#i know it's weird to refer to them as like. a representation of my mother/aunt. but like it wasn't really anyone i recognized

[skeletalheartattack]

remembering a dream i had, where i was visiting a family member who was showing us around the new house they moved into, and at some point i was desperately trying to find a bathroom, but not to do my business or whatever - i was specifically looking for a bathroom that had a mirror.

so i'm going around this persons house, going from bathroom to bathroom, trying to find a mirror because i guess i wanted to make sure my hair looked good, and for some reason, not a single bathroom had a mirror. eventually in my search, i run into the woman who can only be described as either my aunt or a representation of my mother, and i'm like "hey listen, do you have a mirror anywhere?" and she looks at me and laughs, and she says "oh honey we don't have any mirrors, we use god's most important invention" and then proceeds to hand me her phone.

[deanwasalwaysbi]

Thinking About How This Wasn't Actually a Denial

But was it self preservation?

The year was 2013 and rather than a denial, Jensen said "Don't ruin it for everybody now."

What was the fan 'ruining' for everybody? The Con? or something else? So if I was a tinhatter - and sometimes I am - I might think about other tv shows from the past that were covertly queer and how they handled the question, were TV shows 'out'?

Mainstream shows like Bewitched, you know, shows that are so clearly straight, you can tell because... well. ... they never technically used the word 'gay'. ... witches honor

SPN Film Studies is Back in Session! Join Under the Cut for more on supernatural & the story about how Bewitched! came out of the Broom Closet

Bewitched aired from 1964-72, it's so old the first season was in B&W. The show starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, the strange housewife with a stranger secret. Her husband, Darrin, unwittingly married into the whole witchy family, from the now drag icon Agnes Moorehead's Endora with her open marriage, to the unmarried and batty Aunt Clara (Marion Lorne who played the mother in Hitchcock's heavily gay coded 'Strangers on a Train'), to the extremely coded Uncle Arthur (gay actor Paul Lynde). (We can't know for sure, but it seems at least 4 members of the cast were gay themselves.) The core premise of the show involves Samantha balancing who she really is with repressing that self for the safety and comfort of her family.

Samantha and her husband keep her [ahem] 'queer' nature a secret which gets harder on Samantha when she has to tell her daughter to live the same way, “I know what fun it is to be a part of the magical life ... to have so much at your fingertips. But we’re living in a world that’s just not ready for people like us, and I’m afraid they may never be. So you’re going to have to learn when you can use your witchcraft and when you can’t.”

There are plenty of generic 60s wacky hijinks but there are also whole episodes metaphorically about repression being harmful, episodes where characters asked if another was a 'thespian', episodes where Darrin was queercoded while under a spell, episodes about representation & bad stereotyping in media, and even two episodes where witches discussed whether it was time for witches to come out to the mortals, (whether mortals could accept that they were just nice normal people trying to live their lives like everybody else - or not - and would just freak out and kill them again).

When it came time to recast Dick York's Darrin with a new 2nd lead, Elizabeth and her husband, William Asher, knowingly cast the gay Dick Sergeant. (Although he wasn't out publicly at the time.) Then, when Sergeant came out in '91, Montgomery supported him and the two served together as the grand marshals of the Hollywood pride parade.

Dick Sargent expressed in the 90s what he would want in a Bewitched reunion episode: for Darrin to meet another like couple, a witch and a mortal who are married, and another, and another, and end up forming a whole community and support group, finding out that it was never so uncommon after all, that it was actually "about 10% of the population." The two would march in the first mortals and witches pride parade, saying they should have come out years ago.

In '94, Montgomery had this to say about the queer themes of the show, “Don't think that didn't enter our minds at the time. We talked about it on the set, that this was about people not being allowed to be what they really are. If you think about it, Bewitched is about repression in general and all the frustration and trouble it can cause. It was a neat message to get across to people at that time in a subtle way.” (x)

Interviewer: Are you concerned that your involvement in the gay-pride parade will lead people to believe you're a lesbian?

