#thinking about how Charles is the musical one but we’ve seen a number of times carlos randomly singing in the car

[leclercskiesahead]

“It’s finally quali day…”

carpool C2 karaoke

[ladyeliot]

All of me. Chapter One [B.B.]

When she met him masterlist

Prologue

Pairing: Winter soldier x Female Reader [Michelle]

Summary: In May 1954 two parallel worlds were to meet in Berlin. On the one hand yours, completely chaotic, on the other that of the Winter Soldier.

Warnings: Angst. Toxic relationship. Mind control. Winter Soldier.

Word count: 3075

A/N:  Sorry for my spelling and grammatical mistakes, English is not my native language, I am learning.

West Berlin. May 1954

The mirror showed a reflection you hadn’t stopped to contemplate in a long time. Rosy cheeks offered life and warmth to a pale face that seemed to have been forgotten. Your skin was smooth and the colour of porcelain, showing the youth that had just begun. Your eyes were highlighted by a greyish iris, which seemed to be complemented by blue drops, but as pale as your complexion. Your golden hair was tied back behind your face, but even so, a few strands stood up in rebellion, sliding down your forehead.

You moved closer to that imposing mirror, which was perched on the chest of drawers in that hotel room. It was then that you could see on your lips that the reddish lipstick had been fixed to perfection, offering a speck of colour to that ensemble that you formed in your totality. Your attention was diverted to the melody coming from the phonograph’s horn, however you could notice the presence of a person behind you reflected in the mirror itself. Those vermilion lips showed a smile, as the warmth of the male body pressed against your back. 

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” the whisper overpowered the music. “Tonight every man in the universe will know how lucky I am.”

A blush came over you, causing you to look away from his face through the mirror and lower your gaze, still smiling. It had been a few months since you had left behind everything you had known in your nineteen years, venturing out to suffer the indifference and rejection that the unknown future could bring. Your life in New York was a past that counterbalanced the pain and happiness of your younger years, but it did not offer you all that your inner self demanded, until he came along. Richard was a young British man of beauty, wit and chance, who had made a fortune in the tobacco world after the end of the Second World War. So you could say that it didn’t take long for you to notice him and for him to want you among his various properties. It was an accumulation of promises that entered your mind and led you to follow him to Europe without questioning their veracity, accepting the consequences that this meant for a young woman of your position in a world run by and for men. 

It had been many years since you 

had had a male figure to support or guide your decisions, as well as your purpose in life. The loss of your father during the Second World War made you acquire a mind of your own and make decisions of your own, which mostly used to be accepted by your sweet mother, but which in this case did not find a place in the audacity of your friends and family. Those who knew you thought that your judgement had been clouded or that you had only lost your mind because of your love for that gentleman.

Richard had made his appearance in New York City just a few months earlier. Your fates crossed in the New York night, during the presentation of a new Walker Motors Corporation internal combustion engine at the Edison Hotel, a milestone in the market. Richard was an external guest, invited by one of the company’s own partners, but you were invited by the leading eminence. It is worth noting that Charles Walker, director of WMC, has been friends with you since your childhood, which is why you attended the private party. However, it was not until midnight that Charles himself took it upon himself to introduce you, alluding that Richard had shown an exclusive interest in meeting you.

“Where is your mind?” Richard’s lips brushed your right earlobe.

His fingers rested on your neck and brushed aside a slight lock that fell across your collarbone to rest his lips on it. All the while you watched each of his movements in the mirror.

“I don’t want your mind to go elsewhere if I’m not in your thoughts,” that whisper sent a shudder around your body, as Richard’s lips continued to trail firmly down your neck.

You had been extremely decisive in agreeing to give yourself to a man you barely knew, or had any testimony about his past. But your mind was so dazzled by the hopes you had placed on him and his oaths that you had barely been able to consider the fact that something could go wrong.

The kissing stopped, which caused you to open your eyes again to find your own reflection. Richard turned away from your body for a moment to look inside his jacket. After a few seconds he pulled out a greenish rectangular box, which he opened without letting you see what was inside.

“Close your eyes,” the young man asked softly in your ear.

With little opposition you acted as he had instructed. A tingle tingled around your neck, which brought a subtle smile to your lips as you waited for Richard’s command to open your eyes again. However, it wasn’t until after he placed a brief kiss on your bare shoulder that you decided on your own to contemplate the object resting on your collarbones. Your lips parted in surprise, as an array of pearls lay upon you, illuminating practically the entire room. Your fingers slowly brushed each one of them, you hardly knew what to say, the only thing that came to your mind was the questioning of why about that detail.

“Tonight you will shine over the whole world,” Richard’s hands rested on your hips. “There won’t be anyone in Berlin, east or west, who doesn’t know who Michelle Wells is.”

You offered him a blushing smile as you stared at your figures in front of the mirror, those words giving you the encouragement you needed to face the performance that was to take place in a few hours.

Your ability on stage had been recognised in various clubs in New York, but you knew that the audience that night could not compare to the one you had had before. New York had been the pinnacle of jazz, and Harlem had been a favourite neighbourhood of its own creation, yet it was a far cry from anything you were used to.

A slight sigh came out of your mouth, showing the presence of your nervousness in such a situation. It was an unavoidable fact of life that you were thousands of miles away from your hometown, and even if you had made yourself think that you and Richard would find your own home, you couldn’t help but feel incomplete.

“Take everything out of your mind, leave it blank and just focus on you from this moment on,” the breath collided with your ear, creating a brief shiver down your spine. “Forget everything you have lived through, and all the people. You are the creator of your own destiny, and no one can stand in the way of that. Tonight may be the most important moment for your future. For our future.”

In that instant you turned around so that you could look directly into his eyes, those that depending on the light could appear blue or green. Under the dimness of the lamp the greenish hue could be found in them, but you barely noticed it because their proximity was cut short when he said those words, melting into a slow, passionate kiss before he left for the club.

Meanwhile, in East Berlin

A whitish light flickered faintly above him with each step down the long corridor. The silence was broken by the flickering tinkle and the sordid screams in the distance. The place felt like hell itself. However, if it really was hell, it was not as he had imagined it to be. The mist was pouring out of his nostrils with every exhalation, the cold was bordering on extreme. Yet he was unable to feel it in every part of his body. His gaze was impassive, as his ice-cold eyes seemed to be held in a sea of darkness. The road came to an end as the stiff iron gate cut him off. His footsteps slowed but did not stop, as a dull echo reported the opening of the gate, offering entrance to a new area.

The walls, as sturdy as the material of construction, stone, offered not a hint of light, for there were hardly any openings in them. The place had the characteristics of an underground bunker, with only a musty smell coming from the ceiling. His figure continued his march along the corridor, with a firm and decisive step, knowing where he was going. At that instant, a silhouette loomed on the right side, guarding a new entrance. That silhouette, noticing the presence that was heading towards him, moved away from in front of the door, opening the way for the man, who stopped in front of it until it opened.

“Oh, we’ve been expecting you, soldier,” said a German-accented voice from inside the room.

Unlike the corridor, there was a pleasant warmth in that room for anyone. However, he was no longer a person. The door closed behind him, preventing him from leaving, for he would have to face the four figures sitting at an oval table. One of them rose from his seat and slowly approached him with his hands behind his back, until they were facing each other.

“I believe the orders you have been given are clear soldier,” he observed curiously squinting at the young man. “Do you have any doubts?”

“No, sir,” a coldness crept into his voice from inside his throat, it seemed as if he had spent the last few months barely expressing a sound through it.

“That’s the way I like it,” that statement came along with an encouraging look from every part of the young soldier. “Kerkove will be in charge of taking you to the west side of Berlin. There you know what you have to do.”

The soldier merely nodded, processing all the data that had been offered to him hours before. The door opened again to let him out, just as he had entered, and the person in charge of his mission stood there. Over the past months he had carried out a number of other missions on the eastern front, but this was the first time he would be infiltrating the western zone, covered by American and British soldiers, which is why he was wearing an American infantry uniform, similar to that of his companion.

As he arrived outside, he realised that the night was clear, as the moon was in full bloom, a fact that could hinder the key points of the mission. Even so, he had to concentrate, since his first test would be the moment he wanted to cross the border, for although he was in the uniform of the American army, he had to pass himself off as one of them.

Fifteen and a half kilometres was the distance to be covered by car, before walking three kilometres to the point in question. The quietness fell upon him, sharing a constant blank stare, and with nothing else in his thoughts but each and every step to be taken that night. There were hardly any words between the two of them, until the moment they parted, as his companion informed him that they would meet again after four hours at the rendezvous point to carry out their extraction.

The ease with which he found himself in West Berlin in five minutes seemed absurd in the face of so much apparent control over the population itself. The tranquillity received on the other side of the wall caused a rupture in the new area, a commotion was generated as he walked towards the more central streets, entering the Berlin night. The movement of pedestrians and cars caused him to slow his steps, remembering his sense of mission ‘To blend in without being discovered’.

The streetlights illuminated the roads and the power of those lights fell on his face, generating a sense of uneasiness in the face of his own passivity. Groups of uniformed men walked along, mingling with the local population. He was curious as to where they were going, for the premises of the busy main street invited him to enter them. Those five soldiers in British uniforms, which he could distinguish by colours and badges, made their way to the pavement in front of him and then entered a place called 'Central Club’.

After looking around, he could not think of a better situation than to take the same path and thus discover their frequent activities. With the proximity to the place, he noticed the melody that could be heard behind the door, which became more and more noticeable after opening it. An unfamiliar smell hit his face as he stepped inside. Warm brown tones met his gaze as did long descending staircases. Hesitantly he descended each step, incorporating the smell of aniseed liqueur into his senses as the notes coming from those instruments became more constant. A greenish curtain gave way to the hall, which was unexpectedly packed with people. Its tables were completely crowded and the noise mixed with the melody hardly let him think in those moments. He looked around as a boy bumped into him trying to get in. His gaze fell on the bar on the right-hand side, intending to sit down and take in the area at his leisure. Nearby he could find an empty stool catching the attention of the bartender himself.

"What will you have?” he asked as he wiped a glass of champagne between his hands “Is this your first time at the Central Club?”

The soldier nodded, half-opening his lips, for he had scarcely noticed his presence.

“Then you must try our special aniseed and ginger cocktail,” the waiter began to serve him after watching the boy nod. “I suppose you’ve come for her, haven’t you? We haven’t had the club this full since before the war, she’s a real gem, I envy the man who gets her.”

The soldier paid little attention to his words, but nodded at every comment he offered, for he had not yet been able to adjust to the atmosphere generated by the crowd. Music was still playing on the circular wooden stage in the background. A band was providing entertainment, showing off their merits with a piano, drums, bass and saxophone. However, due to the noise it was impossible to hear them.

He took the glass that the man had prepared for him a few minutes ago and brought it to his lips, making his throat burn with every drop that fell through it. His senses were amplified and the warmth was rising from within him. She turned to the man behind the bar to inform him to refill the glass, for if he was to blend in he hoped to do so as everyone else in the place did.

The music stopped and male words came from the stage. The soldier barely noticed. However, the deafening noise of applause and cheers made him look towards the back of the room. A female figure appeared as if out of nowhere before his very eyes. After she came on stage, silence fell, reminding him of peace. The spotlights created an aura of divinity around the young woman that abstracted any of his own thoughts as soon as he beheld her. Her crimson lips could be glimpsed from every corner of the club, making the blood burn under those uniforms.

Time had stood still for a few moments, for the slowness with which such an event unfolded before his eyes was apparent. The girl slowly brought her fingers around the microphone to bring it closer to her mouth, as she set the rhythm by snapping her fingers to the melody of the bass. That was the moment when the soldier became a man, his reasoning engaged in a constant struggle against his experience. That voice had taken over his thoughts and was the only thing he could hear inside him. The melody had awakened a sliver of his memories, but he had not yet realised that fact. The hole of darkness that made him up had found a flame to illuminate it. 

“All of me

Why not take all of me?

Can’t you see?

I’m no good without you”

His muscles had relaxed as the minutes passed. His lips were parted and his eyes were completely lost in hers. For an instant he thought he could feel their paths meet, holding her gaze, a fact that generated a throbbing in his heart that he did not seem to possess. In a subtle blink of an eye, barely noticing it, the girl finished her song and lost his vision as everyone in the room rose to their feet to applaud her, but he did not. He preferred to keep his gaze lost trying to glimpse what had just happened in those moments, as his mission became present in him again.

“It’s a wonder,” the bartender interjected.  "A woman with a voice like that can’t possibly go unnoticed. I think I could listen to her for the rest of my life, and watch her too. You know what I mean.“

The soldier just sipped the last of the liquor in his glass and turned his attention back to the group of men in British uniforms who had led him there. They seemed to be in a hurry to leave again, so he took a note from his pocket and without looking back left it on the bar to follow them. From that moment on, his evening was based on analysing each of the places they frequented and the activities they carried out, making the odd brief conversation, and letting himself be seen in the area. He did not have a chance to think about the heady moment he had experienced until he returned to the bunker and was asked for all the information he had collected. However, although a new memory had settled in his mind, he was unable to express his encounter with you.

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[masqueradeball]

How about number 3? Like, tell us all about it if you want :)

Oh my gosh 🥺 thank you so much for giving me my first ask! 💖 I'm eternally grateful I get to spill all my pheels out.

3. What is my favorite Phantom tv/film adaptation?

My absolute favorite Phantom is the 1925 Lon Chaney silent film. He just embodies everything that I like about Gaston Leroux's Erik for me and he is both horrifying and pitiable. I dislike the ending but I can live with it given it's what test audiences wanted at the time. I truly love his Red Death costume. You can find it on Youtube and the Tubi app for free.

My first runner up would be Claude Raines in the 1943 because his Erique so soft and tragic in that film I cannot help but love him. This was one was my grandma's favorite 'classic monster' movies that she loved, so I have a special place in my heart for this one. I love his hair and appreciate that he was one fine silver fox before the revenge and jealousy issues set in. The opera parts are a little boring, but the costumes and the sassy diva rival to Christine are worth the watch. We get 2 handsome Raouls who end up going to dinner together at the end of the movie and a Christine who gets to bask in the limelight of her career while not choosing any suitor, which is the best possible outcome for her. Double play for the win in my book! You can watch it for free on the Peacock app.

My next runner up is a 3 way tie between Robert Englund, Gerard Butler, and Charles Dance.

I honestly enjoy all their performances because they each bring something unique to the role.

I cannot stress enough how violent the Robert Englund version is if you want to give it a go, but Erik Destler is insane, twisted, and fabulously murdertastic in this. I love the creepy, evil vibes the man gives off. Think of this film as a time travel AU of the original novel. I feel like he nailed Leroux Erik's darker, snarky personality that some people tend to forget he had and the gothic horror parts of the original novel are there. Bonus: they keep the Faust parallels like in the novel!

I'm gonna say it: I love the Charles Dance miniseries. I know it's not the best, but damn, he is so dry and sarcastic I cannot help but enjoy his performance. I want to pinch his cheeks and smother Cherik with the love his father never gave him everytime I see him. Again, this one focuses on the operas a lot, and for me it's a bit boring. But the backgrounds, settings, and props in this thing are fantastic and the costumes are wonderful too.

That leaves Gerard Butler in the 2004 movie. No he is not the world's greatest singing Phantom, but I don't care. I absolutely love his facial expressions and body language. The Phantom is an emotional, expressive dude and the Red Death costume scene is pretty good. I love how kind and sincere Emmy feels in this film and I appreciate she's not overracting and doesn't feel fake compared to some other Christines *coughSierracough* Being the film version of the ALW musical, this Phantom story focuses on the romance and Gerard excels at that. When he and Christine are singing Past the Point of no Return, I FEEL THEIR PASSION! And that's what counts more so than hitting the same notes we've all heard a million times before.

Now for the versions in the 'I will eternally like this' category 😊 :

The Phantom of the Paradise from 1974. This is also a very violent and dark film so fair warning if you haven't seen it. It's a bizarre rock musical, but if you're weird like me and enjoy Rock & Rule or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, this might be a film you'd like too. I don't want to spoil it too much but the Faust/devil parallels are here too, as is various pop culture references. His teeth and mask are terrifyingly cool, and so is the electronic voice box he uses. It makes sense Daft Punk was inspired by this film. Maybe G1 Soundwave was inspired by this film too, but that's a debate for another day 😉

Next is the animated 1988 film. This one features animation on par with other 80s tv cartoons of the time. I love that they kept the Persian and the torture chamber from the novel. The Phantom's death scene is pretty damn epic. Christine is kind of a flake, but animated Leroux Erik is hilariously insane and terribly charming, especially when he calls himself a Don Juan. It's worth watching just for his antics and his dialouge.

You might not expect a Goosebumps episode to do a Phantom story any justice, but here we are: 1995, The Phantom of the Auditorium is a spooky fun take on the story and honestly, I'd like to see the full play the kids at that school are putting on cause it looks better than some of the live Phantom stage scenes I've seen. Both young boys playing the Phantom are fantastic actors and the plot twist at the end is great.

I absolutely have to give a shout out to Wishbone's Pantin at the Opera. He is the best, cutest, most adorable Raoul de Chagney ever and I will fight you if you dare talk smack about this version. I'm not even a Raoul stan by any means but like, this dog is precious and I enjoy this episode so much.

Also in the animated category and cute dog category is Scooby Doo Stage Fright made back in 2013. This movie is one of my fave Scooby Doo films (yes I own almost all of them on dvd) and there are multiple Phantoms, a reality tv show contest, and Fred and Daphne finally kiss each other! Lots and lots of hidden Phantom references in the background and lots of voice acting talent for those of us who appreciate that.

Now for the versions I intensely dislike 😏

The 1962 Herbert Lom version. UGH where to start. The sets are so small and everything looks dirty and of the wrong time period. The color in the film looks washed out. The clothes look too modern somehow (maybe it's their hairstyles?) and it bothers me. It feels low budget in a bad way and it shows. This phantom is not likeable or pitiable even though his backstory is similar to the Claude Raines version. He has no romantic interest in Christine, so it feels off. This guy is such an old a$$ piece of sh*t, he literally slaps Christine as she's singing for him for no damn reason. His paper mache mask looks like a Kindergartener's botched art class project. His personality is like somebody locked up cranky grandpa in the basement and he's PMS-ing because y'all forgot to give him his daily prune juice. This squatter's lair lacks creepiness, and his bizarre sidekick is annoying and yet somehow more interesting than the Phantom. The pervert manager trying to bang Christine aggravated me and simultaneously made me want to vomit. Raoul is the only likeable character in the whole damn movie. The Joan of Arc opera scene makes up for some of the film, but it's still terrible.

Next on my meh list is the 1983 made for tv movie starring Micheal York and Jane Seymour. Now, this one has some likeable and applaudable scenes: the various murders and general creepiness of the Phantom, and the lair scene when she wakes up in his bed and the Phantom gets all up in her face is so intense and so Leroux I absolutely love it. The rest of the film is a jumbled hot mess at best, but Jane Seymour is 🔥 and she gets some damn good sex, so hell yeah to that!

And lastly, I do not like the Royal Albert Hall 25th anniversary recording. I should preface this by saying it is Sierra I don't like. I like Ramin, I love Hadley, everyone else is wonderful but I cannot stand Sierra. She tries too hard to make Christine a Disney Princess- and that doesn't fly with me. It comes off as insincere or mocking the source material at best, and at worst it makes Christine look like an airheaded ditz. Apparently Sierra played Ariel at one point which is hilarious because of all the Disney princesses, I dislike her the most. But that's a different rant for another day.

And finally, the one I hate most of all:

The 1998 Argento film. This is the worst Phantom adaptation I've ever seen. It is a whole lotta nope for me. Between the rats, the unecessary and pointless telepathy, the r*pe scene, and the unfunny weird vibe from the murder going on in this film it's a disaster from start to finish. Honestly, it's the rats and his hair that bother me from a visual standpoint alone and it's beyond disgusting the way this a$$🤡 treats Christine. I don't like any of the characters in here and for good reason. It's not worth watching and if you do, be ready to bleach your brain afterwards.

💖 Sorry if this was a long read! Thanks again for giving me an ask and I will cherish it forver!!!! 💖

[thelioncourts]

title: the mannequin gallery fandom: captive prince pairing: damen/laurent rating: mature words: 11722 for chapter nine (9/?); 62773 all together

Rustling from across the room woke Damen up from sleep. When he pried open his eyes, he was met with utter darkness, all except for his extremely familiar clock blinking in red numbers at him, ‘4:11.’ Damen groaned, threw the pillow over his head, and gruffed out, “Are we ever going to wake up at normal hours again or is this life from here on out?”

