Ron!" Hermione screeched. "I have to get ready first! My hair is a mess, I need to change…"

Ron's confusion was evident. "Why? You look beautiful."

Hermione blushed. "Well, I'm glad you think so, but this is our first official date and I want to look… you know… special. Mum, will you help me pick something out?"

"Of course, dear."

Mrs. Granger's eyes were shining as the two women dashed up the stairs of the small house, talking non-stop and giggling, leaving the two men watching in awe.

Mr. Granger clapped Ron on the shoulder. "These women, eh?"

Ron nodded, suddenly dreading being left alone with Mr. Granger.

"Now, Ron, I'm sure I don't have to tell you this—seeing how we let you two share a room here—but if I hear a single word about you not treating my daughter with the utmost respect, I won't be very happy."

"Of course, sir. Besides, Hermione would probably hex my bollocks off if I did anything she didn't want to do." Ron's eyes widened, mortified at using such crass language.

Mr. Granger snorted. "I'm sure you're right, son."

A silent understanding seemed to take place between the two men, both of whom loved the bushy-haired witch upstairs. After an awkward moment, Hermione's dad spoke up again.

"So, you've never been to the cinema before?"

"No. From what I understand, it sounds like a bunch of people sitting in a dark room, watching a giant television."

"Well, I suppose that's an apt description of it. But it's more about the experience of enjoying something together. Not only that, but between the big screen, the sound, and the treats, it's quite fun."

Ron perked up. "Treats? What kinds of treats?"

Mr. Granger smiled, knowing of Ron's penchant for sweets—much to his professional disapproval. "Yes, there are a number of things we typically eat at the cinema, including popcorn, candy, and," he visibly cringed, "fizzy drinks."

"Fizzy drinks? Sounds interesting." Ron realized anything that made Mr. Granger look so disgusted was probably full of sugar and, and most likely delicious. He couldn't wait to try it.

Mr. Granger chuckled to himself. "One time, when Jean and I were dating, we went to the cinema and I accidentally spilled a drink all over her dress, halfway through the film. She was furious, so we missed the rest of the show and I took her home. Luckily, she still wanted to see me, and we laughed about it a few days later. It's a good thing too, because I was already quite taken with her."

Ron let out a laugh. "Magic certainly would have been useful there!"

As they came down the stairs, Mrs. Granger and Hermione was stunned to see the two men laughing jovially.

Ron caught Hermione's eye, and sucked in a breath. "Blimey. You look incredible!"

She'd pinned up her hair, and had changed outfits, opting for a black knee-length skirt, warm stockings, a dark blue jumper, and a denim jacket.

She touched her hair self-consciously, as Ron continued to stare. "It's nothing, really."

"Looks like I'm not the only who's quite taken," joked Mr. Granger.

Ron watched as Hermione approached, holding out her hand. He took it and stood up, pulling her into a hug and gently kissing the top of her head.

"Ready to go?"

He nodded, nerves suddenly exploding throughout his body. He was going on an actual date with Hermione, something that a few weeks ago seemed like an impossibility.

"I promise I won't spill a drink on you."

She looked up at him strangely, not understanding why her parents burst out laughing "I hope not."

[its-your-girl-savy]

Long Lost Lovers Part 5

** The next morning, Chloé’s POV**

I’m awoken by someone ripping me out of bed and vamp speeding across the room behind the wardrobe. Now, I’m angry.

“To whom it may concern, I am far older, far faster, and far stronger than you. You can not beat me and it would be foolish to think otherwise.” I say stalking over to the dresser.

The vampire whom attacked me runs out full vampire speed and pushes me to the wall. The devil herself, Katherine Pearce.

I turn her around so she is on the wall and turn her wrists to nearly break them.

“I’m a lot older faster and stronger than you, little girl. Don’t try your luck with me.” I edge.

“I give!” she says laughing.

I let go and Kat runs in the room with a stake and a bottle of vervain.

“Katherine.. Of course.” She says laying down the vervain and stake.

“Just little old me. What? Do I not get a hug??” Katherine asks Kat with her arms spread.

“Not until you tell me why you’ve decided your visit this year would reside on the eve of the founder’s party.” Kat states crossing her arms over her chest. Now would not be a good time for a gentleman to see us, still in our night gowns!

“Was that today?!” Katherine asks, “Oh right, it was yesterday!”