"[Laughing] I'm really not worried about that. There are bigger things to worry about. Like the presidential election and finding a cure for AIDS. I did the parade in support of Dick. I mean, in the end, didn't we all?" (x) (Montgomery was also one of the first celebrity allies to fight for LGBTQ rights and support HIV/AIDS-related fundraisers.)

So did they talk about it at the time? No. You can bet they didn't speak about it publicly. What would have happened if a fan, publicly, had asked Elizabeth, William, or Dick about the show's queer allegory content? This was a time when being gay was a literal felony. They would have had to have lied or risked losing the show, their careers, and possibly subjecting themselves to violence.

Now. back to Jensen and the Schrodinger's long con:

This was in 2013 - The same year that the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a federal ban on gay marriage. You certainly couldn't call homosexuality illegal in the US at that time. It's the same year that Dabb and Sgriccia spoke about the Aaron moment on the DVD and whether there's 'this potential for love in all places' for Dean. Of course Jensen said this about the very same scene: "But it was - you know - it was comedy. It was a comedic moment in the show and fortunately Dean gets a lot of the comedic moments in the show and it was just, you know, Ben was poking fun at the fact that - you know, how can we make this very kind of manly, heterosexual guy uncomfortable - uh -you know, or  or have him back on his heels and throw him off his game a little bit.”

I'm reminded of 2012 when Ben Edlund stepped in about a Destiel question at comic con, pretending it was some freaky thing that fans had made up even though he'd already written and directed TMWWBK, which had already aired.

Jensen: “What’s Destiel?” Ben Edlund: That’s some weird shit. Jensen: Is this something that you created, Ben? Ben: You don’t want any part of that.

Or the next year for season 9 when Jensen said “I think the whole Cas and Dean thing has gotten out of hand”  “I don’t think there’s anything secret to their relationship even though a lot of people wish there was” EVEN THOUGH- that season we got the nightstands acknowledgement and Misha (or both of them?) was told to “play him like a jilted lover”

Or Jensen's knowing bromance smile in 2015

I think recent events (cough spn gate) have made clear that the network and many viewers were still uncomfortable with CAS being gay in 2020, deleting even familial mentions of Cas from the finale episodes once he was revealed to be not only gay but also in love with Dean. (x) (x) (x) Can you imagine then what Warner Brothers would have said to an acknowledge bisexual Dean Winchester in 2013? Granted, there was no Trump election, but legitimate, could that have been the end of the show? Or the Russian and Conservative US viewership? Is it possible that Jensen would have feared so?

Is it possible that Jensen had a more personal reason for a knee jerk defensive response?

So was Jensen covering in 2013? Well. This happened 5 years later in 2018:

That hostile "? No." came even though Misha confirmed that he and Jensen had discussed Destiel by that point. Granted, discussing Destiel as a concept and accepting Dean being inherently bisexual are two very different things - Cas is GN after all - still, less than encouraging.

I may never get over the jumps back and forth that Jensen did. At this point I think there's no denying that a lot of SPN's queer content was on purpose, even as writers and actors were telling fans and network execs otherwise. Yet when each person involved was brought in? that question haunts me at night. I have gone off before about the timeline in my pursuit of whether Jensen was Ben Hur'd (x) and, if so, for how long. I'm sure many in this fandom have so much to add.

In the meantime we'll just have to cherish this moment from 2019:

Interviewer: 'So, tell us just a little bit about what you’re most excited to tackle with your character this final season.’ Jensen: “Cas. Just like a full football form tackle.”

Bewitched references in SPN:

2.05 - Dean: Well, it looks like he can't work his mojo just by twitching his nose, he's gotta use verbal commands.

2.20 - Dean says Barbara Eden was hotter than Elizabeth Montgomery - sigh - Dean.

7.05 - Dean thinks a husband has no idea his wife is a witch, and refers to him as Darrin. Dean also indicates he likes the first Darrin better. - (I guess I can't make a comment about how much TV Dean watched as a kid if I get all of his references and also haven't saved the world.)