Nik, who was the source of the rustling, didn’t look up from the duffle bag he was rummaging through when he said, “I mean, maybe. If you take that job, it definitely might be your life from here on out. Though, to be honest, I’m not sure what all a social media manager is supposed to do.”

Damen groaned again.

Last night, after the whirlwind of yesterday’s events, Damen finally managed to tell Nik all that he could. He began where the craziness had, telling of the demon spawn from Etoile’s office leading him to an impromptu meeting where he was offered a job without Nik. Then Damen went on to explain how the same demon spawn was harassing him at the rehearsal party and that, somehow for some reason, led to an interrogation by Laurent who snapped back to normal so fast it gave Damen whiplash. By this point in his storytelling, Nik was already drinking again and Damen still had more to tell. He finished by telling of Laurent not eating, and none of the other models eating either, before telling of the apparent fight between Laurent and his uncle and Laurent’s followed drunken escape and insinuation Damen might try something unseemly.

“Basically,” Damen had ended last night, “I can’t wait to get out of here. And we’re never doing anything with models again. Not ever.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Nik had said before downing the remainder of a bottle.

Later, and much more quietly, Nik had asked a still-not-sober-enough Damen, “Were you thinking of taking the job?”

The tone of the question had had Damen looking away from the details on the ceiling to look at his friend. Outwardly, Nik had looked as he always did. Outwardly, Nik might as well have been asking what Damen wanted for breakfast when they woke up to start the day tomorrow. But there was something intoning, something that had Damen wishing he desperately had another drink suddenly.

“Hell no. I like to think I’m a pretty good guy, but working with people like the ones we’ve met? I might go homicidal.”

That had seemed to drive away whatever had possessed the tone of Nik’s voice, but the memory of it — and everything else — flooded Damen’s mind at Nik’s lighthearted jab of the job offering. No part of him wanted to face the Etoile entourage today, but every part of him wanted to get today over with so things could go back to a semblance of normalcy. That, and his refusal to allow Nik to go about this alone, were the only things that made him get up.

Damen stood and stretched, arms high above his head, and his shoulder popped loudly, the joint both grateful and full of protest at the movement. Cool air swept over his sleep-warmed torso and he walked behind Nik to go and begin brushing his teeth in the bathroom. “Do I need to wear the suit right now?” he asked around a mouthful of toothpaste. “The show’s not until 10:30.”

“Just bring it along,” Nik said, his voice muffled as his head was half inside his duffle bag now. Then, with something akin to a flourish, he found a lens that must have gotten misplaced at some point and began to clean it. On the bed were already three other lenses, each one shiny and perfect. “They said we can change in the dressing room with the models.”

“Living every guy’s dream,” Damen said. He turned and spit into the sink.

As he only had to bother with bringing the suit in its garment bag, Damen was ready to leave in a matter of minutes. Nik hefted his own bag over his shoulder and shook his hair out of his face. Then he grimaced in Damen’s direction.

“Seriously?”

Damen looked around himself, looked down, looked up, and looked back at Nik and mocked his face. “What?”

“I know I said bring the suit along, but you literally threw on a sweatshirt and...and that’s it.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve gotten all bougie hanging around the models,” Damen said, adjusting his own bag where it was knocking at the backs of his knees.

“When did you start saying bougie?” Nik asked in response, laughing now.

“I don’t know. I think the kids are saying it.”

“Seriously, though, can you at least try?”

“I promise, cross my heart and everything, to actually put effort in when we start getting ready. Maybe I’ll even steal some fancy hair gel or something. Deal?” Damen said.

Nik sighed. “Fine. But I want you to put on that gaudy suit and own it. I want you to behave as if Etoile has been the air you’ve breathed for the last twenty-seven years of your life. If I have to be seen out in public with you like this,” he motioned at the frumpled hem of Damen’s sweatshirt, “it’s the least I, and the rest of the patrons of Paris, deserve.”

“Let’s go then,” Damen said, and he shoved at Nik’s back to get him moving. “I need coffee first.”

“No time. We’re going right to the Grand Palais.”

“No time?”

[Continue on AO3]

Nik had been serious about the ‘no time.’ They were lucky that the streets were mostly empty and they could get to the Grand Palais without a fuss, because when they got there it was, in apparently constant Etoile fashion, bustling. They didn’t appear to be the last ones, or even remotely close to being the last ones, because neither of them saw a single model. Instead it was Charls and his crew running around like the world was possibly ending, though if Damen were to be given three guesses as to why, he would bet he’d be ruled correct when he said the others were feeding off of Charls’ energy.

“How long does it take to set up the same shit they set up yesterday?” Damen asked Nik from the corner of his mouth.

“I don’t know, but I know that yesterday they were like this for two hours straight. And, as you can tell, the models aren’t even here yet and I don’t know when they will be.”

“Well, they’re clearly preoccupied and you’re probably about to be as well. I’m going to use this time to get myself some kind of caffeine. I’ll be back in less than an hour.”

“Damen,” Nik sighed.

“Forty minutes,” Damen tried again. “It’ll keep me out of the way and will let you settle in. Do you want anything?”

“No. I don’t need anything adding to my jitters.”

“You’re going to be great, and I’m going to be caffeinated. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Damen turned and exited the very doors he and Nik had just entered through. The sun was low in the sky and the city was dark and its air damp from the river. A quick look at his phone said it was a few minutes nearing five and he was certain there had to be some Parisian café open to the earliest of customers. Logically, he knew he could have searched it on his phone and found an answer, but the city was quiet. Damen opted to simply walk instead, eyes peeled for a storefront alive with lights.

A bell, somewhere in the distance, chimed out with a song, its ringing carrying across the city, the melody travelling with the breeze, and Damen sighed into the chilled air. The bell’s song ended, then came the singular sounds, bass so low he felt it in the pit of his stomach, indicating the time. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

He crossed a bridge, stopping for only a moment to peer down into the dark waters of the Seine. The tops of the ripples and waves were golden with streetlight and the last bits of moonlight, but when the ripples settled and the waves fell, it was all pitch black. There was a beauty in its darkness, in the remembrance of the history of a place like this, and it all seemed that much more beautiful when, in the dying of the bell chiming came from just a block away the faint sound of music.

Pushing off of the stone railing of the bridge, Damen followed the music. It got closer, or rather he got closer, as he turned down the first street the rest of the way across the bridge. There, along with the music, were the storefronts alive with lights. There were only a few stores with lights on, but there were enough that Damen could make out the few people out and about as he was in the before-dawn streets of Paris; or, in the case of one gentleman he saw, still out from the evening. One front was a bar, though it appeared to be in the quick process of closing for the day, the sign turned on the door and all the lights off except for the one overhead a bartender at a register counting the drawer. Another was a bakery, its inside in a similar state as the bar in regard to a singular man, only this man was dusted with flour and rolling some kind of dough on the flat surface of the counter. But there, almost the storefront at the corner of the end of the street, was a café.

Coffee shop would probably be a more appropriate term for this place. As Damen came right upon it, he immediately wanted to go inside. It was a hole-in-the-wall looking place, no big signs outside announcing its name, no fancy gold seats like the café closer to the hotel, and the only thing Damen could think was cozy. Perhaps that came too from the small, intimate space inside, only one couch at the window and two other seats possible to sit in, or perhaps it came from the warm color of the walls or the bookshelf, however small, perched above the seat nearest the door. Or perhaps, as expected, it was the delicious smell of coffee wafting from underneath the door, the two baristas inside hard at work.

There wasn’t an open sign on the door, but there was a person inside, sitting comfortably on the couch and hidden in a book. The worst thing that could happen was the baristas told Damen they weren’t open quite yet and he turned and went on his way. But, not wanting to overlook such a place, he pushed open the door, its own little bell ringing out, clear and high.

“Are you open?” he asked in French, pitching his voice lower as to not disturb the reader on the couch. Both baristas nodded yes, one smiling wide, and Damen bid them both a good morning. “I’m glad. It’s just cold enough out there I need the caffeine to both get through the day and to warm my hands.”

He ordered his usual, a simple espresso shot, and it came to him quickly in a small white cup, the liquid hot and welcome.

“What are the chances?” a voice sounded out from behind him quite suddenly and Damen, who had been attempting to figure out which of the two available seats he should take, nearly tripped over a chair leg in his attempt to acknowledge the person whose face had been in the book the entire time.

There, on the couch, was Laurent.

He looked the least like the Laurent that Damen had seen yet. He looked, for lack of a better word, cozy, like the shop. His lithe form was drowning in a baby blue sweatshirt that was plain in everything except for the lettering going vertically up his left side that said ‘Givenchy.” His legs, which were curled up close to his chest, were swathed in simple black, the sweats high quality but unnamable, and on his feet were simple white tennis shoes. The blond of his hair was loose and spilling over one shoulder and the blue of his sweatshirt made his eyes pop, the color of the it reflecting in them the same way the lights of the city had reflected on the dark water of the Seine.

The sight struck Damen somewhere deep in his chest and he became all too aware of two things. The first was that this was the first time Damen had seen Laurent in something not meant to be on a runway, for even his clothing when Damen and Nik had ran into him outside of his apartment all those days ago would have looked perfectly in place on a stage; his face was cleared of makeups, his hair free of products, and he was dressed as twenty-somethings did when dressing casually (minus the price tag of the sweatshirt which had to be over two thousand). The second thing was that he looked more beautiful than ever, as though the comforts of a sweatshirt and tennis shoes softened him into something Damen was terrified to reach out and touch because he might break him.

“I mean, honestly,” Laurent continued, as if totally unaware of Damen’s crisis at hand, “what are the chances?”

“Laurent,” Damen said. Laurent’s name left his mouth like the first gasp of air after being underwater too long and Damen cleared his throat, bringing his espresso closer to his chest. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Unexpectedly, Laurent shifted on the sofa, leaving plenty of room for Damen to join him. He looked smaller like that, curled on the sofa with a worn cushion nestled behind him. On the stage, he looked like a god, like Apollo, swimming in gold and larger than life. It was the angle, the length of his legs, Damen reminded himself, but it didn’t change the fact that it was how it felt. But here he looked — Damen didn’t finish the thought. Instead, after a moment’s hesitancy, he sat down.

“I’m hiding,” Laurent provided, just as Damen was settling. “I don’t have to be at the Grand Palais until six-thirty, but, as per usual, I was told I would not be given any food or anything to drink this morning. I can forgo food, but caffeine is a necessity. Not getting it will only lead to a massive headache that will put me in a murderous mood. This café is far enough away I doubted anyone from the show would wander over. Yet, here you are.”

Damen didn’t respond to that right away. Instead he said, “Your normal mood isn’t murderous? Gods, I’d hate to see you get to that point then.”

It was said jokingly, but as soon as the words left Damen’s mouth, they brought with them an onslaught of memories from only last night, each one so concrete in detail because of the closeness in time. Laurent’s scathing interview after Nicaise had insulted Damen to the nth degree, his clenched fists as he talked quietly with his uncle, the ease in which he told Damen, a smile on his face and everything, that if he wanted to get assaulted he would have just gone to a party, the way he didn’t want help, didn’t trust help, to even get across the street.

As if reading his mind, Laurent spoke in a voice Damen had yet to hear from him. It wasn’t a quiet voice necessarily, something that may have been expected in this context, but it was absolute in its apology. It made Damen dizzy.

“I’m sorry about last night. I don’t remember all of it, but I remember enough to know you helped me to not get ran over by a car, despite whatever insulting things I had no doubt said to your face.”

“You seemed stressed yesterday. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried about it. But I am sorry. I’m normally much more controlled than that,” Laurent said. He fell back further into the cushions, his blue sweatshirt pooling around his arms. It looked like it was almost too big for him with the way it fell down to cover his hands.

“What made last night different?” Damen asked.

“This and that,” Laurent said vaguely. He took a sip out of the cup in his hand and Damen watched with amusement as Laurent’s mouth puckered and he squeezed his eyes shut as if to block out the taste that way. Sensing Damen’s eyes on him, hearing the small chuckle he had let out, Laurent brought the cup away from his lips to say, “I didn’t get my usual additives of milk and sugar. It’s not exactly pleasant.”

“That’s just espresso?” Laurent nodded and took another painful sip. “Why not get something you like? This looks like torture for you.”

“It is. Very much so. But, as I told you, I came here because I knew they wouldn’t allow me anything once I arrived at the show. I couldn’t make it obvious I had anything though, thus, a disgusting, bitter, black espresso shot is what I get.”

“But what —”

“As I do remember telling you this last night, it’s all in relation to not eating leading up to a show. Even a simple cup of coffee or latte could lead to bloating. We don’t even drink water for the same reason. Water weight, and all that,” Laurent said.

“That seems excessive.”

“You look like a guy that likes to workout,” Laurent said, and before he continued the sentence he downed the rest of his espresso in a quick gulp, like a child trying to take medicine before the taste registered. “What’s the best way to show muscle definition?”

“Dehydration,” Damen answered quickly, then it was his turn to make a face. “But it’s not healthy to do, especially often.”

“You can tell my uncle that.”

Damen allowed the silence to speak for him then. Outside, the city was coming more to life with every passing minute. Damen could see shop owners arriving and slipping inside their businesses, ready to begin the day. He could see men in suits, harried and on the phone already, walking down the street with purpose unbecoming of such early hours still. He could feel those blue eyes watching him watch the city.

Then Laurent said, the tone to his voice much more familiar, “Tell me you’re not wearing that. Or, if you are, tell me you’re going to not associate with anyone that is part of Etoile. Not a one of us has the time to explain why we’re dealing with obvious amateurs.”

“We’re wearing the exact same thing,” Damen said, looking down at the sweatshirt and sweatpants protecting his body from the chilled air.

“No. I’m wearing Givenchy, steamed free of wrinkles. You’re wearing —” Laurent trailed, “Champion? Or is that outfit from a convenience store?”

“First of all, this is all Nike. Second of all, it was all a gift from Nike leading up to the release of their new winter stuff last year.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Laurent said, sounding anything but. “I wasn’t aware I was in the presence of fame. Can I get your autograph?”

“You’re really telling me this mood isn’t murderous?” Damen asked and, gods help him, he was laughing.

“This is me being quite pleasant, I assure you.”

“Well, if it qualms any of your worries about your dear status here in Paris, I’ll have you know that your uncle had Charls create a suit just for me to wear at the show today and it, direct quote from the note inside of the bag, ‘will bring out the warmth of my skin.’ Your embarrassment can be staved yet another day,” Damen said.

Chin perched on his own hand, Laurent scanned Damen up and down. Then his lips quirked up, just at the corners, and it was suddenly far too hot in this sweatshirt. “I bet Charls is having a grand time fitting you. He’s not accustomed to people quite so —” and then Laurent stopped himself.

Instinctually, Damen leaned in closer. “So what?”

“So culturally simple,” Laurent finished.

Damen leaned back, and rubbed at his neck. He hadn’t meant to —

Just then, Laurent’s phone vibrated on the table in front of them and Damen watched as Laurent grabbed it and silenced the sound.

“And with that, I must be off. Charls will have a coronary if I’m even a minute late.”

Copying Laurent’s earlier move, Damen quickly downed the rest of his espresso. “I’ll walk with you. Since we’re going to the same place.”

They brought their cups to the bin near the front where workers could later gather them and then they were off, the bell to the shop ringing behind them, its fading followed by a flash of light from inside.

Outside, Damen had to sidestep several people to keep up with Laurent’s confident stride. Every moment, a new onslaught of cars or pedestrians or even busses seemed to be arriving in this area of the city, each one adding to the growing chaos. With a kind of fascination, Damen watched as people getting out of cars lugged heavy camera equipment, watched as people getting off of one of the busses — the oldest of them not possibly older than twenty-five — descended its steps in insane shoes, watched as garment bags were carried this way and that by undescriptable people.

“Is this all for fashion week?” Damen asked.

“Where have you been? It’s been like this since three days ago,” Laurent answered. The sun was finally over the horizon.

“I’ve been at rehearsals and parties and whatnot all for Etoile. I didn’t realize Paris itself got like this.”

“We’re the fashion capital of the world. Every year gets more intense, more insane, than the last.” They were crossing the bridge over the Seine now. “Just be thankful you haven’t been assaulted by the influencers. Oh, wait. You are one.”

“I am not,” Damen said, annoyance heavy in an instant. “And what do you mean assaulted by them?”

“Don’t you follow the tabloids? Every year, we get more and more famous Instagram stars or YouTube stars or whatever the newest craze is that think they belong in our front rows. Or, in some awful cases, that think they belong in our shows. And they show up, acting like the next best thing whilst the rest of us, who have worked for what we have, bristle at their lack of critical thinking. It’s quite fun. The most fun I have is bitching with the rest of the Etoile group over the one thing we all have in common: the hatred of entitlement.”

Once again, Damen chose one particular thing to latch onto. “You can have fun then? You’re not entirely incapable?”

Laurent’s lips quirked again. “I’m not above setting security on you.”

They finished the rest of their excursion to the Grand Palais in silence, Laurent’s eyes ahead and Damen’s unable to decide if they wanted to look at the city or at Laurent more. The closer they got to the building, the more evident it became that there was a line forming outside the entrance, and an official one at that. It was roped off by velvet ropes, ones that kept the direct walkway out of public reach. When directly in front of the building, let in by Laurent’s face only, Damen watched the frenzied crowd that only continued growing.

Damen felt like an athlete awaiting his time to take to the field.

“Does this not bother you?’ he asked as they ducked in the door.

“I’ve done many of these. Even if it did, I’d be long used to it by now.”

They were walking right through, not being given any attention from the bustling that rushed over them with a wave of anxiousness. It only added to the feeling low in Damen’s chest.

“That wasn’t a yes,” Damen said. He narrowly avoided running into a man pushing a cart with boxes stacked double of his entire height.

“It wasn’t a no either,” Laurent said.

Somehow they had made it all the way to the elaborate stage from yesterday. It looked just as magical, just as identical to the Hall of Mirrors, as it had the day before and Damen was still floored at the dedication to its artistry. Charls was on the stage, shaky fingers pointing people this way and that way and, like time slowed, Charls turned and, catching sight of Laurent, made a noise near inhuman.

“There you are!” the designer said, bustling quickly down the stairs.

“Yes, Charls. And I’m earlier than you asked me to be. As I always am.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Charls fretted, “I’m just always so relieved to see you walk through the door. It calms me tremendously.”

“I’m glad,” Laurent said. He sounded like he genuinely meant it.

“Good luck today,” Damen said as Charls began to lead Laurent away, back toward where the dressing rooms were far behind the stage.

“Thank you,” Laurent said curtly, his tone much crisper with just those two words alone than it had been the entire morning. Charls didn’t seem to be paying them any mind, his own thoughts far too focused on getting Laurent in the dressing room quickly and seamlessly, but Laurent seemed hyper-aware of Charls’ presence in that instant. Then he was gone.

For the next hour, Damen roamed. He felt more comfortable doing so than he had yesterday, and it was fascinating to watch everything behind the scenes come into place if he were being honest. If he had thought the sessions that had been arranged in those earliest weeks had been busy, or if he had thought the dress rehearsal yesterday had been busy, those were nothing in comparison to what was happening today. Models were arriving entirely un-modeled up, some of them, but not many, unrecognizable with their undone faces and hair and normal clothes, and a few were stopped at the door by Vannes who snatched beverages from a handful of them, mumbling something in French that Damen couldn’t discern from where he was standing, but that sounded unkind. At one point there was yelling from somewhere in the back, and the set designers were spending equal amounts of time running between the expensive seats set up for the crowd and the atual set itself, doing the most mundane things like painting a bolt on the back wall, near the bottom, gold.

At seven-thirty, the doors opened to let in the second round of crew members, this group consisting of the lighting and technology company, a catering crew that Damen noted wouldn’t be providing food to the models, and, unexpectedly Damen’s possible new boss.

Etoile’s creator was dressed the part for a man that owned a modeling and clothing design company. His suit dripped with money, from the quality of the material to the gold fitted to his cufflinks, his belt, his lapel, and even the buckles of his shoes. But other than the gold, it was a tame suit, predominantly a deep red with flashes of white to compliment the gold. At the entrance, he stopped and talked to Vannes, the two of them speaking lowly. Then the man gave a nod and kept walking, walking right into a yell of cheers at his arrival, led by Charls and several of the honey-eyed boys that would be walking first.