“Not ammused, Katerina!” Kat replies.

“Please, call me Katherine!” Katherine responds.

“Not a possibility for me, as it is my name and yours is completely different.” Kat says anger appearing.

“Well, I came to see you two; but something much more delightful has caught my attention.” She states, “The Salvatore boys. Stefan and Damon? Mostly Stefan.” She continues.

“You stay away from them, Katherine. They are far too good to be your toys. Far too good to be drug into the Vampire world.” Kat responds.

“Well, We shall see.” Katherine responds.

***A few days later during Katherine’s visit***

“Miss Lockwood? Miss Forbes? I have word from The Salvatore boys. They have asked I deliver this to each of you.” Marie, My handmaiden adds from the door.

I take mine and Kat takes her’s.

“Miss Chloé Forbes,

Would you honor me in accompanying me to see Hamlet at the theater tonight? I would truly be honored.

-Stefan Salvatore.”

I sit and write my reply.

“Mr. Stefan Salvatore,

It would be my honour to accompany you to the Theatre tonight. Pick me up at 4?

Xoxo,

Miss Chloé Forbes

Kat’s POV

“ Miss Katherine Lockwood,

I would be truly honored if you would accompany me for a stroll, I would love to see you again. I do hope you agree, or at least consider it.

-Damon Salvatore.”

“Katherine, Would you be a doll and stay here with Emily tonight?” Chloé asks from the bed.

“Depends, where ever are you and the Salvatore’s off to?” Katherine edges.

“Different destinations, none of you apparent business.” I add

I sit to write a response back to him.

“Mr. Damon Salvatore,

I would be truly honored to accompany you for a stroll. Meet me at the town square at 4? Hope to see you there

Xoxo,

Miss Katherine Lockwood.

“May I accompany one of you?” Katherine pleads.

“No, you may not. We shall enjoy our evenings, and you shall take Emily to do something and we shall all be home promptly at 10:00.” I state. I should ready myself.

I walk to the guest room, and look at my gowns. I pick out a cream gown and wear my hair pinned mostly back.

Stefan’s POV

“Miss Chloé Forbes

Would you honor me by accompanying me to the theater tonight to see Hamlet?

-Stefan Salvatore.”

I send it off with my mother’s handmaiden and await her reply. I’m sitting on the loveseat with Damon as a young woman shows up saying she has word from Miss Forbes and Miss Lockwood.

“Yes, Please come in.” My brother replies.

“No sir, I am very fine here, Thank you. Here’s the letters.” She responds handing us both a letter.

Mr. Stefan Salvatore,

I would be honoured to accompany you to the theatre tonight. Pick me up at 4?

Xoxo,

Miss Chloé Forbes.

Inform Miss Forbes I will be there.

Damon’s POV

Miss Katherine Lockwood,

I would be truly honored if you would accompany me for a stroll, I would love to see you again. I do hope you agree, or at least consider it.

-Damon Salvatore.

I sit on the loveseat soon joined by my brother as I await her response. I had sent it out with my mother’s handmaiden.

“I have word from Miss Forbes and Miss Lockwood.” She replied.

“Yes, please come in.”I offer.

“No I’m just fine where I am, Thank you. Here are the letters.” She hands us both a letter.

Mr. Damon Salvatore,

I would be truly honored to accompany you for a stroll, meet me at the town square at 4? Hope to see you there.

Xoxo,

Miss Katherine Lockwood.

“Inform Miss Lockwood I will be there.” I reply grinning like a fool.

Chloé’s POV

I am sitting by the window awaiting Stefan’s Arrival when out of the blue Katherine Pierce stakes me and I wake up in the atlantic ocean. NOT ACCEPTABLE KATERINA. MARK MY WORDS, I WILL FIND YOU AND CONSIDER THIS A MARK OF CAINE AS YOU WILL SUFFER 7 TIMES WHAT YOU HAVE DONE.

Kat’s POV

I’m waiting at the town square for Damon and when he arrives, Katherine shows up. What is going on?

“Hello Mr. Salvatore; Kat, dear, A word please?” She says with a demonic smile.

I pull her to the side, “What have you done Katerina?” I edge.

“If you want to get to Chloé before she wakes up you’ll have to leave Mystic Falls, She’s at the bottom of the atlantic with a stake in her heart.” She says I gasp. “Better hurry Tick Tock.” She finishes before leaving.