14.03 - Jules refers to the witch as 'Brunhilde' - this is a minor character in bewitched but more so from mythology and likely referred to the cartoon witch from WB cartoons - the stereotypical witch that faced bugs bunny with the green skin and straw hair.

let me know if you have any to add. Stay Witchy ✌

[skytlake]

Presenting: Felicity Smoak Should Be Gay

Disclaimer: I am still on season seven of Arrow-->

Slide One:

Felicity Smoak Should Be Gay

An Important Presentation by Sky T Lake

Slide Two:

Who is Felicity Smoak?

Hacker Extraordinaire

Vigilante Known as Overwatch

Computers/Math/Science/Etc  person on Team Arrow

W 🤢 wif🤢 i cant even say it 🤢 wife of oliver queen 🤢

step mother of William

beautiful amazing woman

she’s kinda awkward and doesn’t know when to stop talking

big nerd

former CEO of Palmer Tech

She’s so cool

Picture: a photo of Felicity Smoak, a blond woman with glasses

Slide Three:

I Want Her To Be Gay

I like shows with gay characters

there’s not enough lesbian representation in superhero things my dudes

how awesome would it be to have a lead role in a superhero show be gay

but mostly i personally want her to be gay

Slide Four:

It Would Be So Neat

imagine a superhero/vigilante show that started in 2012 having one of the original 3 main team members be openly gay

that would be wild i would love it

it would be so cool to have this nerdy lesbian just like hacking into the FBI and saving the city every week

Slide Five:

She Gets Really Flustered When Women Compliment Her

Sara Lance, known bisexual, flirted with Felicity multiple times

Felicity gets flustered and doesnt know how to respond

but like in the gay way not the uncomfortable way

see next slide

Picture: the words “That’s Gay, Babey!” in light purple cursive font

Slide Six:

Three sets of two gifs from conversations in Arrow

1.  

Felicity says “I was happy to hear you’re not dead anymore.  I mean, I didn’t know you before you didn’t die the first time.  I’m still glad you’re alive.”

Sara Lance responds with a bit of a smirk/smile “You’re cute.”

2.

Felicity says “I have a scar.  It’s in my mouth.  I had my wisdom teeth removed when I was 16.  Three stitches.  They were really badly impacted.”

Sara is standing next to Oliver Queen and John Diggle, all three are in exercise clothes. Sara responds “You’re still cute.”

3.

Felicity says “I always wondered, you know, were you flirting with me all those times you said I was cute?”

Sara says “Why? Were you into it?”

Felicity responds “Of course, it’s you.”

Gif source: https://felicitysmoak.tumblr.com/post/184186370181

Slide Seven:

She Should Have Women Friends

WHY DOES SHE NEVER HAVE FRIENDS OUTSIDE OF THE TEAM >:(

and there are barely any women on the team

theres like,,, thea queen,,, whichever canary is around,,, thats about it

most of this show is just men

felicity needs friends who are women whether she’s gay or not

but imagine all the arrowverse wlw hanging out

no wait dont do that i just started crying at the idea of so many beautiful powerful women

Slide Eight:

Felicity And Curtis Could Be Even More Awesome

Imagine This:

Curtis, very gay nerd, and his best friend Felicity, another gay nerd

Hacking government websites and making pop culture references as a team

The dynamic would be wonderful and we already know they interfere in each others’ romantic lives

two gay nerds trying to set each other up on dates thats what i want

also imagine the jokes they could make

WLW MLM Solidarity my dudes

Slide Nine:

Two clips of a YouTube video labeled with titles and time stamps.

Curtis and Felicity chatting: 0:06-0:25

Curtis is Not subtle: 01:25-end

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XlxVsBz56I

Slide Ten:

The Jock/Lesbian BFFs

You know what’s better than Olicity? Oliver and Felicity being Friends without any weird uncomfortable romantic/sexual tension.

As everyone knows, Jock/Lesbian is one of the greatest friendship tropes.