A tap on the shoulder stole Damen’s attention.

“How was your coffee?” Nik asked, and even though he had just tapped Damen’s shoulder, he was already fiddling with the camera in his hands.

“Good,” Damen said. He reached out and made Nik stop moving, pushing the camera to Nik’s chest. “Laurent was there.”

“Why would you say that to me? Can you not see that I’m already at the point I’m near crawling out of my own skin? There’s no reason to add to my stress.”

“It was fine,” Damen said, laughing. “I didn’t tell you that to stress you out, I just told you because it was unexpected.”

“He didn’t kill you so I suppose it wasn’t too bad,” Nik said. “And whispers are that he’s in a tolerable mood today. The whispers also say that can change faster than a strike of lightning, but we’re all hoping for the best.”

“His uncle did just arrive so I wouldn’t put that thought too far back in your mind.”

“Great.”

Outside, though it was incredibly muffled, the bells Damen had heard on his earlier excursion began to chime again. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

“Oh heavens,” Damen and Nik heard from the stage and there was Charls again, looking ready to faint at the next thing that made him startle. “Attention, everyone, attention!” he called out, his voice ringing from the glass ceiling and the multitudes of mirrors in the room. “It is eight in the morning which means the doors will be opening in one hour for the show. That means it is time. It is time to get the models makeuped and dressed, it is time to test the sound and the lights, it is time to run through every scenario in which something could go drastically wrong and ensure we have a solution in place. This is it. The press will be let in first and that will tell the world what we are doing here today. Places, everyone!”

“They told me we could go get ready now alongside the models,” Nik said, hanging his camera around his neck.

“Most of the models have been here since before seven. What have they been doing the last hour?”

“Warming up. They had them doing stretches and exercises to loosen their joints and get their legs ready for walking and complete stability or whatever Herode was rambling about.”

Damen pursed his mouth in thought. “That makes sense.”

“Does it?” Nik asked.

“I’d like to see you get up there and walk across that stage in heels and not fall on your face,” Damen said.

“I bet you would like to see that,” Nik joked, and then dodged a thwack from Damen. And for a brief moment, surrounded by gold and glass instead of the vastness of the ocean, they were twelve again, roughhousing their way to the back room before quick composure had them standing upright and tall.

The door to the dressing room was shut, but the noise from inside was loud and brought with it a spike of something akin to anxiety.

“Let’s see what you’ve gotten us into,” Damen said.

The dressing room was, of course, not like a standard dressing room, because Etoile did nothing simply standard, not even its behind-the-scenes stuff. Everything was white, stark white to be precise; the walls were unblemished, not a color in sight, and everything else was white as well, as if it was saying ‘Look at these models. Their beauty is all the decoration needed.’ Lining the left wall was a seemingly endless line of vanities, each adorned with a mirror dotted with bright lights for the makeup artists, and several models were in the chairs, getting their makeup and hair done. To the right were two separate stations, one being full-body mirrors and a stand for models to wait on as the design team fiddled with their clothing and spent excessive amounts of time making sure there wasn’t a wrinkle in sight, a tear the width of a strand of hair, and so on, and the other station was a finalizing station near the door with an empty chair was waiting for Laurent’s uncle to make sure everything was approved before he sent them out. Near the back of the room were clothing racks stuffed with clothing, some of the garment bags almost exploding with how much fabric they contained, and that’s where Damen could spot Charls, Vannes, and Herode.

In the makeup chair closest to the door, Ancel was getting his red hair teased to a high, the fiery strands cascading over one shoulder like a crimson waterfall. When he saw Damen and Nik in his peripheral vision, he turned just a little more and winked before saying, “Can I just say thank you to whoever brought the eye candy for us? For so long we’ve been the only eye candy in the room, and I’m not sure many of us are each other’s tastes, but these two make a majority of us very happy.”

Nik held back a groan of something, Damen could practically feel the metaphoric grip he had on it, but Damen, much better with this kind of attention, walked on in and said in response, “We aim to please,” and Ancel let out a noise that could have practically been a purr.

Over on one of the stools the models were getting dressed at, some already draped in fabrics, others getting refitted due to something gone wrong, was Aimeric who was getting sandals laced all the way up to his knees by a frazzled looking woman who undid the knots at least four times, clearly unhappy with how they looked.

Several other models were in the expected places. Damen spotted a sandy-haired boy with a beautiful curl to the ends of his hair — Erasmus, Damen thought his name was — getting a pair of pants hemmed by a design intern, and near him was a dark-haired boy with a hand on Erasmus’ bare shoulder, the hold almost protective in the curl of the boy’s fingers. A boy with skin the shade of chestnut was getting glittery body oil with gold flecks applied to his chest, the brush being used large and round and moving in perfect clockwise circles. Near the back, one model was stripped down to almost nothing, standing patiently whilst Vannes, now moved from her conversation with Charls and Herode, was scanning the clothing racks for the right bag.

“I didn’t know they let animals back here,” came the unmistakable voice of the devil Nicaise who, with strength unbefitting his size, shoved past Damen and Nik, going as far as to walk between them, breaking the trance of watching the organized chaos of model-magic coming to life. He was dressed like a model, unsurprisingly, his small form bathed in a deep red dress with sheer sleeves covered in sparkling gold. The red brought out the rosiness of his cheeks, a sign of the youth still there, and strewn throughout his hair were similar gold specks, each one flawlessly places as though he was naturally as shimmering as he appeared.

“Gods above, I’m going to go take some pictures of everyone getting ready,” Nik mumbled, a furrow between his eyebrows made only deeper with every second Nicaise stood there, a hand on his tiny hip.

“Yeah, they let us out into society sometimes to see how civilized people work,” Damen said, not missing a beat. Nik was already halfway across the room, raising a hand to Jeurre who was talking with his nose upturned to a cowering boy helping set up drinks and food.

“Where’s your collar with your owner’s number on it? I’d like to call and report you missing. Maybe they’ll send out animal control,” Nicaise said.

“Nicaise,” came yet another unmistakable voice and there, in one of the chairs, was Laurent again. He must have been blocked by his makeup artist when Damen walked in, that was the only way Damen would have missed him. He was wearing a white robe, one tied loosely at the waist, coming down only below his knees, and at the legs it was falling open some, revealing one thigh the same color as the robe. His eyes were shut, the makeup artist applying delicate strokes of gold on the space of his eyelid. To allow the makeup artist access, Laurent’s head was tilted back so his eyes were higher, but it only showed Damen the elegant column of his neck leading to the sharp lines of his collarbone. “No one needs you back here antagonizing. Wait until after the show.”

“Gold washes you out. Has anyone ever told you that?” Nicaise asked, his attention switching from Damen to Laurent quickly.

Eyes still closed, Laurent smiled. “I’ll make sure to avoid gold in the future then.”

“I think gold looks good on you,” Damen said. Nicaise’s attention quickly switched back.

“Well we’re all aware of your lack of taste so that’s not surprising in the least.”

“What are you doing back here, Nicaise?” The line of gold on Laurent’s eyelid had been exaggerated in the minute they’d been talking, the thin line of the wing extended far out beyond his actual eye.

“Watching your final show come to close,” Niciase said. “I figure this is the closest I’ll ever get to watching something like an execution.”

The makeup artist put away the liquid gold she’d been using and reached now for a brown contouring stick. With practiced precision she made a line underneath the dip of each of Laurent’s cheekbones then grabbed a rounded brush. She blended the brown line in until it was smudged and faded, appearing as a natural shadow that emphasized the fine structure of Laurent’s face, made him look sharper and more untouchable.

“Just think,” Laurent started, “in a few years you’ll be in my exact position. I suppose it is good that you witness this.”

Nicaise flushed immediately at the words, the color all the way at his ears, and it matched the blush the makeup artist was now applying to the tops of Laurent’s cheeks.

“I’m never going to be like you,” Nicaise said, and the venom with which he spit those words out had Damen feeling as though he was hearing something he wasn’t supposed to be hearing.

“No?”

“No, I’m going to be better than you,” Nicaise said. “I’ll be better than you in every way.”

“I hope you are,” Laurent said.

“You’re intolerable,” Nicaise said, ears still red and venom still on his tongue. “I’m leaving.”

“Yes, I’m sure my uncle will want you right next to him one last time. I’ll see you after the show, alright?”

Nicaise, shoving past Damen again and, even though Nik wasn’t there, stepping on his foot, said over his shoulder, “I hope you fall flat on your face,” and then he was gone.

Laurent’s eyelashes, now darkened with mascara, were incredibly long. They rested on the blushed apples of his cheeks, the black of them a drastic contrast to his pale skin, but it was their length that had Damen staring. He hadn’t anticipated Laurent opening his eyes though, hadn’t anticipated what a lining of gold and a darkening of his lashes could do to the blue of his eyes. They made eye contact in the mirror and, for an illicit moment, Damen felt the electric shock of want hit him, felt the desire to see if Laurent’s golden hair felt as silk to the touch as it appeared.

“You still haven’t changed,” Laurent said. “I do hope you weren’t lying about embarrassing us all.”

“I’m getting ready to put my suit on right now, thank you,” Damen said, finding his voice. “I was actually looking for a place to change.”

Laurent hummed, the noise sounding near amused. “We don’t have places to change. We simply change.”

It made sense. Of course, Damen hadn’t been quite honest when he said he was looking for a place to change because he was mostly coming up with an excuse to not sound as winded as he felt, but thinking on it now...yes, he thought, taking a cursory glance around the room to the models in nearly nothing a they got fitted, there wouldn’t be a place to change.

“I promise no one will bite. Actually,” Laurent contemplated, “Ancel might. But everyone else is harmless.”

Nik had hung their bags near the back of the room, both off to the side as to not get mixed in with the models’ things, and Damen could see his hanging there, the note Charls had left on it visible from even this distance.

“I’m not shy,” Damen said. “I was trying to avoid having you fall desperately in love with me. But I guess there’s no help for you now.”

“My delicate sensibilities,” Laurent started, his voice superficially whiny, near mocking. Then he stood from the chair and began to untie his robe. “It’s as though I’ve never seen anyone in minimal clothing.”

The robe fell.

Damen hadn’t lied when he said he wasn’t shy; in Greece, he grew up wearing hardly any clothing, his adventurous self far too busy spending as much time in the ocean as humanly possible. And even when he wasn’t in the ocean, he was usually right by it, lounging outside at his family’s home in nothing but a pair of shorts or walking the shops that lined the water in the same thing. He wasn’t arrogant, or oblivious, enough either to not be aware that part of his and Nik’s following came from the lack of clothing Damen seemed to spend most of his time donning (or not donning). After all, the forever-loading comment section on every photo of fire emojis or the water dripping emoji or the panting-face emoji told him that.

Other people’s nakedness had never bothered him either. One didn’t bed as many people as Damen had in his lifetime and were bothered by nudity. But Damen was used to expecting it, was used to others making a show of it. His bed partners usually tried to be alluring with the way they lifted shirts over their heads, the way they revealed inch by inch of skin -- unless it was a quickie in an airport bathroom or something. Laurent didn’t do that; the robe simply fell, pooling on the floor in a puddle of satin white, and leaving Laurent in nothing but an equally satined, and poor excuse for, underwear that came up high on his hips as to not clash with the high slit in one singular pant-leg of his runway outfit that showed just enough skin to be considered temptation.

But Laurent wasn’t one of his bed partners.

That didn’t mean Damen didn’t want to know if his skin felt just as smooth as the satin of the robe now on the floor. It looked like it would.

Unbothered, Laurent walked over to one of the stands. Though all the models were each in similar states of undress, Laurent drew eyes to him as he walked, drew eyes as he accepted one of the designers hands to stand by the full-length mirrors. Damen could see Laurent’s face in the mirror, could see the shadows of his eyelashes again as he was looking down and talking to the same designer. Damen could see his ass which was near enough to short circuit his brain.

Across the room, Nik called for him.

“Please get dressed,” Nik said, his voice having taken on a near pleading tone.

“I was getting ready to.”

“No, you were getting ready to do or say something stupid to Laurent who, unaware of the fact that you have no ability to not stare at every beautiful blond you, stripped down to nothing in front of you,” Nik said. He shoved the garment bag in Damen’s hands.

“He’s —” Damen started.

“Don’t finish that sentence. I can guess what you’re going to say.”

They were somewhat behind the clothing racks, the most privacy offered in this room, and Damen, without hesitancy, ripped his sweatshirt over his head and shucked off his sweatpants in a matter of seconds, leaving him too in his underwear which was a nice tight pair of black briefs. Nik began to do the same, less quickly than Damen, and that’s when a wolf-whistle reached their ears.

“Now they’re giving us a show,” Ancel said and immediately half of the room was looking at them.

“I’m going to kill myself or them,” Nik muttered only loud enough for Damen to hear and he was unzipping the garment bag with enough force to nearly break the zipper. “I can’t decide.”

“Just ignore them,” Damen muttered back, holding in a breath of laughter, as Ancel began to have a very loud, and very graphic conversation about Damen or Nik or both’s cocks like they weren’t even in the room.

Nik’s suit was as he said it would be, black, black, black. It was nicely made, the material Etoile quality, but it was simplistic, all neat and straight lines, no embroidering, no odd tie, no anything. It was one of Damen’s favorite suits he’d seen because it did what he wanted outfits to do and that was highlight the person, not the clothing itself.

Damen’s suit was a little more complicated. The first step was a white dress shirt which was just a size too tight, forcing Damen to leave more than a few buttons undone at the top. The second step was the pair of red dress pants, ones that ended right above his ankles and had a perfectly straight crease down the central part of each leg. The second step were the shoes, white and shiny and blessedly left without decoration. The fourth step was a gold and red vest, one that accentuated the width of his shoulders. Lastly, it was finished with a red suit jacket with gold cufflinks identical to the ones Laurent’s uncle was wearing. It did bring out the warmth of his skin.

“I want your suit,” Damen said, pulling and adjusting the lapels.

“Too bad.”

“Alright, everyone!” Charls’ wobbling voice called out. If Damen had thought the man had looked stressed earlier, it was nothing compared to how he looked now. He looked sickly, white with a yellowed hue, red bright eyes, and a face that said it may end up over a trash can at any moment to expel anything and everything in his body. “It is nearing nine which means the doors are opening. Final touches will be made to the models’ faces and hair shortly. Photographers, it’s time to begin settling in where the show will take place, ensuring your positions are secured. We’re counting on you to capture the artistry that are our models, are these pieces of clothing, are the Regency. Everyone else…” he trailed dramatically, “we shall see each other on the other side.”

“That’s my cue,” Nik said. “And yours.”

“Let’s go, bigshot,” Damen started, but just as they began to walk, a hand reached out and clasped around Damen’s wrist.

He didn’t know her by name, but he knew she was a hairstylist, the same one that had been teasing Ancel’s hair up to a high and in a quiet voice she asked, “Can I do your hair? I promise it won’t take long. Your curls.”

“They need artfully tousled!” another stylist called over her shoulder.

“Yeah, Damen, get your curls artfully tousled,” Nik said.

“I’ll do it, but just so I stay out of your way since you’ll yell if you start to get all extra stressed.”

Over the girls excited squeals, Nik said, “Sure, that’s why,” and he threw a quick look to where Laurent was still on the stand by the full-length mirrors getting his golden corset pulled tighter and tighter.

The girl who had asked, Tilda, was practically skipping as she followed Damen who sat down in one of the open vanity seats. Without another word, she opened one of the drawers of the vanity they were in front of and pulled out three different bottles, each one gold like the everything else and Damen wondered momentarily if the brand they bought was purposefully gold, if it was coincidence, or, worse, if Etoile took their usual brand and put it into gold cans and jars to fit the aesthetic. He wouldn’t put it past them.

“I’m going to keep it quite simple,” Tilda began, grabbing a spray bottle off of the vanity’s top. “First I’m going to wet your hair, then I’m going to run this mousse through it. After that I’ll apply a heat protectant and blow dry those curls to a voluminous fluff, and finish it with a smoothing oil. Shouldn’t take any longer than ten minutes.”

She kept her hands perfunctory as they carded through his curls, at first turning them into a mess of frizz and uncontrollable poofiness. Then came the spritzes of water, dampening Damen’s hair but not soaking it. Just as she said, she first squirted the mousse into her hand, the smell of it light and the puff of the whiteness growing after exiting the spray can, and she ran it through until it had dissolved and sunken in. Next came the blow dryer that had Damen squinting his eyes, catching only brief glimpses of himself in the mirror. Last was the oil that Tilda ran through the ends of his hair, taming the strands that didn’t want to cooperate with the rest of the hair.

“What do you think?” she asked him and, if he were to tell her the truth, he’d tell her that it didn’t look that much different and that’s why he liked it. All that work seemed to do was tame the curls into a purposefully messed up, bedhead kind of look.

But before he could tell Tilda so, Laurent said, “I think he’s in my seat.”

Damen turned around in the chair. One of his curls fell over his eyes. Laurent was dressed in the outfit he’d walked in yesterday, missing only the crown which couldn’t be put on until they finished his hair. But everything else was perfectly done, from the makeup on his face to the golden shoes on his feet. The corset made him look impossibly small, like Damen could put both his hands on either side of those ribs and his fingers would touch. He looked sharp, untouchable, unobtainable, and like something out of a dream.

“Sorry, Your Majesty,” Damen said, pushing himself up to stand. “But if it means anything, I can’t embarrass you. I told you I’d clean up.”

“You look like one of Etoile,” Laurent said. He sounded displeased still.

“Hair looks good,” Ancel said, strolling by, heels clicking. “So does your chest hair.”

Damen snorted a laugh then tried to cover it with a cough as Laurent’s eyes narrowed. “Right, sorry. Your seat.”

Maybe it was in imitation of the designer that had helped Laurent on the stand, maybe it was the corset that had to be uncomfortable, maybe it was the heels on Laurent’s shoes that had him nervous the other would trip, but Damen held out a hand for Laurent to help him into the seat. Laurent’s eyes narrowed more at the gesture, now directed at Damen’s outstretched hand. Then, of all things he could have done, he took it.

“Don’t you have to find a seat in the back of the show or something?” Laurent asked.

Tilda, holding back an obvious giggle and quite accustomed to Laurent clearly, began to brush out his long blond hair, holding it up so it draped over her arm, a Dali melting clock in person.

Exiting the dressing room, it didn’t take long for Damen to spot Nik. As the lights weren’t dimmed yet, Nik’s black suit stood out greatly where he positioned on the floor near the right side of the stage. In current-expected Nik fashion, he was fiddling with buttons and settings and Damen couldn’t wait for this to be done and over with so Nik would go back to actually enjoying what he did.

“Hey,” Damen said, getting Nik’s hyper-focused attention to switch over for even a minute. “Where am I sitting?”

“Vannes said all of Etoile was sitting together over there.” Nik pointed to the left side of the stage and the group of seats clustered right there, each one with a name tag indescribable from this distance on it.

“I’m not exactly part of Etoile.”

“You’re not exactly not part of it either. I’d check over there first.”

In the second row, right where the Etoile section ended and the rest of the seats began, was Damen’s name in the same fancy script that had adorned the garment bags. Damianos Vallis. There were six more rows behind his seat, each one curling around to meet at the other side of the stage, like an elongated horseshoe, and some of the seats were already full, predominantly with journalists who had gotten in with press passes, a few working the old fashioned way with a notebook and pen and a rest working with electronic devices.

Not knowing what else to do, Damen took his seat. He spent the next half hour scrolling through his Instagram, liking comments, liking photos, and even uploading a photo onto his Instagram story of his white shoes and the location tag of ‘Paris, France.’ Then, in an instant, it seemed like everyone invited was arriving at once, voices and excitement filling the air. Every person entering was dressed in something made to be worn during a fashion week. Damen wondered, watching an old woman draped in a green dress and covered with a, what had to be real, fur coat that fell to her ankles, how much money was in this room alone. Around him the seats began to be taken over, conversations occurring in a multitude of languages, many of which Damen knew but couldn’t process when happening all at once.

Two rows behind Damen, a group of guys around his age sat down, one of them, the one with all the attention of the others, was definitely wearing some of Kanye West’s strange shoes, and he looked familiar; it didn’t take Damen too long to recognize where he knew him from. The guy popped up on Damen’s on Instagram ‘explore’ page, a traveller that did inane giveaways like cars and iPhones all for followers. Damen rolled his eyes and focused back to the stage.