“What’s the matter, Kat? Has something happened?” Damon asks.

“Yes, I’m sorry I have to go.” I continue.

I return to the Forbes’ Estate and gather mine and Chloé’s things. I sit and write Damon an explanation.

Dear Damon,

I am sorry but I must leave town. Do not come to search for me, do not miss me, do not write me. Forget I existed. Live a full and happy life, if we are to cross paths again in this lifetime, you shall have all of me, with no limits. I will be yours. So long as you promise you will not miss me. I love you..

Yours until the end,

Katherine E. Lockwood.

That should be explanation enough.. Now to fix what Katherine has done..

Chloé’s POV

I wake up again I’m weighed down by my gown, I can’t get to the top. I find a note I have just now seen.

Here’s the deal, you stay away from Mystic Falls for at least two weeks and I won’t kill any family you have or any future family.

Xoxo,

Katherine Pierce.

Suddenly I see a light yellow shawl. CHLOÉ!

That. Bitch.

Kat’s POV 6 months later.

I’ve been on the is bloody boat for 6 months trying to find Chloé ! Katherine could’ve given me coordinates or something!I swim down just as chloe wakes up again.I grab her and swim back to the top. “Chloe, honey, are you okay?”“I have to get back to Mystic Falls.” She screams.

[chiseler]

Eve Arden: She Knew All the Answers

“When men get around me, they get allergic to wedding rings,” says Eve Arden’s Ida in Mildred Pierce (1945), a film that won Arden her only Academy Award nomination. Ida is a good egg, a steady, loyal friend to Joan Crawford’s Mildred. “You know, big sister type,” she says, in that inimitably sardonic, wised-up, swooping voice of hers, as she pours herself a stiff drink. “Good old Ida, you can talk it over with her man to man,” she says, of those men who treat her as if she isn’t a woman. Ida says that men are “stinkers” and “heels,” but she doesn’t sound all that mad about it. There isn’t a trace of self-pity in her tone, either. Arden never asks for sympathy. In fact, she never asks for anything. Some things seem to confuse, or bemuse, her on screen, but she was usually just playing that for laughs.

Born Eunice Quedens in 1908 in Mill Valley, California, she was a child of divorce raised mainly by her mother, who encouraged her to drop out of high school and go on the stage. She toured with a stock company and made her film debut in Song of Love (1929), a creaky musical where she played a romantic rival to the heroine. She went back to the stage, only making a brief, uncredited appearance in the Joan Crawford vehicle Dancing Lady (1933) as a blond actress who gets fired when she objects to her treatment in rehearsal. She speaks in a thick Southern accent but then drops it: “I told you that Southern accent would sound phony!” she tells her agent in her own voice. There could be no such artifice for her. Even when she later did Russian and French accents on screen, they were burlesque routines and not meant to be taken seriously.

Statuesque at 5 foot 8 inches, she joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1934 and was encouraged to change her name. Spotting a perfume bottle in her dressing room with the name Evening in Paris and a cosmetics bottle labeled Elizabeth Arden, she came up with her new name: Eve Arden.  There were a few more years on stage before she returned to the movies in 1937 to play a girl called Eve in Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door. If that movie makes a religion of wisecracking, then Arden is its high priestess, lounging around the Footlights Club for out-of-work actresses with a white cat named Henry draped around her shoulders like a stole.

Eve has lines under her eyes and looks a little tired; she always seems to be reclining. She’s mainly an audience for the other girls, waiting out their carbonated and inventive complaining until the moment when she can add her own topper and make the whole place explode with laughter. “There’s no such thing as a fifty dollar bill,” she insists, and of all the girls she gives Katharine Hepburn’s society dilettante the hardest time. “Is it against the rules of the house to discuss the classics?” asks Hepburn, to which Arden replies, “No-o-o, go right ahead…I won’t take my sleeping pill tonight.”

I’ve seen Stage Door countless times, and so I know what Arden will say and when she will say it and how, but when I try to re-create some of her line readings by saying them out loud, I am unable to get them right. I think it’s because she weights every single word heavily as her reading goes playfully up and down the vocal scale but her overall delivery is still somehow airy, both throbbing with thick sarcasm and strangely light. “Olga wants peace, peace at any price!” cries one of the girls, to which Arden sharply cracks, “Well, you can’t have peace without a war.” That “war” comes out as “wa-a-er,” as if she likes to pick one word to spread her thickest sarcasm over.