Imagine we’ve got overdramatic jock Oliver with the woman in the chair Felicity like this would just be great

not much else to elaborate on this i just think it would be rad

Slide Eleven:

Cool Gay Aunt

So in Arrowverse canon, Felicity is the stepmother of Oliver’s son, William.  William and Felicity originally bonded over math  and science and they get along really well.  Notable memory is them eating ice cream for dinner because Oliver wasn’t around to object. Now imagine it’s pretty much the same dynamic but she’s the cool gay aunt.  Felicity comes over with her computer and hacks the NSA while William works on his science fair project and they eat cookies. Perfection.

Slide Twelve:

She Could Join Legends

It is well known that Legends of Tomorrow is the gayest of the Arrowverse shows.  Legends is where underappreciated characters go to achieve their full potential and be gay.   If Felicity were canonically gay, she could be the Legends’ science/math/computer person.  She’s already friends with Sara so she’s got a way in.  So many possibilities with Felicity on Legends it could be cool

Side Note: Wally West is Bisexual and you can’t change my mind

Slide Thirteen:

College Felicity Has The Gay Vibes

LISTEN I know the flashback of College Felicity was her with her boyfriend but she’s just got those Gay Vibes my bro

This really cool hacktivist who does good through crime while looking super cool

Be Gay Do Crime am i right?

Picture: A photo of Felicity Smoak when she was in college.  She has black hair with purple streaks and dark makeup.

Slide Fourteen:

Olicity Feels Forced

This isn’t even necessarily related to her sexuality this is just a criticism of the writing.

At first it was kinda cute, but over time it became clear they just don’t fit together well.  They got engaged, then broke it off, then started dating again and got married spontaneously after only dating a short time? Blech

Their personalities clash and they argue too much and the writing just isn’t good.  If the writing were better it could have been a good relationship but unfortunately that was not the case.

Slide Fifteen:

In Conclusion,

Felicity Smoak, coolest lady on Arrow, should be gay for many reasons but most importantly because I want her to be.

Slide Sixteen:

Thank you for reading my dudes

Hope you enjoyed

[equalseleventhirds]

okay. okay. i’ve been thinking about the good place and the character of jason mendoza and i have some. complicated thoughts.

first let me say i love jason, he is my son, he is amazing, i just love him a lot. also i am a big fan of asian representation in media and seeing another filipino on screen is so cool!

but i saw some stuff (old stuff, from like s1, but it popped up and got me thinking) about how jason is breaking asian stereotypes by being a dumbass. which, okay, in general true? asians being stereotyped as the intelligent model minority is a problem and it’s cool to see that broken down

but jason is also specifically filipino. and i am filipino. and when filipinos are treated as generically asian, they do get that model minority bullshit, and that is bad and should be addressed. but when we are treated specifically as filipino... not so much.

a disclaimer: i am half white, and my filipino mother is fairly light skinned, and i am fairly well educated, so people often assume i am east asian and treat me as such unless i tell them i am filipino. as i have moved away from california, some people i meet have not met many filipino people and do not even know the stereotypes that were prevalent in my home state and home town, so they also treat me as generically asian. i absolutely benefit from colorism and i do experience the ‘model minority’ treatment more than i experience the filipino-specific treatment i’m about to talk about; however, i also experience the latter, i have watched my more obviously filipino family members experience it as well. it’s a thing. it happens. and for some reason racists manage to believe both sets of stereotypes about us, switching to whichever is suitable to whatever situation they’re dealing with, because they are not logical about this, they are just racist assholes.

 so what are these stereotypes about filipinos that i keep referencing? okay. we are considered:

dirty, poor, uneducated, stupid, lazy, criminals, dangerous, savages, drug addicts, alcoholics. filipino women are supposedly easy, flirtatious gold diggers. filipino men are supposedly gangsters and troublemakers. we are expected to take on low-paying menial jobs, usually as domestic or farm workers, because so many of us are immigrants and/or don’t speak english. we eat weird food; we eat dogs.

i once had someone tell me that ‘filipinos are the mexicans of asia,’ a statement meant to demean both mexicans and filipinos, and specifically referring to the stereotypes i listed above, which that person also believed about mexicans. it was cruel, it was racist, and it was meant to make me feel bad that i was not a ‘real asian.’ i’ve also had people tell me how much they LOVED asians (a fetishizing problem on its own), only to find out i was filipino and say ‘oh, not YOUR kind of asian.’