He did so with great timing. The rest of Etoile’s members were finding their seats all around him. First he saw Vannes and Herode taking their seats, leaving Charls alone in the back which seemed like a questionable move if he were being honest. Then he saw Nicaise saunter in, his head high, and his eyes never leaving a certain point of the stage as if waiting for someone. There were others Damen recognized, but didn’t know by name, like the set designers and the board of members Laurent’s uncle had mentioned at times, but none of them stood out, except for all the red they were wearing. It must have been coordinated for all of Etoile’s group to wear red.

At long last, the man himself came onto the stage. The lights dimmed, causing a few people in the crowd to squeal as if they had never had lights dim on them before, and the only bright light was a central one on the stage. Laurent’s uncle was a commanding presence, even when alone on a stage. Actually, with the spotlight making the gold of his outfit shimmer, he looked even more commanding. His voice, when it rang out, was strong.

“Welcome, all,” he began, and like with the lights, a few squeals pricked at Damen’s eardrums at the first sound he made. “I thank you all for coming. This is Etoile’s tenth Paris Fashion Week, a milestone in this company’s own life. In those ten years, we have accomplished so much. Our design team is world-renowned for its creativity, for its grace, for, as some of the bolder tabloids have said, its ability to make even the plainest of models look deserving of worship. Speaking of our models, they have also helped mould Etoile into what it has become today. Our models are sought out by all. Did you know that, between all of our models, someone from Etoile has graced Vogue in over seventy countries and have been in a total of three hundred and ten magazines? How extraordinary.” The entire crowd began to clap and cheer and Laurent’s uncle took it all in with grace, the smile on his face real and too humble for a man responsible for all of this. “I don’t want to keep you all as I know you’re here for the outfits and models and not for me talking your day away. Without further adieu, I give you Etoile’s spring line for Paris Fashion Week.”

Before the rest of the lights went out, Damen saw Nik across the way, his camera blocking half of his face. Then —

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice started, its pitch low and breathy, its French accented heavily. “The French Revolution began in 1789. We, the people of France, had grown tired of the disparages between our King and ourselves. There was struggle, and pain, but we emerged victorious from the battles and slowly began to make our country what it is today through hard work and dedicated leadership that focused on bettering each citizen. Now, the great places, like Versailles, are for the people, just as they were always by the people. Though we relish each day in our freedom, we keep the beauty of the past alive by embracing it through every step we take in our great country. Today, we bring the beauty and elegance of that timet to you. Please welcome Etoile and its spring line entitled The Regency.”

Around Damen, the crowd was already vibrating with anticipation, oohs and ahhs on the tips of their tongues, so when the first model came from stage left and began an elegant walk, everyone was quick to respond.

“Look at the lining!”

“Oh, he decided to be audacious with the shoulders this year.”

The models weren’t walking straight out. They were elegantly gliding horizontally, showing off the sides of their outfits, before finally walking straight out and taking their time at the end of the catwalk, their faces expressionless, the focus on the clothes. Or intended anyway.

The second model came out, then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth. All of them were honey-eyed, tiny things, three of them so similar in structure and face Damen thought they might be brothers. Behind him, that Instagram guy and his friends were making more comments about the models than the clothes.

“Look at that one.”

“Just how I like them. Small enough that I can just grab them and hold them on my dick.”

“Check out that one’s mouth. Already open.”

“You could just slide right in and —”

The next models began walking, one of them particularly eye-catching but simply because of his makeup that was done to match his clothing pattern directly, two bold lines of red dripping down his face like the two red lines running symmetrically with his nipples. He was followed by a model with pitch black hair and skin just as dark, the gold outfit particularly startling and wonderful on him, and he was followed by a model in a dress with a train that had to be going on two yards in length.

“Darling, you have to buy that for me as a wedding dress!”

“But we’re already married.”

“We can renew our vows then! I have to wear it, I simply have to.”

“Anything for you.”

There were a few more models after that one. All of them were in the colors of white and gold, prominently gold, and though Damen had seen it all yesterday, the opulence of it in this room, on this set, with all these people staring and absorbing everything, felt like so much more than what it was when the lights were on and bright. But then, like when the air took on an unnamable quality before the rain, there was a change.

It came with the slightest of pauses in the walking, in the way the stage stayed empty long enough to have heads craning to see what they were missing. It was exactly what Etoile wanted. The anticipation. Then walked in Aimeric.

The red rejuvenated a life in the crowd, a life that hadn’t truly diminished during the show, yet it grew now to astronomical proportions. Aimeric walked with a face that said someone had once told him he couldn’t do this so he was not set to do it better than anyone before him and the people watching were whispering praise for his sandals, for his outfit, for him. The excitement only grew when Ancel came out. Ancel walked differently than Aimeric. Ancel walked like he was aware of just how attractive he was, and it gave him something in his step, something when his heels hit the ground, that had many people in the crowd trying to keep a handle on themselves.

“He looks like he’d be eager,” one of the guys behind Damen said.

In par with his attitude, Ancel flipped his fiery hair at the end of the catwalk, letting it rain down over his shoulder in a show of its own, and a decent part of the crowd swooned at it, their voices full of nothing but adoration. Before he turned off the stage, Ancel kicked his heel back, as if needing to ensure everyone got one more look at his legs.

Then the lights changed. It was a subtle change, the lights brightening just a little more as if to draw yet more attention to the stage, as if everyone wasn’t already watching, completely enraptured. The murmuring in that instant got louder, like the crowd minutes before a concert began, and Damen realized something in that moment that hadn’t even occurred to him. All of these people were expecting Laurent.

He wasn’t sure why the realization of that made him feel as if he had just stumbled, but it did. Unlike him, unlike Nik, the rest of this crowd, assumingly, was into fashion and knew exactly what Etoile was bringing to the table. And Laurent, Damen did know now, was Etoile’s star was its muse practically.

If Damen had felt as if he had stumbled just moments ago, it was nothing to how he felt when Laurent came out on the stage. Logic told him he had just seen Laurent — in this very outfit and everything — just an hour earlier, yet seeing him on the stage, seeing the crown newly placed atop his head, he was golden, god-like, as if his likeness should be in one of Greece’s ancient temples and not here in Paris being ogled by people that just didn’t get it.

As he had at rehearsal, Laurent walked with his back straight, his core, tight, and it made him powerful. Nicaise’s wishes of Laurent falling flat on his face would go ungiven because Laurent was a professional, was seasoned. The crowd adored him, practically melted, and when Laurent finished his horizontal criss-crossing of the stage and began to walk straight down the remaining catwalk, the lights caught onto his crown, making him glow an ethereal pinkened hue.

“How much would you pay to get those legs wrapped around you, Ian?”

“Bitch like that, he’d only need to see my cock and he’d be the one paying me,” said an Ian. “Goddamn, look at him though.”

“You ever see those porn pics of, like, some chick before and after? You know, like how in the ‘before’ one she looks all cute and like she has her shit together and then in the ‘after’ she looks fucked out, makeup smeared, hair destroyed, mouth all swollen from getting reamed out a couple hundred times? Picture that with him. That crown practically sideways on his head, that gold and red makeup on his face smeared to hell from wacking your dick on his face too many times.” All the other guys made noises of agreement. Damen clenched his fists into his pants to keep from turning around. Instead he focused on the rest of the crowd that he could hear.

“Every year he looks like an angel when he comes on out.”

“What on earth is Etoile going to do if he doesn’t resign? No one else brings everything to life like he does.”

“Art. His existence is art.”

Damen was half-inclined to agree.

At the end of the catwalk, Laurent stood for just a second, and Damen could see Nik for the first time since the lights dimmed, his friend having followed Laurent down the stage. In a matter of only seconds after that though, Laurent turned and exited the way he came, all eyes on the red bottoms of his shoes and the way the corset gave him hips meant to have a hand on them.

When Laurent was gone, the stage stayed empty, the music still playing, the house lights still dimmed, all as if to allow the crowd the time to absorb what they had just seen. Then, like an explosion, all the models were coming back out in a sea of gold and centerpieces of red, and a few of the boys were motioning for Laurent’s uncle who climbed to the stage with an easy smile.

Damen watched the man get doted on by his models, listened to the crowd’s cheering turn into a roar, and watched as the man came to Laurent, held out his hand, and watched as Laurent took it. The two of them walked to the front of the stage, hands clasped, and together they looked like a king and a prince, like a king and a king, like a king and queen.

“Thank you,” Laurent’s uncle called out to the crowd which only seemed to get louder in response. Acknowledging he wouldn’t get another word in, the man gestured instead to the models behind him, then at Laurent, and the sound became near unbearable in volume. Laurent moved behind his uncle, their hands still holding, and motioned for Ancel or Aimeric or someone to grab his other hand, and Aimeric did. Then all the models formed a line down the stage and they all began to bow in thanks. It was only when they had left the stage that the lights returned to normal and the music stopped. Damen and Nik made wide-eyed eye contact across the already-dispersing onlookers.

“Everyone’s practically running out of here,” Damen said to Nik as soon as they were in hearing distance.

“I just asked Jeurre about that. He said that the next show is at the Luxembourg Palace and with the amount of people in the city right now, traffic is a mess and nobody wants to be late.”

Nik looked flushed, the kind of flushed that came after a good workout and it made Damen grin. “How’d it go?”

“I think it went alright.” Damen gave him a look. “I think it went really well. We’re supposed to choose thirty photos to send in sometime over the next two days. I don’t know if I can decide on just thirty.”

“I’ll help.”

“Photographers!” came Charls voice. He sounded infinitely better than he had earlier, as if a well-done show had him feeling like himself again. “Please come to the dressing room. I’d desperately love some photos of everyone now too, there is so much elation!”

“One last call for Etoile,” Nik said.

Talik, who had been on the side of the stage Damen was sitting, motioned for Nik. She was standing with Herode, his orange-red hair and beard a standout with this group. The three of them began to walk toward the dressing room together and just as Damen went to follow, he heard his name.

“Damianos.”

Turning, Damen saw Laurent’s uncle near the seat he had been in before he had joined the models on the stage. Nicaise was with him, holding his hand the same way Laurent had been.

“I’ve only got a moment before I need to leave and attend Halvik’s show at the Luxembourg Palace, but I’d like to speak to you before I go.”

“Of course.”

Nicaise’s fingernails were painted gold. It was all Damen could look at as he approached, their hands so drastically different in size. Peeking out were Nicaise’s golden nails, gold like the jewels in his hair.

“Congratulations on the show,” Damen said before he could say something stupid. “I think it’s all anyone is going to talk about for a while.”

Laurent’s uncle smiled. “Thank you. I’m glad you think so. But do you know what would make it talked about even more? Social media attention placed on it.”

Damen nodded in agreement, dread filling the pit of his stomach.

“Have you thought about our conversation yesterday?”

“I have,” Damen said honestly.

“And?”

“And,” Damen started. He didn’t want to say no. No made it real and as much as he meant the no he couldn’t...commit to that not. Not when he hadn’t explored options. Not when — “And can I think about it a little more? It’s a big change from what I’ve been doing. I don’t want to rush into it.”

Nicaise scoffed.

“I can give you until tomorrow. But I’ll need an answer.” The man paused and perused the room with his eyes. “There’s nothing like this world, Damianos. There aren’t opportunities in abundance to enter it either. Think wisely about it. I’d hate to see a talented young man like yourself waste what you’ve been given.”

“I’ll think on it,” Damen promised, and Nicaise, the devil, scoffed again.

“Good. Now,” Laurent’s uncle held up Nicaise’s hand a little higher, a little tighter, “we’re off to Luxembourg then we’ll be celebrating. I trust you and your photographer friend will be at the party tonight?”

“I believe so,” Damen said, but it sounded more like a question.

As they left, Damen noted that Nicaise’s shoes were almost exact replicas of the shoes Laurent had worn in the show.

Grabbing his phone, Damen took a photo of the empty Etoile stage and posted it to his Instagram story, the same location tag of ‘Paris, France’ on it and simple hashtags: #Etoile and #ParisFashionWeek.

Within an hour, he had almost five thousand messages about it.

[paulinedorchester]

London, July 1943: Excerpt from a work in progress

After nearly twenty minutes, Foyle decides that he might as well walk.

A cab pulls up at the entrance to the Victoria Coach Station every few minutes, but the drivers favour passengers in uniform. Difficult to resent that in wartime, but it quickly becomes clear that they’re really looking for the Americans – ready, willing and able to pay twice the normal fare. There are throngs of them in London: on leave, newly returned from North Africa, giddy with the success of the Sicily landings. Foyle keeps looking for familiar faces but sees none.

It’s barely a mile to Charles and Pamela’s place, if he recalls correctly, and it’s a fine day. After almost three hours cooped up in the coach it’ll do him good to stretch his legs. He hasn’t brought much with him and his suitcase is easy to lift. He picks it up and sets out.

Travel remains slow and uncomfortable, as it has been for the past few years. The discomfort is as much psychological as physical. Posters with such inscriptions as Must you travel? and Is your journey really necessary? are still displayed at every station, and Foyle had weathered a few cold stares from passers-by as he entered the coach stop at Hastings.

But it’s Charles and Pamela’s twentieth wedding anniversary on Saturday, and it had been kind of them to invite him. He really doesn’t feel the need for a change of scene, as they seem to feel he must, but he is curious to know what London looks and feels like with no official duties to discharge, even in the midst of the war.

And the war is everywhere he looks. Westminster has been spared neither bombing nor the depredations of the war effort. The railings have been removed from the familiar public garden he passes as he walks north along Buckingham Palace Road, and the garden has been cut up into allotments.

Buckingham Palace itself, he recalls as he makes his way past it, was hit repeatedly in 1940; it’s hardly a moldering ruin, but clearly only stopgap repairs have been carried out, the King and Queen waiting out the shortage of manpower and materials along with the rest of the country.

And as he walks across the Green Park he sees that it’s the public garden writ large: stripped of ironwork, much of the land being used to grow food.

At length – it’s a longer walk than he’d remembered, after all – he reaches Arlington Street and the drive in front of Arlington House. In 1936 Charles and Pamela had given up the fine Georgian house in Highgate that they’d taken before their son Alan was born and moved into a large flat in this mansion block, just completed at the time in the height of modern style. The move was a practical one, they had said: the place was and is an easy walk from the Admiralty, where Charles’ duties were demanding increasingly long days, and their daughter Averill’s school – now evacuated to Yorkshire – was also fairly close by.

Arlington House still stands, but it’s sandbagged and most of its metal ornament is gone. Some windows on the lower storeys, Foyle observes, have been blown out and boarded up.

‘My name is Christopher Foyle – I’m here to visit Commander and Mrs Howard,’ Foyle tells the elderly porter, who looks him up and down in an appraising way.

‘Yes, sir. They’re expecting someone by that name,’ the porter concedes, sounding a bit skeptical. At once he adds, ‘May I see your identity card, please?’

Foyle had suspected, and still suspects, that Pamela was privately relieved at the end of the Howards’ conventional existence in the suburbs. As he waits for the lift he reflects, not for the first time, that it’s hard to decide which seems more unlikely: her decision to leave her earlier life of vaguely Bohemian gentility for marriage to a Naval officer, or Charles’ choice of her as his wife.

Not that they aren’t well suited. They were both born into well-to-do families whose fortunes had been made during the previous century from the more refined aspects of trade: fine printing and engraving in the Howards’ case, textiles for the Fourniers. Pamela’s parents, though tolerant of their daughter’s artistic inclinations, had put the kibosh on her youthful ambition to become a ballet dancer.

Of age by the time the last war began, she had joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, driving an ambulance between Calais and a point that was often unnervingly close to the front. After the war she’d been one of the countless women to whom marriage had seemed an unlikely prospect, if only given the small number of surviving men. Although she had no real need to earn her own living she’d found a position at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as a Deputy Company Manager, the first woman ever to fill that role.

And then, one evening in 1922, she’d somewhat reluctantly accompanied her father to a banquet at Drapers’ Hall. There she had been seated to the left of 1st Lt Charles Howard, R.N., a junior executive officer in attendance to represent the office that supplied Naval uniforms, still a bachelor at nearly thirty-two. (Foyle has never been entirely clear about how old Pamela is.) They were married nine months later. The wedding was a spectacular business in a Regency chapel of ease in St John’s Wood; Andrew, five years old and saucer-eyed throughout his first visit to London, had been a pageboy.

The brevity of their courtship had caused some talk, according to Rosalind. Still, it was a conventionally appropriate match – but also, Foyle knows, a very happy one. Pamela found Charles bright, witty and kind as well as quite handsome. His determination to remain in the Navy – in the teeth of his family’s expectation that, as the only surviving son, he would return to civilian life and enter the family business – had struck a chord with her, even as the novelty of life as a mildly rebellious bachelor girl with a toe in the demi-monde was beginning to wear off. Charles’ sense of duty was counterbalanced, and his own long-neglected aesthetic interests reawakened, by Pamela’s creative impulses and artistic connections.

It is Pamela herself who answers the door of the flat and laughs gently when her brother-in-law is unable to conceal his surprise.

‘Jill was called up,’ she explains, ‘and there’s really no hope of replacing her. They’ve all been called up! Not to worry, though — I haven’t yet taken over the kitchen. Mrs Ellis is still with us, bless her, so we won’t starve! It’s awfully good to see you, Christopher, and I’m very glad you’ve come. It means a great deal to Charles, as it does to me.’

Rosalind and Pamela had taken to each other at once, and became quite firm friends, Foyle recalls.

Mrs Ellis brings in tea, apologises for its meagerness and withdraws to the kitchen.

‘Would you care for something a bit stronger than mere tea?’ Pamela enquires. ‘I can imagine that you might need it, after travelling in this day and age. There’s no whiskey of any description, I’m afraid, but we do have a bottle of rather good Portuguese sherry.’

‘Well, um, perhaps a very small glass. Thank you.’

Sounding less facetious, she asks after Andrew.

‘He’s, um, he’s well,’ Christopher replies. ‘Not that it’s easy on him – not that I wouldn’t prefer to see him in some sort of nice, safe job at a desk – but he holds up all right on the whole. How’s Alan?’

‘Happy as the day is long — adores the Royal Naval College, talks constantly about the Painted Hall, and is quite convinced that we’ll win the day just as soon as he’s on active service!’

‘That’ll be, um, another two years, won’t it?’

‘Quite right,’ Pamela says dryly. ‘A bit long to wait, in my opinion. He has a chit for the week-end. He’s asked after you.’

‘It’ll be very good to see him. What about Averill?’

‘I’m afraid not — she won’t be here, I mean. Keighly’s a long way off, fifteen’s a bit young for such a long journey on one’s own — as I see it, at any rate — and they’re keeping those girls busy year ’round there. We haven’t seen her since Easter — and we went there. Quite a trek in these conditions! But there’s some good news on that score — the school’s coming back to London in September. I don’t know that I was meant to tell you that,’ she adds, ‘but there it is.’

‘Is that wise?’

‘Charles and I have had a few conversations about that, I can tell you! But Keighly’s not all that far from either Bradford or Leeds, and they’ve both been Blitzed. I suppose that the governors think that they may as well take their chances! In any case the decision’s been made — and it’ll be marvelous to have her home.’

‘Of course. I understand you have a new job,’ Christopher adds.

‘Yes. I’m afraid I wasn’t much good at making Sten guns — they showed me the door, Christopher, to be perfectly honest! — so I’ve joined CEMA as a sort of manager-at-large.’

Christopher frowns, puzzled.

‘Seema?’ he asks. ‘Oh, the Committee, um... ’

‘Or the Council, as it is now, for the Encouragement of Music and Arts.’

‘That part of the Government?’

‘No, not as such. It was run strictly on private funds at first, but Parliament has awarded us a hundred thousand pounds per annum — and Mr Bevin absolutely loathes us!’ Pamela adds with great glee. ‘Some of the people we’ve reached,’ she continues, sounding more serious now, ‘have never seen a live performance of anything before — they’ve simply never had the opportunity — unless it was the village amateur dramatic society, I suppose. It’s truly wonderful, Christopher — we’ve had letters from people who tell us that we’ve opened up whole new worlds for them! War does break down barriers — as dreadful as it is to think of it doing anything beneficial!’

‘I’ve often heard – um, the young woman who was my driver – I’ve often heard her say much the same thing.’

‘Would that be Miss Stewart?’