When Hepburn asks her what she’s done in the theater, Arden says, “Everything but burst out of a pie at a Rotarian banquet,” a weird line, but one that Arden plays against with her facial expression. She seems to be signaling that Eve has done things like that, but she’s too tired now for chorus girl hanky-panky with jerky businessmen. “Never heard of him,” she says, when Hamlet gets mentioned. “Oh certainly you must have heard of Hamlet,” says a dim Southern girl, to which Arden replies, “Well, I meet so many people,” in a “nice,” polite, nearly ghostly fashion. It’s a profound kind of wisecrack in the very original way that Arden delivers it. She was capable of hitting a pure note of comic exhaustion, like a faded memory of a past life that does not touch her anymore.

Arden never signed to one studio for long, and she made a surprising number of poverty row and independent productions in the 1940s and early ‘50s. She wrestled with Groucho Marx in At the Circus (1939), meeting his aggression with her own, but she often found herself dead last in the cast list. In a bit in Raoul Walsh’s Manpower (1941), the 33-year-old Arden says to pal Marlene Dietrich, “I’m 25, look 35 and feel 50,” and this pitiless line got at something essential about Arden, because there isn’t much difference between her at age 30 or 50 or 70. Her type stays the same no matter what her age, a woman who is past it all and unimpressed and just making the best of things.

Weary of typecasting as sarcastic secretaries and good sports, Arden returned to the stage for a bit but soon went back to support glamour girls like Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944) and Ava Gardner in One Touch of Venus (1948), which is really a film about Arden and her deepening existential dilemma as she looks at gorgeous Ava and looks at herself and wonders, “Why am I me, and why is she that?” Arden flirted with prettiness whenever she opened her blue eyes wide, but she usually did this only for parody purposes. She seems uncomfortable as a promiscuous actress in The Voice of the Turtle (1947), as if she knew that her natural role on screen was to patiently listen to the Joan Crawford’s of this world and gently mock their emotional grandiloquence from the sidelines.

After years of playing support, Arden finally won a star vehicle of her own, first on radio and then on television, as schoolteacher Connie Brooks in Our Miss Brooks, which ran through most of the 1950s. Arden was consistently, tirelessly inventive in that long-running series, mastering the art and timing of situation comedy and providing a template for later players. In the twenty or so minutes of each Our Miss Brooks episode, Arden generally manages to get at least three to four laughs. The writing for that show was usually good or at least serviceable, and if it was ever a little less than that, Arden would still find her laughs in between the lines with little looks and reactions of distaste, disgust or dismayed confusion. She could get a laugh just by smoothing down her skirt, or wincing slightly.

She returned to the screen in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), wearing some grey in her hair as James Stewart’s loyal, kindly and largely unpaid secretary, a woman who will pour some more coffee for you in the middle of the night. It might do to say that Arden’s film characters are stoic or resigned, but that’s not quite it. There’s something else about them, something unclear but suggestive. There’s something even a little mysterious and unplaceable about Eve Arden on screen, as if she isn’t giving too much of herself away for us. She does her job, like her characters do, and we get to enjoy the sound of her helplessly skeptical voice, which enlivened many movies less classic than Stage Door, Mildred Pierce and Anatomy of a Murder, but we don’t ever really get the real her and how she actually feels. She and her characters have retreated somewhere private where they cannot be reached. Maybe that’s why she had such a long career, because audiences always wanted more of her.

She appeared on television a lot as an older woman, dryly reacting to the wacky Kaye Ballard in another series, The Mothers-In-Law, and matching her sour comic timing with Bea Arthur in an episode of Maude. She was still at school as the principal in Grease (1978), as if Connie Brooks had climbed up the ladder but still had to put up with inane students and low-level jokes. One of her last credits was as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella for Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series in 1985. Rather satisfyingly, the 77-year-old Arden is asked to gloat over treating the pretty young Jennifer Beals “like dirt” because she and her daughters have not been as well-favored by dissembling nature.

Arden married twice, the second time happily to actor Brooks West, and she raised four children, three of whom were adopted. After her death in 1990, her long-time publicist and manager Glenn Rose said, “She kept being cast as this sarcastic, acid-tongued lady with the quick retort and put-down. In real life, Eve would have never put anyone down. She wasn't that kind of person."

by Dan Callahan