even within the filipino community those negative stereotypes are repeated, and some people try to assimilate into white society. my mother did not teach me or my siblings tagalog, because it would be easier if we only spoke english. she told us about the bad things my aunts and uncles and cousins did, drinking and committing petty crimes and getting into trouble and not going to school, with the clear message that we were not going to be like that, because she was raising us differently than them. she still cooked filipino food and taught us a few things, but it felt like i was supposed to know only parts of my culture, and not be a part of that community.

i’ve gotten off track and it’s late and i’m tired, but the point is. jason mendoza. i don’t believe the writers made jason uneducated and lazy and a petty criminal because he was filipino; i did read something that said they auditioned many different asian actors, so i don’t think it was intentional. i don’t even know if they are aware of this problem, since it’s pretty specific to areas with a large filipino population; anywhere without that and we get treated as ‘just another asian’ by most people, so maybe they do only know the one set of model minority stereotypes.

but i do wish it had been considered (the show even has jason point out how racist it is to treat all asian group with another). and i don’t think i’m really comfortable with think pieces about jason breaking stereotypes when there is. this. i mean idk if it’s possible to make a filipino character who does not fall into either set of stereotypes at all? and it wouldn’t even be an issue if we had enough filipino characters that they could not all fall into the same stereotypes, and good on the good place for putting another filipino character into media anyway, i’m just. feeling complicated about it. idk.

[representationintheatre]

The Inheritance

Title: The Inheritance  Writer: Matthew Lopez  Director: Stephen Daldry  Theatre Company: The Young Vic

I’m here to tell you that The Inheritance does not deserve your love.*

This contains spoilers for the play.

The Inheritance is an eye watering, almost seven hour, epic of a play in two parts. It is “loosely based” on EM Forster’s Howards End and charts the lives and relationships of two young men, Eric and Toby, in a post-AIDs world. Although this is not a review in the strictest sense, it’s worth saying that the plot of The Inheritance is relatively simple, yet overblown into multiple plot divergences that would have been much smarter focusing on its core argument about the legacy of AIDs with a new generation of young gay men.

Some thoughts and ideas are compelling, a couple of scenes are genuinely moving, but it’s all unfortunately lost in a sea of indulgence. 

Gender: 1/5 Does it pass the Bechdel Test: NO

There is but one woman in this seven hour epic that follows the lives of several white cis gay men over a period of several years, and she arrives in the final 20 minutes, trotted out as a stand-in for the character of Miss Avery from Howards End.

If you are familiar with Howards End, you will know that Miss Avery is more of a spiritual concept than an actual person. She’s otherworldly and her spectral presence is often directly referred to in the book. In The Inheritance, this otherworldly aspect is retained, both in the way that she is performed by Vanessa Redgrave, as well as in the way that she validates Eric’s spiritual experiences when he visits the house.

So here we have a play of seven hours, a cast of 12 men, set in modern day New York and no women aside from a stand-in for a spiritual character.

One might even speculate whether this character would have existed or been a woman at all if they weren’t able to secure the stunt casting of an actress from the original film adaptation. 🤔

And, to be honest, all this wouldn’t be as problematic if the play wasn’t based on Howards End.

It really is audacious to take what is essentially a feminist novel, albeit a conventional and somewhat limited one, and erase women entirely. The novel is lead by two female characters and the narrative is driven by their experiences at the turn of the 20th century. Margaret and Helen, the two leads, are proto-feminists and what happens to them throughout the novel rests entirely on their sex. None of it could happen to a man. This is an absolutely crucial point of the novel.

Furthermore, the central themes of Howards End – from suffrage, independence, sexual freedom, the nature of marriage, to social justice and the benevolence of women – all appear to have been erased in The Inheritance. While some attempt at political debate appears occasionally in The Inheritance (quite unsatisfactorily), it’s done as an afterthought as much as anything else. 