‘Oh – yes.’

‘We’ve heard some very encouraging things about her.’ Pamela smiles and sips her tea. ‘As it happens, CEMA is looking for a regional officer for the Hastings area. We have someone in Brighton, but she has her hands full with that region — and she’s expecting a baby in January.’

‘This a paying position?’

‘Oh, of course! Not lavishly, I’ll admit — two guineas per week to start with, plus travel expenses.’

‘That isn’t too bad,’ Christopher considers. ‘If I can think of a likely candidate I’ll let you know.’

‘I’d be quite grateful for that.’

Modern as the flat may be, it has a hearth and a mantel, with a clock sitting atop the latter that now strikes the hour.

‘Charles promised to come home at a reasonable time today,’ Pamela notes. ‘Christopher, I ought to tell you that he left here this morning in — I was about to say “in a foul mood,” but “in a highly unsettled state” might be a better way of describing it.’

‘What about?’ her brother-in-law asks, trying and failing to picture this.

‘I don’t know! I can tell you what brought it on, though — a letter that arrived in the morning post. But I didn’t see it — not the letter itself, I mean — and Charles didn’t tell me what was it said. All I know is that it seemed to agitate him a good deal. He took it away with him. Well, when I say that I didn’t see it, what I mean is that I didn’t read it,’ she goes on. ‘Of course I didn’t. But I did see that it was typed — on rather better paper than one is accustomed to seeing nowadays, and that the paper was marked.’

Christopher smiles dimly.

‘I’m no longer with the police, Pamela,’ he reminds her.

‘Well, no. I know that, of course. But isn’t it interesting, nonetheless?’

‘Depends on what’s in it.’

When the door to the flat opens a few minutes later; Pamela excuses herself and goes into the hall to greet her husband. Foyle hears both of them saying his name, and Charles using the words apologise and upset. After a few moments the Howards return to the sitting room.

‘Christopher! Wonderful to see you! Thank you so very much for joining us,’ Charles begins, shaking his brother-in-law’s hand. ‘How was your journey up? We’ve been hearing the most terrible stories,’ he goes on. On the surface he’s the same as ever, but something has changed behind his kind eyes. Something has rattled him.

‘Oh, can’t complain,’ Christopher replies.

Charles asks after Andrew and – with a vagueness that seems almost deliberate, as though the subject were slightly too indelicate to bring up – enquires as to whether Christopher is keeping himself satisfactorily occupied these days. These subjects having been discussed, there is a short silence during which he looks first pensive, then determined.

‘Pamela tells me that she’s put you in the picture about my... well, my loss of an even keel this morning.’

‘Well, um, she told me that it occurred,’ Christopher replies.

‘Mm. There was a letter in the morning post that gave me quite a shock. As the day went on, though, it dawned on me that it concerns both of you as well,’ Charles continues, glancing at Pamela and then back to Christopher. ‘Please correct me if I’m wrong, Christopher, but I don’t believe that you ever met my brother – and of course I know that you never did, Pamela.’

‘Knew him only by reputation,’ Christopher affirms. Captain Nicholas Howard, 4th Battalion, Royal Surrey Regiment, had been killed in action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

‘Yes. Well. It seems that there was at least one thing about him that I didn’t know either.’ Charles falls silent again, looking perplexed. He reaches inside his jacket, brings out an envelope and removes its contents, which he offers to his wife and brother-in-law. ‘Perhaps it would be best if you both simply read this.’

He watches for a moment as Pamela and Christopher stand side by side, each holding an edge of the letter paper, taking in its contents. Then he looks out of a window.

[have-some-gotdamn-faith]

Hey, hope it's not too much but can you write something (anything really) about a depressed reader in camp and the others reactions/what they do? (Feel kinda... Off again today and I wanna pretend the gang would care about me being sad)

I would be delighted tbh, and I’m sorry to hear you’re going through a dip---mine’s been so bad lately that I actually called out of work. I understand, bab, so lets write you some feel-good stuff

Cut for length cause this post definitely ran away with me.

Gang reacts to (fem!)Reader in a Depressive Episode

-- Arthur --

would approach the topic tenderly---he’s seen you like this before, and knows how difficult it can be for you to express immediately how you’re doing

will help with chores---lifting heavier things, speaking with Grimshaw on your behalf, etc

he’ll make sure you’re fed and check in with your general self care, to make sure it’s not being neglected

does his best to make you laugh in his own, goofy way

will absolutely enlist Lenny and/or Sean to help distract from the bad feels---shenanigans are imminent when drink is involved

if you need to be away from the chaos, he’ll take you fishing or simply ask you to take a walk with him

doesn’t necessarily make conversation, he just allows you to Be until you decide otherwise

-- Charles --

picks up on the mood shift pretty quickly, but won’t directly acknowledge it

he knows what it is to feel not-so-great on the inside, and doesn’t like to be confronted on it all the time

but you’ll know he knows by how his attention towards you takes an uptick

he’s always...close, nearby

when he finally does ask after you, it’s on an outing of some sort---probably hunting or even errand running

or, if your outing sees you both gone over a few days, he’ll ask at your small campfire

he won’t pry, but you know you can vent what you like and he’s a willing ear

he’ll be the one to surprise you on y’all’s return with a natural trinket he thought you might like

something you can hide in your pocket or tie through with a leather cord to wear---it’s something to ground you and your thoughts when they’re running away with you

-- Javier --

like Charles, he’s not one to immediately say anything, but he DOES notice

while he’s a little more open towards trying to get you to talk about it---little by little!---he’s just as content with easing your pain

if he’s ever taking some solitary time, and he wants to share it with you, he’ll call you over to sit next to him while he plucks away at his guitar

if Javier is playing any songs you know, he gently encourages you to sing along

otherwise, he’s happy enough to provide a distraction to the nasty bullying going on in your head

will ask you to dance---if you’re feeling up to it, he sets a very slow, even pace (he don’t need music to whirl you around!)

if you’re not up with it, he’s fine with keeping you company at the table or on one of the logs

-- Kieran --

he knows this song and dance, and recognizes it immediately in you

it hurts him to see you so pained, and will do what he can to ease it

horses are his natural go-to, and will invite you to help him with tending to the camp’s steeds

specifically, he’ll have you feed them sweets and brush their coats

when all those tasks are done, he wants to ask you to join him in the shade, but doesn’t want to push your boundaries

instead he might say something like, ‘I think we’ve earned a break, there’s a nice spot over here to sit’ and hopes you’ll take the bait

speaking of bait, definitely bank on fishing trips---it’s another good way to clear your head, or at least distract it

he’ll congratulate you on each catch you make, in hopes of lifting your spirits even a little

-- the Girls --

ERRANDS TRIP

seriously, best way to at least try and lift your spirits is to get you the hell outta camp and maybe do some shopping

maybe even raise a little bit of hell on your way out

I feel like Tilly is low-key wildly good at card games, and will likely ask you to accompany her to whatever poker game is going on at the local saloon

also security in numbers, lbr

Karen is the one taking you to the tailor’s, having you put on a fashion show and clapping excitedly at everything that looks marvelous on you

Mary-Beth is the one perusing the sundries shop and (where applicable) the local bookshops, and will ask you to help her pick out her next novel

somehow all y’all end up at the gunsmith and the shopkeep is very surprised at how many women are in here looking through the catalogue

will get rounded on quickly if he dares make a comment, so he doesn’t, and y’all peruse at your leisure

when all the excitement is done, that’s when they’ll approach the situation seriously, and make sure you’re okay

field trip through any flower fields y’all find, cause its mandatory!

[caroline18mars]

A Man On Fire - Chapter 63

"Now that we’re together I wanted to wish you a late Happy birthday in person..I don't know if you heard or read my messages I left, you didn't spend it on your own, did you?" somehow he found himself holding his breath for the answer he already knew, “I did and it was very uhm..insightful” oh he was taking the emotional road, I’m condemned to you but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it, in fact could you stop talking altogether?. “I felt really bad, you know me not being there for you on that day..I had all these things planned for your birthday back in Europe..but..” the food was lovely, the company was more than exquisite, he was calm, she was calm, in fact if he didn’t know any better, he would say this was the best Christmas eve’ in years. “Yeah well..anyway, you’ve got a birthday coming up as well..big plans?” this was a disaster, this was like scooping your own heart out with a spoon, but what was she to do? she had nowhere else to run “knowing you it’ll be a huge party full of booze and dope, 10 girls on each finger who’ll obediently grant your every sexual desire” another shot fired, don’t care, he had it coming. For some reason, Jared felt himself go bright red, don’t get angry, let her vent, she’s entitled to it “no..nothing planned, I mean Shannon and Mom will come over but no nothing planned..and for the record, I’m not sleeping around and I’m not interested in other girls..” as he said it, the music started playing and a dancefloor in the middle of the room was revealed. “May I have this dance?” out of the blue a man popped up behind her that held out his hand “what? Oh..eh yes sure” she stammered, dancing in between meals how refreshing, as she stood up she caught a glimpse of a shocked Jared, his eyes shooting daggers at the guy, how do you like it now the shoe is on the other foot, you don’t do you?. “You looked like you needed to be saved from a situation there, I’m Nathan by the way and it’s probably a bit too forward but you look absolutely stunning” the man dancing with her in his arms smiled, “thank you..Nathan, I’m Harper Coco, but I’m good with just Harper or Coco” classic, tall, handsome stranger, not the guy she went for normally but hey he was charming and he smelled divine. Jared couldn’t keep his eyes off of her even though his blood was boiling that it was not him twirling her around the dancefloor and holding her close, and could everyone stop those horrible ‘oohhhs’ and ‘ahhhss’, of course I know she is the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth and an amazing dancer.

”You ok?” Nathan smiled at her as the song ended “I’m fine, thank you for the dance” she took a step back already, “no, thank you! Maybe we can catch up later, have some wine, talk some more” he reluctantly let go of her hand, “sure yeah” she smiled and turned to go and left his heart dancing in hope and joy. “Looks like you’ve got an admirer..so I take it you two know each other? He held you real close” Jared felt his heart pound in his throat, yes he was jealous, so what? “looks like it, it’s none of your business but no I don’t know him and yes it’s nice being held again by a real man who’s genuinely interested in me” she calmly sat down and put her napkin back in her lap while the main course was being served. He couldn’t take it anymore and got up, acting like nothing was wrong he crossed the dancefloor over to the deserted hallway, just leave, let it be, there’s clearly nothing left to fight for, he fucked up, she moved on, “peacetalks not going so well?” Charles strolled up to him. “That’s the least you can say, it’s over, I went too far..she’s building up her life again without me..like ‘we’ never happened” he shook his head, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Jared..because that’s the issue here isn’t it? You cheating on her? I’m not gonna lie, I swear I’d never cheat if I had a beautiful creature like your Harper in my bed every night” Charles raised his eyebrows. “I never meant to, I was high..and drunk” there was a bit of a sob in his voice, “happens to the best of us..so you’re just gonna let some guy sweep her off her feet right in front of you, or are you gonna fight for her? Ask yourself the question, Jared, how bad do you want her? So bad that you’ll risk everything to get her back even if that means getting rejected by her again?” Charles dug his hands into the pockets of his designer tuxedopants and cocked his head staring at his friend. Jared bit his lip and then took a deep breath “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get her back..it destroys me just thinking that I’ll never see her again after tonight, but there’s a possibility and..” but Charles cut him off “there’s no ‘but’ in love Jared, so what if she’s headstrong and has a strong will? It takes one to know one? So you got yourself a bit of a lioness I see..rowwhhrr I bet she’s a beast in bed too” he giggled. “A gentleman never tells..but if you really must know she’s absolutely sensational in bed” a little smile appeared around Jared’s lips, it was the first time in god knows how long that he actually smiled again, “Well? What the fuck are you waiting for then?”

”There you are, I thought you'd gone” was that hope or dissapointment in her voice? “maybe they can re-heat it for you, it's really delicious” Harper took another bite, she could do with some food, he couldn't help but notice how her luscious curves had been reduced to the absolute minimum. “No, it's fine” he sat back down next to her and started eating, even though it tasted like sand to him, he felt like a like a lovesick schoolkid again, couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, could only think about her “you're right, it really is delicious”. Harper shuffled in her seat “I saw Charles following you..so how do you two know each other?” what if this deal she agreed on with him was nothing more than a cruel joke? Jared put his fork down for a second, god I'm glad you're actually asking me a question I can answer “I walked into the gallery one day looking to buy a few paintings for my new house about a year ago, I bought a bit more than I was planning on so he took me out to dinner and we've been really good friends ever since”. She nodded with a deep sigh “I see” and picked up her fork again, “so did you put him up to this? And the truth this time, please?” her question made him frown “what? No, I didn't put him up to anything, ok yes I must have mentioned something about being in love but I don't remember mentioning your name, he's probably seen you and your work on my socials, he probably thought I was still on tour in Europe while you were stuck here in NY, and wanted to surprise us both..why?”. He saw her bite her lip, what was going on? “ok, so he made me an incredible offer”, oh of course “he wants to exhibit your work?”, she nodded “well Harper, if there's one thing I can say about Charles, it's that he's the best in the trade and so are you..so it doesn't surprise me one bit, you're an amazing talent and it's high time the world gets to see that talent”. His words were followed by another one of her deep sighs “I don't know..I don't know if I'm ready, what if it turns out to be a disaster?”, on instinct he took her hand “Harper, listen to me! It's not gonna be a disaster, this is your chance to impress the world just like you impressed me and Charles, so do me a favour and fuckin' start to believe in yourself”. Harper pulled her hand out of his grasp, just because there had a bit of an armistice going on didn't mean the war was over “I need to..I'm going to the bathroom” she mumbled as she grabbed her purse, she just needed to get away from him for a bit, let things sink in, it was all a bit much right now.

For the rest of the night that guy kept hovering around her, trying to sweep her off her feet, stay calm, seize the moment, if there's ever gonna be another one..he downed his drink in one go and tried to socialize with his contacts. “So, still interested in getting a drink somewhere?” Nathan whispered in her ear while they were dancing again, “not tonight, have you seen the weather, everything's snowed under” she shook her head with a faint smile. The party was nearing the end, and just the thought of having to get back to her cold apartment by herself depressed her, “ok then..give me your phone, I'll put my number in there and give me a call tomorrow, how does that sound?” he almost had his hand halfway down her purse already. A little annoyed she pulled her phone out, a little too forward maybe? Oh definitely, ah well let him put in his number, she was gonna have a really good think if she even wanted to call him. Nathan pulled her in for a hug, suddenly it didn't feel right for her, in the corner of her eye she could see Jared standing there, hands in his pockets watching her. “Ok bye” she gave him a faint smile, turned and headed for the hall, “were you planning on saying goodbye to me at all?” Jared walked up to her while she waited for her coat, “uhh yeah, of course, I just wanted to get my coat while they call me a cab. “I'm afraid there's no cabs in this weather, even the airports are closed” Derek said having overheard the conversation, “what? oh..but..” a little panic washed over her, this was the other side of the city..

“My car's waiting outside, I'll give you a lift” Jared shrugged and didn't wait for her answer putting his hand gently on the small of her back guiding her outside. “Careful” he looked at her high heels ploughing through the snow and only let go of her to open the door of the huge SUV and helped her inside, “good evening Miss” the driver greeted her “it's gonna be a slow ride, but we'll get you home”. Harper gently touched his shoulder while Jared hopped in the front of the car “thank you, I really appreciate it”, Jared quickly tapped in her address in the satnav and the car slowly moved forward. The drive home seemed endless and the snow just kept on falling, “I'm sorry, Miss but several streets are blocked, including yours..” the driver gave her a worried look in the rear view mirror “oh..I see, well drop me off here and I'll walk” she didn't see any other solution. Jared and the driver briefly looked at Jared who then gave him a firm nod and mumbled something she couldn't understand, five minutes later the car pulled up in front of a hotel, what? This was nowhere near her home. Jared jumped out of the car and held open her door “I don't know my way around here” she said in a hoarse voice, “you don't have to, you're staying right here” he held up his hand to help her out of the car again, “Ben, take the car home with you, you live close by right?”. The driver nodded “yeah just another 5 minutes, call me tomorrow when you need me, merry christmas”, Jared gave him a small wave “merry christmas, Ben” and threw the door shut. “I don't know about this, I don't think I can afford..” Harper bit her lip, thinking about all the bills she still had to pay, “you don't have to worry about money, they're all booked up anyway so you're staying with me” what? Was this some kind of joke? Noticing the shocked expression on her face Jared tried to reassure her “do you have a better option? No? I didn't think so either, come on, it's freezing and I still have a whole tour ahead, I can't afford to get sick standing around in the snow”. He opened the door of the suite for her “after you”, she walked in with her arms folded around her chest, not saying a word, she just stood there in the middle of the room, her body language screaming discomfort. “Coffee?” he walked past her, her scared big eyes following his every move, “ok” she breathed, “the fact that we're no longer lovers doesn't mean we can't be in the same room together, have a seat” Jared picked up the phone and ordered some roomservice. “Why don't you take off your shoes and let them dry by the fire, it's not as if you're going anywhere tonight” that smile of his and the art of putting her mind at ease was something she had missed so much.

[showbizchicago]

Interview with Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright TONY KUSHNER

Known for his groundbreaking works including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America and the Olivier-awarded Caroline, Or Change, Tony Kushner has become one of the most prolific playwrights of our generation.  I sat down with Mr. Kushner who was in Chicago to receive the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. MJR:Let’s talk about The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, a new work that you developed at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis this past year.  How did the concept come to fruition for you? TK: The way all ideas come about. I had been thinking for a very long time about writing it a play that dealt specifically with LGBT issues and I had also been thinking of dealing with Marxism onstage in the Perestroika era. I’ve always wanted to do something about American Marxism or American Communism specifically so all of that came together when Joe Dowling asked me to do a new play for the celebration that the Guthrie did of my work. They performed Caroline, Or Change and 5 short plays last spring. MJR: Speaking of Caroline, Or Change, the Chicago production mounted by Court Theatre won four Joseph Jefferson Awards including Best Musical was an unequivocal success.  Tell us about your partnership with Jeanine Tesori during the development of Caroline. TK: Jeanine is an amazingly talented composer. In my opinion the best composer writing for the theatre living. I am enormously happy and consider myself very fortunate that we hooked up. I never enjoyed working with anyone as much as I enjoyed working with Jeanine. We’re currently working on a new piece together. MJR: Story-wise, Caroline, or Change explored your upbringing in Louisiana. What was the process of transferring a semi-autobiographical narrative to the musical stage? TK: Well of course Caroline is a fictional character. The character is loosely based on the woman who worked as a maid for my family when I was a kid. It was actually dedicated to her.  She just turned 80. There are episodes and certain details in the play that are absolutely from my childhood. I grew up in Louisiana. But the piece is not autobiographic in any kind of reliable sense. The character of Caroline is some degree based on but many of the details of her life are different.

Jeff Award Winner E. Faye Butler in CAROLINE OR CHANGE MJR: As a playwright, what was the most challenging component of musicalizing text to propel a narrative? TK: I wrote the whole thing before I started working with Jeanine so in a way it was like writing a play. It was in a loosely rhymed and metered verse. To some degree it’s like learning a new language because there’s a lot about musical theatre that requires very specific skills that I do not have. I have very little experience working with the form. So I was guided to a great extent by Jeanine and by George Wolfe . But there was a lot that I had to learn about how to construct a moment with music. Caroline is essentially an opera, it’s through-composed. We were both learning a lot while we were doing it. I’m working with Jeanine now on a new piece and I’ve already begun things I didn’t know. In some ways Caroline was easier than most of the plays that I’ve done because it was so much more collaborative. Once I had written a libretto in the first draft I began to work with Jeanine very closely; I wrote the words, she wrote the music with much overlap. We went through every word and every note very thoroughly. I had to learn a very different tempo in terms of how to do re-writes because if you’re doing a musical and you exchange a line, that changes any of the music. And in previews you’re dealing with giant and very cumbersome machinery, and orchestrations. The singers have to learn the music which is a very different process than just learning a new line so it was complicated. MJR: The musical spurred quite a reaction here at Chicago’s Court Theatre. Have audiences received the show differently in varying parts of the country? TK: I actually haven’t seen it in the South yet. It’s been done in a few places including Lake Charles. Everywhere that it’s been done it’s been very successful, people have responded with great enthusiasm. It was a big hit in London, it won the Olivier award. It’s done very well everywhere. Certainly there are times when it’s felt very different. Jeanine and I came out to see it in Chicago right before the election, right down the street from the Obama house. That was certainly a different kind of feeling, kind of an electric and exciting feeling to be let into the Court in the anticipation of the election. Last spring when it was at the Guthrie it was interesting to see the play post-Obama. Obviously the line when Noah says Caroline is the President of the United States meant one thing 45 years ago. Now when there actually is an African American president in the United States it has a slightly different quality. That’s true for most plays today; the surrounding context changes in locale and time, and they become different.

MJR: HBO has been showing Angels in America for the past month. That dramatic sequence was groundbreaking for several communities. How do you think LGBT issues have shaped theatre in the past two decades, and how has theatre informed the community? TK: Well I don’t think my play . I think that one could say that with Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart.   It coincided with relating to the AIDS epidemic for our community. Angels in America came around later. I have no idea what Angels did or didn’t accomplish beyond the fact that it’s a good play. And that’s the most I ever hoped for. The question of the relationship between LGBT politics and theatre is an interesting one. Obviously an enormous number of people who work in theatre are from the sexual minority area and community. I think there’s a reason for that. It’s where we’ve been contributing to theatre in percentages disproportionate to our percentage in the normal population. And I think that on one hand it’s the case that communities of the oppressed very often find a home in the theatre because people who are oppressed learn the difference between what something seems to be and what it actually is; irony, which is an important ingredient in the theatre, the shaking of reality- these are all things that are part of the everyday life of everyone who has a lived experience of oppression. So I think it makes sense that we would be found in greater numbers in the theatre. Theatre is always very quick to respond to moments of social crisis because it doesn’t take any money or particular organization of capital  to make a play. You just find a good writer, actors, director, and a theatre willing to do it and you can put together a play about any subject fairly quickly, certainly much more quickly than you can with most instances of film or television. Theatre is always a good quick response. It is also the place that we go to in order to grapple with social issues of real moment. If you allow Angels to be anything other than a good play, it allowed for a moment in the early 90s at the end of the first chapter to provide a public place for mourning the people who had died in the phase of the epidemic. It was also way of celebrating the end of the Reagan era; there was a great deal of release when Clinton beat the first Bush. We thought, however incorrectly, that we had closed the door on the nightmare of Reaganism which was a pernicious ideology that appeared at the same time as the AIDS virus. So I think that the play was about those things, connected to those things, and provided a public opportunity. MJR: You just finished wrapping up a new screenplay on both the life and work of Abraham Lincoln for Steven Spielberg. What provokes your interest in this particular era of our nation’s history? TK: I worked on for the last three years. We’re working on moving it into the next phase. It’s the time period where every tension and every unresolved conflict in American history prior to the Civil War came to a boil, and eventual explosion. Everything that this country is struggling to become emerges from the crucible of the Civil War. I think Abraham Lincoln, in my opinion, is inarguably our greatest president and one of the greatest people that ever lived- just a completely remarkable figure. I am tremendously interested in him and in his era. MJR: Your stage works are inherently both dialogic and dialectic in form. What keeps your interest in film as a narrative medium, especially since it is often one that focuses on the monologic story? TK: I think film is an extraordinary medium. Many great works of art in the 20th century were created by filmmakers. I feel that’s it’s more narrative driven than theatre, it’s certainly more all-encompassing kind of illusion. I think it doesn’t play as much as theatre does with questions of illusion and reality. To a certain extent I feel as though film is a degree more isolating, it’s perhaps less of a communal experience, though certainly the thing that all the audience’s attention is focused on does not respond to what the audience is telling it. It’s the same from one showing to the next. Obviously there are some stories that cannot be told onstage that can be told on film, there’s just a mathematical question of how many individuals can be reached by a film or television show as opposed to theatre. For me there’s a certain pleasure in surrendering the absolute authority; a playwright in the theatre has, if nothing else, the authority that comes from property ownership. I own the play, I rent the play to the producers, directors, and actors to perform, but it’s mine. When people get together to do a play one of the only common grounds they have to stand is the script. In film, it’s much more the director. The playwright doesn’t own his or her own words. It’s interesting to me and in some ways enjoyable to hand that authority over to somebody else and to be one person among a number who is working to create this final product, but not the person who finally has the decisive say in what it’s going to be. I’ve gotten to work with a few artists I admire enormously Steven Spielberg, Mike Nichols…that’s been thrilling. I got to watch both of them make a movie and I’ve learned a lot from doing that. MJR: You’ve noted before your concern of reducing characters, specifically individuals like Lincoln, into dramatic figures. Do you employ a different approach in humanizing characters for the stage as opposed to a screen medium? TK: Hamlet is a dramatic character, but there’s no reduction in Hamlet. I could think of a dozen film characters as rich as any human being could be. Lincoln is a genius on the level of Mozart or Shakespeare and it’s very difficult and possibly impossible for someone who isn’t a genius to come to any kind of understanding of how Lincoln did what he did. I think that it’s probably impossible for us to know those things. To try and create a dramatic device that is going to deliver the secret of Lincoln’s inner genius or the secret of how Mozart wrote the Requiem or how Shakespeare wrote Hamlet is kind of nonsense. You can’t do that. These are leaps of the human imagination that are so vast and so extraordinary, and rare, that they’re really in a certain sense immeasurable and incomprehensible. What we have is the consequence which is somewhat immeasurable and incomprehensible. There is no one who will ever say everything there is to say about Hamlet, it’s infinite as much as any human creation can be called infinite. I don’t feel that there is any necessary for dumbing down or reducing my ambition as a playwright because I am writing a screenplay. I feel that I can write characters that are just as rich onscreen as they are onstage. There are certain requirements that the forms have that are very different; language is different, the way you construct a character for a script that hopefully many different people will use or perform is different than when you’re writing a script for a director for one movie. So you have a sense that what you are doing is much more for a specific moment.

Tony Kushner, Jeanine Tesori at Court Theatre's CAROLINE OR CHANGE. MJR: Tell us about your process of developing a new work for stage production. TK: I don’t feel that I ever get inspired to do anything. Various impulses come at me during the course of a day just as they came at anybody. I read stories or I remember things that I’ve seen that seem of interest to me because I’m a playwright, that’s my job. I take note of those things and I write them down. If something that I’ve seen or been intrigued by sticks around, I’ll start to wonder if there is something in it that might become a play. If I feel clearer and clearer about why it’s interesting to me- whether it be a person, image, or event in history- I’ll start to keep a separate notebook about it and start to think of what could come as the basis of a play. You mull over five or six things at a time and for one reason or another one of them will the surface. MJR: Do you often find yourself become reclusive during this process? TK: I certainly try to . You should. It’s a good idea to do that. It’s always a mistake to not make that kind of time, but it’s one of the hard things about being a playwright. Part of our time is spent in rooms with a lot of people. Isolation is hard for everybody but for some people it’s easier. If you can’t handle isolation you certainly should not be a novelist or a poet. Playwrights I think in general have a tricky balancing act to do between providing material for the excitement and electricity and sexual heat of a rehearsal room-also the fun and terror of being in the theatre with an audience- and being alone in a room. When I’m really deep in the first draft of a play or screenplay I become slightly antisocial. It’s very hard to talk to people, to be out in the world. I think that everybody who writes experiences this to some extent. You have to kind of smooth your skin away and become available to becoming other people, so you lower boundaries and you remove skin and you make yourself slightly less well-organized than you are in everyday life. It’s hard to go out in public that way. I think it’s easier if you can get the play done in the first draft and then resume your public life; otherwise I think you feel sort of unpresentable and you probably are .  Read the full article

[youknowmymethods]

Content Creator Interview #8

Here we are again folks, number 8! This time we’re continuing on from last week’s interview with a bit of role reversal, @ellis-hendricks posing questions to her friend and beta @geekmama, chatting about Brit-picking, bad writing habits, favourite authors, and, most importantly, which of Sherlock’s shirts does it for her. 

But starting off with a recap of last week’s intro...

We are, respectively, a Californian and a Geordie, and we got to know each other through reading and reviewing each other’s fics (geekmama’s ‘Time of the Season’ series was one of the first fics I read and loved). Geekmama has been writing in the fandom for around 3 years, and I’ve been doing the same for around 2 years, spurred on by the end of series 4 (and the ILY scene in particular). We started beta-reading each other’s work around a year ago, and are always discovering new and unexpected words and phrases that don’t translate across the pond! Although we’ve used the same set of questions for these interviews, we haven’t seen each other’s answers – so it does mean that if nobody else is interested, at least we will be!

Series

 ellis-hendricks: Was there a particular moment in the series that set the ship sailing for you?

geekmama: I think it was A Scandal in Belgravia, and specifically Sherlock’s unprecedented apology to Molly, that got me thinking that the possibility was there, that it wasn’t just Molly’s schoolgirl crush vs. Sherlock’s needs when the game was on. I have to say, even though the Sherlock/Molly ship is easy to board, Mofftiss, etc., were very clever about leaving the way open for other pairings throughout the series. Even the ILY scene and its fallout could be interpreted very differently, if one was so inclined. It is really thanks to all the amazing fanfic authors out there that I jumped on board and took up residence on the good ship Sherlolly.

ellis-hendricks: What's your favourite episode and why?

geekmama: I love bits and pieces of all of them, but the one that I’ve watched more than any other is The Sign of Three. It’s heartwarming, hilarious, and only mildly heartbreaking. Even the villain of the piece, as little as we see him, has a motive one can understand.

ellis-hendricks: If you could ask/tell the series writers one thing, what would it be?

geekmama: Killing off Mary was a mistake, and I don’t care if that event sets up the entire story arc of season four, you should have thought of something else. Come on! You are brilliant writers, you could have done it.

ellis-hendricks: Do you have a controversial opinion about the series? E.g. a character who everyone else hates, but who you love?

geekmama: Or everyone loves but you hate? I’d say Moriarty qualifies. Andrew Scott is very cute, but though he’s in a number of the episodes we’re never given much insight to his character’s motives. Moriarty is pretty much just murderously insane in canon, and I don’t understand how one gets around that to write Molly/Moriarty or any of the slash pairings.

ellis-hendricks: Have you ever, when watching an episode, cracked a case before Sherlock?

geekmama: Well, if the writers want us to, then we’re given the information to crack the case before Sherlock.  The series is about him, after all. The cases are secondary.

ellis-hendricks: With whom would you rather be stuck at a wedding table –

Janine or Irene?

geekmama: Janine, she is just fun and rather ordinary, whereas Irene has numerous ulterior motives under her veneer of smug vanity.    

ellis-hendricks: Donovan or Anderson?

geekmama: Anderson, since he actually felt remorse for what they did to Sherlock, and came to admire him, too. There might be more to Donovan than what we’re given, and certainly that’s what fanfic is for -- I’ve made her a sympathetic character in a couple of my own fics. And apparently she and Sherlock have some pretty interesting history between them.

ellis-hendricks: Who would you rather bring back in series 5 - Mary or Moriarty?

geekmama: Mary, of course -- she is a far more well-rounded (and loveable) character. One wants to know more about her.

ellis-hendricks: Whose house would you prefer to live in - Sherlock's, John & Mary's, Molly's or Mrs Hudson's?

geekmama: Probably Molly’s, though Sherlock’s would be tempting. Molly’s looks pretty state-of-the-art in the ILY scene, if rather bland -- I couldn’t imagine Molly living in a place that’s all granite gray. It doesn’t reflect her personality at all, and I didn’t even think it could be her home the first time I saw that episode.

ellis-hendricks: In your opinion, who has been the best series villain - Jim Moriarty, Charles Magnussen, Culverton Smith, or Eurus Holmes?

geekmama: Eurus. We’re at least given some idea of her motives, and one can feel some sympathy for her, even though she is as insanely murderous as the other three. The other three are pretty equally revolting.

 Your writing

 ellis-hendricks: What was your first fic? What prompted it, and how do you feel about it now?

geekmama: My first in the Sherlock fandom was Visiting Hours, written in March 2016. I first watched seasons 1-3 of Sherlock in October 2015 and I’d been reading other authors’ work for several months. There were ideas I wanted to explore, and I wanted to see if I could still write at all, lol! I hadn’t written anything since July of 2013, when I celebrated a decade of being in the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom with a series of ten 50 word drabbles. Visiting Hours is only 100 words, official drabble length, and it’s held up pretty well, I think. I don’t hate it, at least.

ellis-hendricks: Which fic are you most proud of/most attached to, and why?

geekmama: This is a really difficult question since I’ve written quite a few Sherlock fics. If I had to narrow it down, maybe Idiots in Love, which is part of the Aftermath series and from Greg Lestrade’s pov, which is always fun, and The Kensington House, kid!fic from my Time of the Season series. But then there are all  the holiday fics… and the historical AU’s…

ellis-hendricks: You write great AUs set in other historical periods - do you prefer this or present day?

geekmama: I’ve read, and written, a lot of historical fiction, and certainly writing it comes much more easily to me than writing something set in the present day -- particularly current culture in the UK. It’s a good thing my dear Ellis_Hendricks is willing to Brit-pick for me. I did my best, but I’m sure my early Sherlock fic has plenty of errors in that regard. That was the most difficult thing for me when I was beginning to write in this fandom. However, I have grown to enjoy writing fic set in the present almost as much as writing historical fic.

ellis-hendricks: What are your worst writing habits?/What are your most overused phrases, plotlines, etc?

geekmama: Wow. There are probably a LOT of bad habits (run-on sentences, excessive use of parentheses and ellipses, etc. etc.etc.), and overused phrases/words. As for plotlines, I find the (comparatively) reality-based canon of Sherlock to be somewhat limiting to begin with (which is why AU’s were invented, I suppose). I try not to repeat plotlines, but of course I’ve used post-ILY scenarios multiple times (and no doubt will again -- the anniversary is coming up on the 15th), and I tend to overdo the h/c as that’s one of my favorite things.

ellis-hendricks: Do you have a writing routine? Where and when? And is everything digital, or are things ever handwritten first?

geekmama: Laptop, ideally in the morning, alone in bed (except for a pile of snoozing dogs), with no distractions like music etc. I can write with the TV or music on, but it takes a lot longer to produce anything. I haven’t produced finished handwritten works since I was in high school, and when I first got back into writing in late 2003 it was on a laptop I borrowed from work -- and it was a revelation! I wouldn’t bother handwriting more than a drabble or the outline of a story, now. Computers FTW!!!

ellis-hendricks: Who do you enjoy writing the most?

geekmama: Sherlock (if I have to choose -- I love Molly, Mycroft, and Lestrade pov, too).

ellis-hendricks: Who do you find easiest/hardest doing first person POV? - Sherlock seems fairly easy a lot of the time (hopefully readers agree -- I may be way off base, who knows?), and maybe Molly for hardest. We see so little of Molly over the course of the series it’s sometimes difficult for me to get a handle on her.

ellis-hendricks: Which fic would you recommend to someone who has never read your stuff before? - Benefit of the Doubt, maybe. I like the way it came out. It was one of those that practically wrote itself.

ellis-hendricks: What do you value most when it comes to feedback?

geekmama: Any feedback is very much appreciated, from Kudos to brief comments, but it’s always nice when someone references a particular phrase or idea they liked. I know how difficult that is to do, sometimes, though.

ellis-hendricks: Would you ever go back and revise old fics - or do you consign them to history once they're published?

geekmama: If I discover (or someone points out) an error I will go back and correct it, but I don’t really revise my stories once they are posted.

ellis-hendricks: What's the nicest/weirdest bit of feedback you've ever had? And does feedback ever influence what you write next, either within a story or in terms of future fics?

geekmama: I have to say I’ve had a lot of great, encouraging comments over the years, and maybe a few negative ones, mostly on FF.net, which I pretty much ignore, though one or two brought up interesting points. I think mostly people leave a comment if they really like something, or just go away if they don’t. Feedback does influence what I write to an extent -- say if someone really wants more of a certain story, or aspect of a story, that gets me thinking how it could be done.

ellis-hendricks: Do you - or would you - write other pairings?

geekmama: Well, yes, I’ve written Mycroft/Lady Smallwood, and John/Mary, and I have a few fics that reference Lestrade/OFC. And of course there are other F/M possibilities. But mostly it’s Sherlock/Molly.

ellis-hendricks: How would you define your style? (E.g. mine was called 'fluffy realism’, which I quite liked!)

geekmama: I agree with that ‘fluffy realism’ definition, the sweetest stuff and easily related to. I would call mine “Romance” if I had to choose a word, the old definition of romance that entails fluff, angst, humor, adventure -- all the stuff that makes a story interesting and fun to read.

ellis-hendricks: What's your method in approaching a story? Do you plan methodically, or wing it?

geekmama: I am somewhere in between. With longer fic I sometimes use an outline, but more often I have a basic plot in mind, complete with ending, and think about it until I’m finally ready (and have the time) to write it.

ellis-hendricks: Who do you write for? Is it you, or are you thinking about trying to please your audience?

geekmama: Mostly me. I started writing fanfic in the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom because I wasn’t seeing fic that went where I wanted to go with that story. With Sherlock it was some of that, and the fact that I wanted to further explore these compelling characters, and writing fic was the best way to do that. But I do write for my audience, to an extent, and it is fun to accept a prompt or theme from someone and write to it. In the PotC fandom we had a weekly drabble challenge for years, and I really miss that sort of thing.

ellis-hendricks: Do you have any WIPs, and do you think new chapters will ever see the light of day?

geekmama: I do have a WIP, Souvenirs, for which I’ve written a couple of additional chapters, and hope to finish some day. But it sort of got waylaid by the whole post-ILY thing. I may finish it. You never know. I also hope to write some more of that Regency AU, Uncertain Terms.

ellis-hendricks: Are you working on anything at the moment?

geekmama: I’m going to try to write something for the ILY Anniversay (January 15th).

ellis-hendricks: What’s harder for you - writing the start of a fic, or coming up with a decent title?

geekmama: Writing the start, I guess. Titles are usually easy. It’s plot and particularly a good ending that take a lot of work.

 Reading other people's fics

 ellis-hendricks: What are your favourite tropes in the fandom?

geekmama: Post-ILY scenarios, for sure, h/c, kid!fic, Mary is still alive, Christmas stories. Etc.

ellis-hendricks: What things are likely to turn you off a fic?

geekmama: Bad characterizations (we read fanfic because we want more of the characters we love);  poor editing / grammar; too many crazy tags; Intro posts that have TMI (I don’t want to know that you’re bad at titles/summaries/etc.), or that solicit reviews too blatantly. Well, those things and just stuff I don’t want to read -- bad porn, excessive violence (torture in particular), stories focusing on characters I dislike. I’m kind of picky, actually. But we write and read in a particular fandom for personal pleasure, and I think authors have to expect that their work won’t please everybody (or maybe anybody - who knows?).

ellis-hendricks: Can you recommend 3 favourite fics that aren't your own?

geekmama: Only 3??? Well, I’ve printed out miabicicletta’s A fearful hope was all the world, and sunken_standard’s Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, so I guess that counts for something. It’s virtually impossible to choose one of  Ellis_Hendricks’ fic, they reference so many of my favorite tropes and are all of them deliciously  memorable. But then, how can I leave out Quarto’s Competition? Or Emma_Lynch’s Quarantine? Or so many others?

ellis-hendricks: What compels you to leave comments on top of kudos?

geekmama: If some idea or turn of phrase stands out for me, and if the fic is well-done in general.

 ellis-hendricks: Quick-fire questions!

 John's TEH moustache or his TAB moustache?

geekmama: TAB (I don’t think we are meant to like his TEH moustache, are we?).

Sherlock's purple shirt or white shirt?

geekmama: Gah! Why do I have to choose? Purple, then.

Molly's stripy jumper or cherry cardigan?

geekmama: Stripy jumper, I think, as their relationship is more fully developed at that point.

Mary's christening outfit or black-ops gear?

geekmama: Christening outfit, for sure.

 Submitted by OhAine: this is a joint question for Ellis and geekmama: Do you feel that working together as betas has changed the way you both write?

geekmama: Not really, my process is the same and any input from Ellis_Hendricks is given after the fact. I edit the story accordingly, but there are usually only minor changes involved. I am particularly grateful for her “Brit-picking” skill, which obviously makes her far more valuable to me than I am to her -- it’s surprising how many little differences there are between the UK’s culture and California’s. I was woefully ignorant about that when I became involved in this fandom, and I don’t feel I’m much better now, really.