The fact that Henry Wilcox is a Trump supporting Republican is done with about as much subtlety as a sledgehammer, showcased in crude debates the characters have with him, turning into mouthpieces of the playwright for a short time, rather than being woven into the narrative like in Howards End, in which everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is affected by Henry Wilcox’s politics and how it impacts and conflicts with everyone else.

All this begs the question – what gives Matthew Lopez the right to lift entire chunks of Howards End and plant them in his modern-day epic if he’s going to erase the women and all the themes of novel?

The reality is that modern day New York is full of women. Gay men do not live in a vacuum. They have mothers, aunts, sisters, best friends…they have work colleagues.

Yet, in The Inheritance, it’s like they just disappeared. Matthew Lopez set out to erase women so entirely that he not only replaced the female main characters with men, he discarded the supporting female characters altogether lest there be any reference to a woman in even a minor way. For example, in Howards End, Henry Wilcox has two sons and a daughter, but in The Inheritance he has just two sons. Henry’s daughter, Evie Wilcox, does not exist in The Inheritance. 

It seems to me that Matthew Lopez has a big fuckin’ problem with women.

Recently Julia Pascal wrote an article for The Guardian about how women are being excluded from our stages. She is clearly right about this and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in the theatre community that would argue against that fact. And yet it seems that no one is willing to examine this issue in context of specific actions and decisions.  We see broad and sweeping articles about the general issue, but the critic community is rarely consistent in calling out the building blocks of this issue, which start at the plays being put on our stages and what they represent. 

How can we address the representation of women when plays like The Inheritance are given a pass with 5 stars and no concern for the choices displayed?

Race: 1/5

It’s not enough just to throw in a couple of very side ensemble characters as the men of colour in a PLAY SET IN MODERN DAY NEW YORK.

The play is overwhelmingly white in a way it didn’t need to be and that’s another mystery of the play. It fails deeply to represent a diverse gay community at all and in more ways than just race and gender. 

The casting was one-note, with zero diversity in body types or ethnicity or gender identity.

Plot 1/5

Look, The Inheritance has a lot going for it, but it is a mess and it’s unreal that this has been glossed over. This play got FIVE STARS....someone needs to point out the obvious....there are glaring plot holes and weird characterisations...

For starters: in The Inheritance, Eric, the lead character, marries Henry Wilcox. Their close friendship is shown as it’s building, but it is never shown as romantic, which is underlined when they decide to get married having never had a physical relationship.

In fact, Eric and Henry never manage to talk about having a physical, sexual relationship until after they’re married, prompted only when Eric discovers that Henry has been happily satisfied regularly by a young sex worker and has no interest in sex with his new husband. This stretched credulity to the point of being baffling. It’s not completely impossible to believe that something like that could happen between two men...in a play that explores it and examines the reasons, and addresses and acknowledges that it’s an unusual experience in a modern day progressive society. (Not quite the same demographic, but On Chesil Beach recently examined a similar issue brilliantly, with a mixed gender couple in the 1960s.) But The Inheritance just asks you to accept that this as how it is without examination or credible reasoning.

To recap: a character who has up till this point been shown to have had hot sexy times with his previous fiancé has not questioned or considered any issues with agreeing to, and marrying, his new fella, without ever having physical intimacy with him. In 2018. New York City.

There are plenty of these kinds of niggles in The Inheritance (don’t get me started on the house ownership that is so central to the plot that is completely illogical), which forces us to sit through for seven hours of unwieldy and lazy writing. It’s mind-numbingly annoying and shares more in common with teenage slash fanfiction than any other commercially produced content I have ever seen. You can forgive a 15 year old an exploratory story that can’t quite nail the reality of adult life, but you really can’t forgive a professional playwright (or the audience that seemed to lap it up regardless).

Our grade: 1/5 In summary: seven hours and no space for women in this modern-but-sometimes-not trash version of EM Forster’s Howards End. Read the book instead.

* A disclaimer - I have nothing against plays with all male casts when it makes sense and is relevant. I have issues with seeing too many performed when there are so few all-female plays to counter balance, but there is nothing inherently off-putting about all-male plays and I have a few that fall into my favourite all-time plays in fact.