Next week, Friday 12th April 2019, @thisisartbylexie interviews @writingwife-83

[paperclipninja]

Younger Season 6 Official Trailer warm-up ramble

Ok, I have had every intention of writing a bit of a ramble about the Younger season 6 official trailer since it was released 3 weeks ago and now here we are, one week out from the premiere (how has the time gone so quickly?? But also, I have re-watched the entire series four times since last season ended and started an Instagram account solely dedicated to the show to get me through the hiatus so it has also been FOREVER...also I may possibly need to find some other hobbies (she says as she writes an essay about a promo trailer)...) So I thought I’d better dust off the ol’ over-analysing part of my brain in preparation for the new season because it has been a while since I’ve rambled or reviewed.

Frankly, there is so much to take in in that 2 mins of gloriousness that this is guaranteed to be incoherent at least some of the time, so let’s just start with the beginning and that moment on the brownstone stoop when Charles is telling Liza he has had feelings for her for 16 years and seriously, straight out of the gate, I’m not coping. I mean, I know in my brain that Charles and Liza are now a couple but seeing it, actually SEEING them standing there in broad daylight being all couply and flirty, my feelings were not ready. I am also not ready for the moment I have been waiting for with an absurd amount of anticipation, the Maggie/Charles meeting. Yet here is a glimpse, them sitting all comfy and barefoot on the couch just chatting away, Maggie giving him the bff once-over as appropriately ominous music provides the required effect of DRAH-MAH. I can’t wait to see that scene properly, I just have such high hopes for a Maggie/Charles friendship and I will be waving that flag this whole season.

Through the rest of the Maggie voice-over part of the trailer we get some Amato wisdom about two people who have been through a lot being perfect for each other or dragging each other down like anchors but honestly, at this point I’m finding it hard to concentrate because we have some ‘man coming up behind woman as she’s getting ready for work’ trope in play, which is very distracting for a number of reasons. And then there’s the Liza casually telling Charles she loves him thrown in and EXCUSE ME, for this I was 0% prepared (as was Liza it seems) and 26 seconds in, my deceased status is not boding well for actually making it to the June 12 premiere.

We also get confirmation that everyone at work finds out about Liza and Charles. I am HERE for the ‘it’s ME’ moment because who doesn’t love an open plan office workplace affair reveal (p.s. who ARE all those staff in the office? Where have they been the past 5 seasons? Do they know where Josh’s friends are?)? I’m loving the fancy looking event, this show rocks the glam and Diana, Enzo, Charles, Liza in a room together, seeing them all out and plus-1ing it, I want it all. 

I too want to hear about the regime change Redmond, thank you for asking and this Quinn situation looks every type of intense and I cannot wait! I just LOVE that they’ve made her book suck. The editing of the music to coincide with Quinn’s table taps in the restaurant is just too much, and honestly, the ‘guess who wrote a masterpiece, it will be our first release’ chant, that random lady joining in, Liza asking what’s happening = pure 24 carat tv gold. 

The Kelsey/Zane situation seems like it’ll continue to play out in season 6 and I hope we keep getting to see more sides to Zane because I felt like I was finally beginning to get a more filled out version of the character in season 5. Lauren continues to be Lauren it seems and that is exactly as it should be because she is perfect and I hope we see her do Heller good this season with all that ambition and drive she has.

The big cliffhanger from last season, the Josh/Clare baby ‘who’s the father’ scenario is still front and centre and look, I said it last season and I’ll say it again, I just cannot see why they would bring pregnant Clare back if the baby wasn’t Josh’s. It would be so unbelievably awful to Josh’s character, who just wants to love so wholly and is a refreshing representation of a young guy openly yearning to be a father, that I just can’t imagine the writers of this show going the whole ‘he thinks it’s his but then it isn’t’ route. And after the somewhat stagnant storyline for Josh’s character last season, I would love to see this character have the happiness he deserves and to develop as a stand-alone character whose purpose and development isn’t tied solely to him wishing he was with Liza. I big L LOVE Josh’s friendship with Maggie so I’m happy seeing him chatting to Liza and Maggie about what he should do. 

Which brings me to the scene I have joked about in the past but never thought I’d actually see and that is Charles and Josh laughing together (I’m assuming alcohol is involved) and I tell you, I want that image printed onto canvas and hung on my wall. I mean look, the writers of this show are smart and also, Josh and Charles have to at least get along civilly because otherwise the story is stuck. If Josh doesn’t want to engage with Charles or remains bitter towards him, then Liza is put into a really difficult position, as she would be if Charles took issue with her being friends with Josh or if he didn’t want anything to do with him. The show can’t move forward properly with that kind of set up IMO so I can’t believe that I’m now saying this and it could be a possibility (because I wrote about it as a far-fetched wish at one point), but I would love to see Charles and Josh strike up a friendship and I can actually imagine them chatting about fatherhood and there being a respect there for the fact they both care about Liza. I have no idea of the context of that laughing scene but I’m 99% sure that I will be playing it on a loop after it’s aired.

Ok, before we wrap things up (and lawd knows we need to, I mean, all these words from the trailer, heaven help us once the episodes start again!) there is an axe-throwing, police line up Diana and Kelsey situation that I am going to need much time to absorb once I see it in full but I already know that it’s going to be everything and nothing I expect *praise hands* 

Speaking of scenes that are everything and nothing I knew I wanted, whatever the dance sequence is with Liza in the white dress twirling into a very dapper Charles, I can only assume it’s some kind of dream/hallucination type thing (unless they somehow get roped into a dance competition somewhere??...will reserve my theories and predictions for another day) I am legit so excited to see it because it looks like nothing we’ve ever seen on this show before and after last season’s Cabaret gem, I’m all for these delightful nuggets and love that Younger continues to find new ways to surprise us 6 seasons in.

I think the big emphasis of the ‘you are running my ideas past Charles’/’are you questioning my loyalty?’ indicates some workplace tension between Liza and Kelsey and that Liza trying to balance her relationship with Charles and Kelsey is going to be a real challenge. Not to mention that ominous end to the trailer in which the music cuts out and we hear Charles say ‘I left my company to be with you’ *dun-dun-dunnnn*. My hope is that we see Liza continue to be the strong manuscript dropping boss woman from season 5 and to tell Charles that she never asked him to do that. I mean, I’m sure there’s a whole lot more to the convo, but where would the drama be in that?

As always, Younger have managed to cut together a premium trailer with the appropriate amounts of intrigue, suspense, misdirection and general excellence we have come to love and expect.  

So buckle in and get ready, the countdown has begun. Bring on Season 6!

[labelleizzy]

20 questions tag

20 questions tag

Rules: answer 20 questions and tag 20 people you want to know better. I was tagged by @wrathofthestag   *waves*

1. Nickname: Liz, Lizzy if we've been friends for decades, and some family.  Then going back in time there's Little Bits and Lizard lips from childhood, Tris from my first boyfriend, Yank from my favorite ex boyfriend's dad. Libby, Liberty, and Liberator and other equally silly plays on my name from my first husband. Izzy occasionally from friends I met first as LaBelleIzzy, which came from MaBelleIzzy by Xtyn and Charles DeLint. Miss Lizness from Amy. Words at Black Rock City. Those are the most memorable ones I've had. 

2. Zodiac Sign: Scorpio cusp of Sagittarius

3. Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw… I'm brave but I had to work for it. I come by clever naturally

4. Height: 5′ 4″ (I think)

5. Last thing I googled: Atonement, the 2007 film with James McEvoy and Keira Knightley. It was mentioned in one of my comfort rereads I'm currently in the middle of (The Least Of All Possible Mistakes) and I've never seen it but it was used as a character note so I watched the trailer.

6. Favorite musicians: Ugh, too many, and music isn't even my primary distraction media. Folks who own multiple albums by include Florence and the Machine, Great Big Sea, Rush, Pink, Daft Punk, Helen Jane Long, Moxy Fruvous, Loreena McKennit, Roxette, Bonnie Raitt, Brian Setzer Orchestra… so many.

7. Song stuck in my head: varies by the day. Last month or two I've been waking up with a different song in my head every day, it's enjoyable, but I'm puzzled.

8. Followers: 523

9. Following: 1092

10. Do you get asks: Very infrequently. Usually, Only if I put out a prompt. (I don’t mind getting asks.)

11. Amount of sleep: I'm blessed and lucky to be able to work from home, and sleep late if I need to. When I taught high school I got around 6/night and I don't know how I survived (hint, I burned out hard, so.) Now my body really likes between 8&9. That's the difference between 40 and 50, I guess.

12. Lucky number: 13 and 1066.

13. What are you wearing: a cute little sleeveless stretchy dress in black and cobalt from this weekend clothing swap! 

14. Dream job: I kinda have it. I write a lot, teach a little, without grades! Art, cooking, community service, some priesting. Taking care of my house, cat(s), and Spouse, and friends. Activism. If I'd change anything and I may still, it would be to do a lot more activism in company with others.

15. Instruments: Voice, mainly. I used to sing in a choir and was insecure about it, but I read music a bit from that and from playing violin as a child and recorder while I was teaching.

16. Languages: English, a tiny bit of Spanish, and a handful of fun phrases from a dozen other languages. I can say "bless you!" In Welsh, German, French, Spanish when someone sneezes. I'd like to learn that in Russian and Japanese!

17. Favourite song: it goes by mood and genre. When I'm angry I want something punk. When I can't get motivated to work I put on upbeat pop dance music. But I'll always start waltzing with Enya's Caribbean Blue, Metallica's Nothing Else Matters, or Seal's Kiss From A Rose. It's programmed into my feet the way Mustang Sally starts me to cha-cha.

18. Random fact: I've never smoked, not once in my life.

19. Aesthetic: ooh good one! Cute Comfortable Genderqueer Hobbit.

20. Dream trip: for a northern pass, Reykjavik, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Moscow. for an equatorial pass? Nassau, the Bahamas. Got a couple of college friends who live there.

Invited to play or pass:  @dizzy-redhead @stultiloquentia , @codenamefinlandia , @valiantfoxdinosaur , @leatherjacketmixtapes , @uhisthisthingreal , 

@bitty-smol , @lizards-online , (@goodnightmoonvale ,) @1realme1 @optimistinchief , @frenchtoastpanda

(@herecomedatbitty) @lauramkaye  

Or, if you see this and just wanna do it? Consider yourself TAGGED (& LMK plz)

[truthbeetoldmedia]

The 100 6x09 "What You Take With You" Review

Episode 6x09 of The 100, “What You Take With You,” written by Nikki Goldwaser and directed by Marshall Virtue, saw the return of Clarke, Octavia finally starting down the path to redemption, the return of some old friends, and a farewell to another. Without further ado, let’s dive in! 

After Octavia came sprinting back out of the anomaly at the end of the last episode, Gabriel desperately wanted to know what happened in there. He’s been waiting 150 years for someone to go into the anomaly and tell him what it’s like (why doesn’t he just… go into it himself?) and Octavia is the first person to ever come back out of it. But she can’t remember anything. Gabriel has an idea — a concentrated form of the red sun toxin that they have used in the past to uncover hidden memories. He mixes up a concoction to inject into her arm, and Octavia slips into a spiritual journey. 

She finds herself alone in his hut, faced with two glowing boxes. The green one has angelic music, voices whispering her name. Then the glowing red box appears, rattling, angry voices emanating from within. We also distinctly see a photo of Josephine on the same table as that box. Octavia has to choose: green for the anomaly, or red for the Red Queen? The sounds coming from the red box definitely bring back images of the fighting pit Octavia ruled over, which makes me wonder if the gentle sounds coming from the green box are also associated with a period in her past, a period of time in the anomaly that she found peace. She opens the red box and a swarm of red, glowing butterflies pour out, reminding us of the innocent moment in Season 1 where Octavia followed glowing blue butterflies. When the butterflies clear, Octavia is standing in the fighting arena, angry members of Wonkru shouting and beating on the fences, Blodreina looking down on her. We also see a large strip of cloth covered in symbols that are familiar to us — we see them in the new opening sequence — but not to Octavia. She flashes back to moments in the bunker, and then further, as she stabs Pike through the gut, as she sentences Bellamy to fight in the pit, as she kills her own people to make them eat human flesh, as she leads them into the gorge to be slaughtered. Octavia tries to flee the pit, but finds herself chained down, and instead collapses into the fetal position and sobs.

After what seems like a long time, the door to the arena swings open, and in walks Pike. Their conversation was so poignant that I just have to share the whole thing here. He tells Octavia that they have unfinished business, and she denies it, simplifying their story to: “You killed Lincoln, and you died for it. End of story.” 

“Was it? You think murdering someone in cold blood, even someone you have reason to hate, is justifiable?” “Yes.”

“And yet, it turned you into this.” [He gestures at the pit]

“Think what you want, I’m not here for you.”

“No. You’re here because of me. The path to the future goes through the past, Miss Blake. Psychology 101. We are what we’ve done and what’s been done to us. Now, you’ve had a rough go, I’ll give you that. And it’s made your dark side strong. I suppose you needed that, to protect yourself under the floor. But what about now? Who are you now? What do you want, Octavia?”

“I want you gone.”

“You tried that; it didn’t take. It has to be something else.”

“I want to know what happened inside the anomaly. That’s why I’m here.” “Maybe nothing happened. Or maybe you’re not supposed to know! They don’t call it the anomaly for nothing. What I know is, you chose the red box, so stop wasting my time and answer my damn question! What do you want? … Okay. Because class is in session, allow me to facilitate the discussion. How does it feel to know that… everyone hates you, everyone you care about, even your brother?”

“Not good.”

“Oh, I expect not. But that’s not the worst part, is it? You hate yourself too.”

[Octavia starts crying]

“Good. One more time. What do you want?” “Forgiveness.” “Deeper. Much, much deeper. Forgiveness is for minor offenses. You murdered people to get them to eat their friends and families. And then you burned the farm to get them to march, because you couldn’t live with the idea of not getting to that valley, even when there was another way! You got 400 people killed in that gorge! You caused the world to be destroyed! What you want needs to be earned! Now SAY IT!”

“Redemption.” “What’s that? I can’t hear you.”

“Redemption!”

“Ding ding ding! A gold star for Miss Blake. I was trying to earn mine when you put a sword through me. Which brings us to big question number 2. What are you willing to do to get it?” “What if I don’t deserve it?” “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Now Blodreina enters the conversation — “Shut up, Pike.” She strides into the arena, and suddenly Pike is in chains too, and there’s a sword at Octavia’s feet. She orders Octavia to kill Pike. “Here we go again,” says Pike. “Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Einstein said that.” Pike and Blodreina argue, the angel and devil on her shoulders, and Octavia crumbles to the ground, whispering her old mantra: “I’m not afraid.” Blodreina holds her sword at Pike’s throat. “Charles Pike of Farm Station,” she begins, and Octavia flashes to a memory of Lincoln on his knees in the mud. “You have been sentenced to death in accordance to the laws of Wonkru,” Blodreina continues. Octavia flashes again to Pike saying a very similar thing as he prepares to execute Lincoln. “Any last words?” Blodreina asks. “Not for you,” reply Lincoln and Pike. Pike looks at Octavia and repeats Lincoln’s last words; “May we meet again” in Trigedasleng. Octavia tearfully leaps to her feet and blocks Blodreina from executing Pike, and in doing so, she breaks the cycle. Pike vanishes, and Blodreina charges Octavia. The two even fight differently now; Blodreina wild and reckless, Octavia careful and guarded. The fight ultimately ends with Octavia stabbing Blodreina through the heart and saying in Trig, “Blodreina no more.” She then wakes up on the table in Gabriel’s hut, a tear leaking from her eye.

Octavia has been one of my least favorite characters for several years, and the deciding factor was when she beat Bellamy bloody while he was chained to a rock. Then in Season 4, they teetered on the edge of making her an antagonist, but didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. Finally, in Season 5, they went full villain with her, which was the most interesting she’d been to me in 2 seasons. But in Season 6, they looked to be trying to start up a redemption arc, but didn’t start with the most important thing: making amends. Octavia justifies why she turned the fighting pit into a source of entertainment, she justifies why she burned down the algae farm and forced her people into an ambush that killed hundreds, she justifies her abuse of people she loves. And then she demands they wipe the slate clean and pretend it never happened — without so much as an apology. Now, finally, finally, we’re seeing Octavia actually work toward redemption. I’m not gonna lie; seeing Pike rip into Octavia like that, exposing her entitled, selfish nature and listing out all the awful things she’s done was one of the most gratifying scenes of television I’ve seen recently. I want to like Octavia again. I’m invested in this redemption story, to see if she actually learns from her drug-induced spiritual journey and does better and works on her problems. (Can you tell I’m all about Monty’s admonition to “do better here”?) The one thing I would have preferred in Octavia’s breaking the cycle would have been for her to just walk out of that fighting pit. I wanted them to show that she doesn’t always have to kill something or someone. They could have had her leave Blodreina to be miserable and fester in her fighting pit, and walk out and be free to start her journey of redemption.

So, what are we thinking about the anomaly? Any theories? Before the season started, I thought the anomaly could be a temporal rift, a place where two universes were touching. That would explain the showdowns between two versions of Octavia we saw in the trailer, and why some dead characters were coming back. Of course, we now know the reasons for both of those, but still aren’t sure what the anomaly is. It definitely seems that time moves differently there; Octavia ran into it with ratty hair and an old lady arm, and came back seconds later completely normal. But it seemed more time had passed for her, though she doesn’t remember what happened in it. I also have a feeling that Diyoza might not come back out, or if she does, she’ll be much older (hence the kid she saw, Hope). Also, I know this connection has been made a million times, but — the anomaly eats up radio messages and spits them back out at random. Can you think of any other important radio calls that went unanswered but have been referenced several times throughout the season? I will eat my hat if Bellamy doesn’t hear Clarke’s radio messages to him at some point here. 

I know a lot of people have picked up on the chemistry between Gabriel and Octavia, I’m not super here for The 100 throwing another love interest at Octavia. She needs to be single and alone and work through her issues because she consistently abuses the people closest to her, who often happen to be people of color — Bellamy, Lincoln, Indra, and likely now Gabriel.

Back in the woods, Bellamy hauls a handcuffed Josephine along to find the Children of Gabriel. Josephine insists that they need to turn back, because they’ll kill her if they find out she’s a Prime, but Bellamy vows he won’t let that happen. And we get yet another instance of a character calling Bellamy or Clarke out on their feelings for each other. “The people you care about are in trouble. I guess you just care about her more,” Josephine accuses him. Bellamy succeeds in finding the Children of Gabriel, but even though they don’t know Josephine is a prime, they still take the two captive and chain them up in a cave that we definitely haven’t seen used before for every cave on Earth. Bellamy tries to tell them that he has information Gabriel needs to know, but the Children don’t seem convinced. While they wait for their fate to be decided, Josephine commiserates with Bellamy about having been in love with and pining for someone for hundreds of years, very clearly implying a parallel with him and Clarke. “What, are we gonna be friends now?” she snarks. “Doubtful,” Bellamy fires back, a clear parallel to him telling Echo that he’d never trust her in Season 4. This clearly means that Bellamy and Josephine are gonna date, right?

And as Josephine tells Bellamy about having been in love with Gabriel for all those years, and how he’s been trying to kill her for the last 70, Clarke taps out through Josephine’s finger in Morse code: B-O-O  H-O-O. Bellamy realizes that Clarke can hear them, and Josephine tells him that means the wall separating their minds is almost gone. Which means Clarke will die soon, and Josephine will download back into her mind drive. Bellamy asks Josephine to let him talk to Clarke, but she refuses, saying she’d have to give over control to do that. But she tells him that since Clarke can hear him, “just say what you want to say.” The Bellarke theme swells as Bellamy looks at her, hope and heartbreak evident in his eyes. “I won’t let you die,” he vows, then turns away before tears can spill over.

“My father was a fool for letting you people stay. All that time spent building a sanctuary for the human race, and he destroys it because of the most human thing of all — love.” She looks at Bellamy and adds, “One look at you — he should have known how this would end.” She’s right; Bellamy is going to tear Sanctum down to save Clarke.

“I guess I’m just saying all this because I know so much about you now.”

“Hmm, you do, huh?”

“Mm-hmm. Take you and Clarke, for instance. Now that’s a weird relationship, isn’t it? First you want to kill her to save your own ass, even though it means the genocide of your own people on the Ark, and then you become besties, bonding over the actual genocide at Mount Weather. ‘Together.’ You lock her up, she locks you up, you leave her on Earth, she leaves you to die in the fighting pits. I mean, it’s exhausting, frankly.”