[myaekingheart]

Last night I dreamed I took a road trip to Audrey Hepburn’s house for a family reunion type thing. Certain scenes were in the format of old film dated 2011/2012 at the bottom left-hand corner. Her house was white and open and reminiscent of my grandparent’s house in the late 90s/early 2000s. Next door was an old apartment complex with dark wood siding and cement stairs. If you went out to the main road, you could see the ocean. 

In the middle of this, I went to school. I was in a classroom with lots of computers that looked reminiscent of my high school, but wasn’t specifically any actual room on campus. The two girls I befriended from my media techniques class last semester were there so I was sitting with them at a long table like in my high school physics class. One of the teachers, who was in a khaki button down like what zookeepers wear and had her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, brought wild animals into the classroom. There was a white cockatiel with a yellow crest who was particularly unpleasant, and he climbed on my shoulder and the zookeeper teacher berated me for doing something along the lines of scraping birdseed in a tupperware because the bird didn’t like that. At certain points it felt like I could literally feel his nails digging into my shoulder, an honestly I was scared of him. But then there was a tiger. He wasn’t fully life-size, rather the size of a large Labrador retriever, but he was the wild animal I was fixated on. I remember sitting on the floor with him roughing around and snuggling with him and shit and my friends were all sitting there staring at me with brows cocked trying to figure out how the fuck I wasn’t terrified of a fucking tiger. I remember saying “It’s just like Topaz (my cat) but bigger!” The tiger eventually fell asleep with his head in my lap. 

Audrey Hepburn and her son Sean picked me up from school around dinnertime accompanied by someone else I don’t realistically recognize but knew at the time to be like an aunt. I remember she was older, maybe in her 60s, with short graying brown hair and was wearing a short-sleeve button down. Sean was driving even though from my perspective it looked like they were all in the backseat while I was sitting in the passenger seat. Sean was arguing with the older woman about slowing down--she was insisting he was going too fast--and he said he would only slow down if “mija” wanted; he used the term mija to refer to his mother. Meanwhile Audrey was sitting there pressing her hand to her forehead looking frustrated and tired of the whole thing. I remember we were driving in an old brown convertible, and I remember passing the sea as we pulled into the street out front of Audrey’s house and the apartment complex. Burgess Meredith lived next door in one of the aforementioned apartments, and in this particular moment he was standing outside his front door on the second story in his boxers and undershirt swatting at the air (maybe with a newspaper? I feel like I remember some sort of paper being put into use here) shouting something that I wish I could remember the details of. All I know is that Audrey poked her head out of the car and shouted back at him “It’s a development, Burgess!” (development as in housing development) and I remember in my dream thinking this was the funniest fucking thing, that I had to tell everyone about this when I woke up because this was such meme-worthy content, the perfect joke. 

Sean dropped us off out front of the house and then went to go park, but when I got out of the backseat (apparently I was in the backseat now), I never closed the door and so when Sean went to drive away, the door scraped the cement stairs of the apartment complex. Sean looked back at me, pissed off, and I remember in that moment thinking he would never truly accept me as a representation of his mother (like in terms of landing the lead role of an Audrey Hepburn biopic), that I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t likeable enough or graceful enough and especially that I always did the wrong thing at the wrong time. 

The inside of the house was kind of weird in that there was an open garage door into the kitchen area. Lots of people were inside and there were a few rows of white kitchen islands people were standing around eating and talking. Almost directly in front of this door and to the right-hand side a smidge was a white patio table with a glass top and matching wrought iron chairs where the older people like my grandmother were sitting watching who I could only assume was my great aunt’s dog. It was a white poodle in a green Christmas sweater dancing around on his hind legs, which is very much the epitome of my great aunt’s taste in pets. I remember making my way to one of the kitchen islands where my parents were standing eating food like potato salad and coleslaw off disposable white plates, holding their food rather than setting the plates on the counter and actually having a sit-down meal. There was also something about blue soda but at this point my memory started growing hazy and I think I was slipping out of sleep. I just remember there being blue soda on the kitchen island and contemplating taking some, like I was tempted by it but the dream cut off before I could satisfy the want.