“Tell me about it.” (And all the Bellarke shippers watching yelled, “RIGHT?!”)

Their captors come back into the cave and prepare Bellamy and Josephine to be moved, saying that the Sanctum riders are coming. Josephine struggles against the man moving her, earning a shove for her trouble. The man picks her back up, but a blonde woman notices a trickle of black blood from her lip. The Children of Gabriel prepare to execute her, despite Bellamy’s frantic pleas. As Bellamy tries to convince them to let her live, Josephine closes her eyes, and when she opens them, we can tell that Clarke is back in control. “Wait!” she calls out, head still on a stone to be beheaded. “Gabriel loves her. Is this what he would want?” The man swings his sword down at her neck, but she kicks his knee and quickly kills or incapacitates the group of people in the cave. Bellamy, eyes shining, can tell Clarke is back in control, and Clarke tells him that Josephine knew she had to give control back to Clarke or get her head cut off. Clarke tries to free Bellamy from the chains still holding him to the cave wall, but more Children of Gabriel approach, and Bellamy tells her to run. She refuses to leave him at first, but he insists, so she dashes off, but not before giving him the key to his cuffs. (Can we just take a second to appreciate Eliza? I know I’m always singing her praises, but she makes a distinct difference between Clarke and Josephine, from her voice to her body language, and it’s so cool to watch.)

Clarke sprints through the woods away from the Children of Gabriel, following the sounds of motorbikes. She manages to flag down the Sanctum riders, who recognize her as Josephine, and take care of her pursuers. Most of the riders take off after the rest of the Children, but Jade stays to get Josephine back to Sanctum. But Clarke hits her over the head with a rock and takes her motorbike for herself. But she’s startled to find Josephine 1.0 standing next to the bike, admonishing her for knocking Jade out. Things are getting worse, Josephine explains, and Clarke needs to give back control. Josephine will just take it back when Clarke falls asleep, anyway. But Clarke grabs Jade’s radio and says, “Gabriel, my name is Clarke Griffin. Josephine Lightbourne is in my head. If you can hear this, we’re coming to you.” When Josephine sees that Clarke isn’t going to go back to Sanctum, she offers to drive the motorbike — but Clarke will have to give over control. But with a smirk, Clarke straddles the bike and starts it. Josephine realizes that, just like she got knowledge from Clarke, Clarke got some of her knowledge. “Sucks, doesn’t it,” Clarke says to her in Mandarin, then puts the helmet on and roars off through the woods. 

After Octavia wakes up, she makes a beeline to one of the motorbikes she and Diyoza left outside Gabriel’s hut. He follows her, asking what she saw in the anomaly, but she still doesn’t know, but she does know what she has to do now. The anomaly gave her a second chance, and now she has to earn it. The two shake hands as Octavia prepares to leave, but then a radio message comes in, one of the Children of Gabriel telling him that they have a prisoner that claims Primes can now make hosts. Then Clarke’s message comes through, and Octavia decides to stay there and wait for Clarke.

On the Eligius ship, Kane is having trouble adjusting to his new life. He looks at his new body, unsettled by not bearing the marks of his past life, but Abby says that he doesn’t ever have to worry about “that” (being killed or nearly killed) ever again. So she’s definitely not gonna be satisfied giving him this one life; she will try to make him live forever and likely do the same herself. I wonder if they gave Abby a lineup to choose from for Kane’s new body, because he sure is hot, and she’s taking every opportunity to get her hands and mouth on him, to the point where I was howling with laughter during a solemn scene. This is how I imagine the scene where Abby picked a new body for Kane playing out (slight NSFW warning for butts):

Also, Marcus “Known Cannibal” Kane telling Abby she tastes different is hilarious considering, you know, “The Dark Year.” There’s also an interesting parallel (or lack thereof?) in one of his conversations with Abby. Bellamy told Echo in the beginning of Season 5 “Nothing is going to change on the ground,” and Abby tells Kane here, “Things will be different on the ground.”

Raven confronts Abby about killing Gavin so Kane can live. She asks Kane if he’s okay with this, but before he can answer, Simone and a group of guards walk in. As Simone and Abby discuss getting the rest of the nightblood serum down to Sanctum so they can make more hosts, Kane notices one of the guards looking at him strangely. “You knew him,” he says to the woman, who tells him that Gavin was her husband. Kane is already horrified, but then the woman asks him to pass a message on to her husband, and Kane realizes the Primes have been lying to the people. The woman leaves to get the shuttle ready to go down to Sanctum, and Kane confronts Simone, despite Abby’s attempts to quiet him. The confrontation was so “Kane” that I’m half convinced they just put prosthetics on HIC’s face to make him look different! After Kane storms off, Raven gives Abby a self-righteous look and says, “I’m not sure it was worth it to him.”

Raven and Kane wake up Indra (!!!!) and she instantly knows something is afoot. Her suspicions are confirmed when Kane 2.0 warmly greets her in Trigedasleng. We later see Indra looking out the window of the ship onto the planet, while Raven and Kane argue. Raven says that she didn’t know until they got to the Eligius ship what Abby was planning, otherwise she wouldn’t have flown the shuttle, and tells Kane that she tried to talk Abby out of it. “Not hard enough,” he replies, much like his response to Bellamy in Season 2 when Bellamy told him that he’d done his best to protect the delinquents against the grounders. Kane can’t believe what Abby has done, and doesn’t understand why, but Indra tells him it’s because Abby loves him. Kane can’t believe that Indra could be okay with this, but as she points out, “On the Ark, you floated people for stealing food. On the ground, my people cheered as children fought to the death to lead us. Is this so much worse?” She suggests that this might be what they need to do to survive, just like those other scenarios. “What I know is that I am looking at my once crucified, resurrected friend, and I can see why some might think that’s a miracle.” (Side note, does this imply that the grounders do have records/knowledge of religions before the apocalypse? Or that Skaikru told them about Jesus while they were in the bunker?)

Kane tells Indra why the whole hosts and Primes thing is bad, and Raven tells Kane that this is why they need him. This exchange annoyed me, because obviously Indra can tell that murdering innocent people and lying about their deaths is bad, and they don’t need Kane to tell them that. Kane then tells Raven that she’s always known what’s right. I’ll admit I laughed here, because if that’s true, that means that Raven has consciously made the wrong decision time and time again. She tortured Lincoln, she tried to turn Murphy in for Finn’s massacre, she refused to help Luna and her people when they were suffering from radiation sickness. The show and the fandom often try to prop Raven up as this paragon of right and goodness, but the truth is, she’s done just as many terrible things as the rest of them, and is by no means a good moral compass. 

Raven, Abby, and the Sanctum delegation, along with the container of nightblood serum, prepare to go down to Sanctum, waiting for Kane to join them. But suddenly Indra, Niylah, and several other members of Wonkru burst through the shuttle doors with guns, and Raven grabs the nightblood serum from Simone and hands it over. Indra leaves with it, while Abby and Simone demand to know what’s happening. Raven tells Abby that Kane told them to keep her there, and when Abby tries to push past Niylah, Niylah tells her that she doesn’t want to see this. Abby pleads with Raven to let her go, and Raven relents and takes her to the airlock. In yet another parallel to Abby’s losing another man she loved via floating, Indra tries to hold her back from the airlock, telling her she shouldn’t be there, but Raven tells Indra she deserves a chance to say goodbye. Abby, sobbing, begs Kane through the airlock door not to do this, and as the camera focuses on their nearly-touching hands, then pans up to Kane’s face, we see the crucifixion scars on his wrist, the symbol of the coalition on his forearm, and Henry Ian Cusick’s familiar face once more. He tells Abby that this was wrong, but that if he’d been in the same position, he probably would have done the same to get her back. But he won’t be able to live with himself, and neither will she. Abby insists that they can make a new life, they can start over. But Kane tells her that he’s doing what she always said she would do — making sure they deserved to survive. But I can’t for the life of me see how killing himself after a stranger sacrificed his life for him is what makes them deserve to survive. Kane tells Abby that she’s strong, much stronger than him, and thanks her for all the times she’s saved him— not just his life, but him. He tells her that if he doesn’t do this now, they’ll both live to regret it, and so many more innocent lives will be lost (again… how?). After all the times Abby has said, “first we survive, then we find our humanity again,” this is how they get their humanity back. Abby breaks down in sobs, and Indra starts to recite the Travelers’ Blessing, with Raven joining in. “May we meet again,” Indra tells him in Trigedasleng, then steels herself and opens the airlock. Raven catches Abby as she collapses, and we see Kane fly out into the vacuum of space.

This show has always had trouble distinguishing between true self-sacrifice and suicide. Within the first few episodes of the show, a young girl threw herself off a cliff to escape the consequences of murdering someone. It was portrayed as heartbreaking, but ultimately the only solution. A few episodes later, when it became public knowledge that the Ark was failing, 320 members of the Ark sacrificed their lives so that their children and the rest of the Ark inhabitants could survive long enough to find a solution. I would argue that this was in fact noble self-sacrifice, albeit unnecessary, as we found out at the end of the episode. In Season 2, after Finn suffered a mental break and slaughtered a village of grounders, rather than deal with what he had done, he sacrificed himself to the grounders to be tortured to death. Now, he was undeniably in a nigh-impossible situation, with Lexa calling for his death, but the Sky People were willing to work towards a solution. Nonetheless, again, his suicide was the only way he could fix things. 

In Season 4, Raven and Clarke both acted self-sacrificially — Raven by straining herself to find a solution to save her people, even though she knew it would likely ultimately fry her brain, and Clarke by climbing the tower to align the satellite so that Bellamy, Raven, Harper, Monty, Emori, Murphy, and Echo could get to the Ark in space, even though she stood a better chance of surviving inside Becca’s lab, and very little chance of surviving at all. Again, I would classify those things as selfless acts to save their friends. There have been plenty of others, from Jaha staying on the Ring to get the Ark back to Earth, to Clarke telling Roan she’ll go peacefully with him (to her death, as far as she knows) if he spares Bellamy. But there have also been instances of straight-up suicide portrayed in, if not a fully positive light, at least a neutral light. Finn didn’t know how to deal with what he’d done, so he killed himself. Charlotte didn’t know how to deal with what she’d done, so she killed herself. Jasper and most of the delinquents committed mass suicide because they couldn’t deal with life on the ground. Octavia tried to get McCreary’s men to kill her in the gorge so she wouldn’t have to do the hard work of being better. And Kane threw himself out an airlock because he didn’t know how to deal with what Abby had done. 

I understand that Henry Ian Cusick got another, larger role in a different show, so they had to write him out of The 100, but Greyston Holt did a fantastic job as Kane, so much so that I almost believed he truly was Kane. How much more interesting would it have been if Kane had decided to take Monty’s words to heart and do better, instead of just giving lectures on morality like he’s been doing in the last couple seasons? They definitely needed to destroy the nightblood serum that Abby had made so that the Primes couldn’t make more hosts and kill more innocent people to continue living forever, but it was absolutely unnecessary for Kane to die. Clarke has synthetic nightblood too; does she need to die? Yet the show completely framed it as Kane sacrificing himself for the greater good. I mean, at least with Finn’s sacrifice, his death accomplished something. But with Kane it’s like when King David from the Bible, while on the run for his life, wished for some water from his well in Bethlehem, then when some of his men risked their lives to get it for him, poured it all on the ground. Kane killing himself didn’t bring Gavin back, nor was it necessary to keep the Primes from making nightblood, it just spat in the face of the sacrifice Gavin made and was solely because Kane couldn’t accept it. If they really wanted to be done with Kane, and wanted his death to be a heroic sacrifice, it would have been more interesting and heroic for him to somehow sacrifice his own life to let the host, Gavin, continue to live. I mean, Abby can totally fish Kane’s body out of space, take out his Mind Drive, and plug him into a new body! And who’s to say they can’t get the nightblood serum while they’re out there? While Kane’s death was executed (no pun intended) beautifully, the absolute unnecessity of it just left it feeling a little bit hollow. 

Michaela’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝🐝

The 100 airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on the CW.

[samosoapsoup]

Living with a Visionary

For more than fifty years, my wife and I shared a world. Then, as Diana’s health declined, her hallucinations became her own reality.

By John Matthias

January 25, 2021

You would think it was a performance of some kind. When she wakes up, if she has slept at all, she tells me about the giants carrying trees and bushes on what she calls zip lines, which I am able to identify as telephone wires. Beneath the busy giants, she explains, there is a marching band playing familiar tunes by John Philip Sousa. She is not especially impressed by either of these things, and the various children playing games in the bedroom annoy her. “Out you go,” she says to them. Then she describes the man with no legs who spent the night lying beside her in bed. He had been mumbling in pain, but nobody would come to help him. She remembers her own pain, too. “I could hardly move,” she says.

And she can hardly move now. Her legs are stiff, her back is cracking as I lift her out of bed. Although still clearly in pain, she gives me a sly look and gestures with her chin toward the flowerpot in the hallway. “The Flowery Man,” she says. “He’s very nice.”

She is fully articulate, in many ways her familiar self. She asks me if I saw the opera. I’m not sure which opera she means; we’ve seen many over the fifty years that we’ve been married. She means the one last night in our back yard. She describes it in detail—the stage set, the costumes, the “really amazing” lighting, the beautiful voices. I ask her what opera was performed. Now I get another look, not a sly one but a suspicious one.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

I say that it’s not a matter of belief but of perception. I can’t see what she sees. She tells me that this is a great pity. I miss so much of life. I used to have something of an imagination, but I’ve evidently lost it. Maybe she should start spending time with someone else. Also, she knows about my girlfriend. The one in the red jacket. There is no girlfriend, but there is a red jacket hanging over the back of her walker. Suddenly, she forgets the girlfriend and remembers the opera. “Oh,” she says. “It was ‘La Traviata,’ and we went together with Anna Netrebko before she sang.”

Now I have my own brief vision. Diana is only twenty-one, I am twenty-five. We have just arrived in South Bend, where I am teaching English at Notre Dame. A friend wrote about us in those days as having appeared to him like two fawns in the grove of our local Arcadia. Diana wore the clothes she had brought from England, including her miniskirt, and people in cars would honk their horns and stare. In London, where we had met, it had been the middle of the nineteen-sixties; at our Midwestern college, it was more like the fifties. A former student told me that when I held classes at home, for a change of scene, he and his classmates took bets on who would be lucky enough to talk to her.

I see her walking in from the kitchen with tea and her homemade scones. College boys—only boys were admitted back then—lift china cups balanced on wafer-thin saucers. Some have never eaten a crumbly scone or sipped tea out of such a delicate cup. Diana is often told she looks like Julie Christie, and my students all want to be Omar Sharif, Christie’s co-star in “Doctor Zhivago.” Some write poems inspired by Lara, Zhivago’s muse. Diana smiles at them, greeting those whose names she remembers. Hello, Vince. Hi there, Richard. She dazzles them. She dazzles me.

Art was her passion. Later, she earned an art-history degree and became the curator of education at our university’s museum. She devised a program of what she called “curriculum-structured tours,” ambitiously proposing to organize museum tours that would be relevant to any class. This she did—chemistry students learned about the properties of seventeenth-century paint, psychology majors studied portraits for signs of their subjects’ mental health—and eventually she exported her innovations to other college campuses. Because of her, students began looking seriously at paintings and sculptures. They followed her hand, pointing out some luminous detail; they listened to the music of her voice, her British accent slowly becoming Americanized over the decades.

Diana trained a new set of gallery interns each year, teaching them about all there was to see and find in the museum’s art. She loved them dearly, and they loved her back. She had been conducting tours for thirty years when a former intern, Maria, came by the house—ostensibly on an errand to collect some of Diana’s library books. Really, she wanted to talk to me. She explained that Diana had started seeing things. The first time Maria noticed it, Diana was showing a class of French students a reduction of Charles Louis-Lucien Müller’s “The Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror,” from 1860. It’s a very busy painting, with dozens of figures waiting to be transported to the guillotine. Diana told the students that at the center of “The Roll Call” was a man named General Marius. But General Marius wasn’t there; he was around the corner, in a painting called “Marius and the Gaul,” about which Diana had written her thesis, many years before. She was speaking in French, and at first Maria thought that Diana had got tangled up in the language. Surely it was her words, not her reality, that had become so confused.

Not too long after Maria’s visit, Diana returned home one day looking tired and depressed. She sat down on the sofa next to me, took my hand, and said, “The students tell me that I’m seeing things that aren’t there.” I admitted that Maria had already told me about this. By then, Diana had begun treatment for Parkinson’s disease, taking a standard cocktail of medicines in small amounts: levodopa combined with carbidopa, in a drug called Sinemet. She had received the diagnosis only because her doctor couldn’t otherwise explain her onset of general weakness. Aside from fatigue, she had virtually no symptoms, and her behavior had been absolutely normal while taking Sinemet. Now she confessed that she was seeing things at home as well. She pointed at a wadded-up sweater on a chair across the room. “That’s not really a cat, is it?”

I asked her what else she saw. “Little people,” she explained, “like Gulliver’s Lilliputians.” Objects had been changing shape—“morphing” was her word—for some time, but recently things had begun appearing out of nowhere. We saw a specialist in Chicago, who, like the neurologists Eric Ahlskog and Oliver Sacks, called these “illusions.” We suspected that the hallucinations were a side effect of Sinemet, and, after consulting many books and articles, Diana and I began to titrate her medication ourselves. Most Parkinson’s patients end up doing this, experimenting with how much they take of each medicine and at what time. There were new delivery systems for the basic mix of levodopa and carbidopa, and we tried them all, along with a number of adjuvant therapies.

At first, Diana could identify her illusions as such, and sometimes even dismiss them. (“Scat!” got rid of the cat.) The things she saw were not always frightening. Many of them seemed inspired by her work in the visual arts. Visiting a neighbor, Diana enthusiastically described a painting on a blank wall where, we later learned, one had been hanging until several days before. Her knowledge of eighteenth-century art may in part explain her delight in seeing topiary figures cut into very large trees, where I saw nothing but leaves. Some of the visions she told me about were clearly breathtaking. “If only you could see this,” she said.

I couldn’t see what she saw, but I could see her. She was somehow growing more beautiful—or beautiful in a new way. Everyone noticed this. Never one to use much makeup or even visit a hair stylist, she would wash her face in the morning, put up her hair or let it hang at shoulder length, and come downstairs to start her day. Her striking good looks belied the condition that would bring her down. It was Julie Christie all over again, but not from “Doctor Zhivago”; she was the aging Christie of Sarah Polley’s movie “Away from Her.” Adapted from Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the film is about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. Her decline is slow, until it is suddenly fast. Diana watched the movie without anxiety. She had not, so far, suffered any significant memory loss. When I reminded her that decades earlier my students had compared her to the actress, she laughed. During a trip to Chicago to see her doctor, we had been approached by a man on the street, who said, “I just have to tell you how beautiful you are. Forgive me for intruding on your day.” We got into a taxi, and Diana growled to me, “I sure don’t feel very beautiful.”

For two or three years, Diana’s condition was manageable through modifications in her medications, and through her ability to recognize the hallucinations for what they were. At the art gallery, she avoided confusion by writing out scripts for her tours. She managed to retire when she was scheduled to, not before. It was shortly afterward that her hallucinations began to increase in frequency and intensity. She insisted that the topiary trees were the work of giants, and she described the giants’ elaborate uniforms. Plays and operas were staged in our back yard, spontaneous parades appeared in the streets.

It became harder and harder for her to understand that her visions were not real. She sometimes asked me why these events were not written about in the paper or covered in the news on television. In the house, nothing held still: objects danced on the mantel, the ideograms on our hanging scroll of Chinese calligraphy flew around like butterflies. At the beginning, many of these transformations had given her pleasure. More and more, however, they annoyed and alarmed her. Three women were “hanging” in her closet and refused to leave. The Flowery Man roamed the house. There were rude people who masturbated into a dresser drawer and had sex on the living-room sofa.

When Diana could no longer shake these things off, she began to surrender to them. She slowly ceased to see them as hallucinations. I had read that it did not help to deny the reality of these visions, so I stopped doing that. I began trying to deal with them as if I could see what she did. Friends were encouraged to make the same allowances. For a while this helped. A fifth person at a dinner for four did not pose a big problem once you got used to this kind of thing. I informed the members of Diana’s reading group that she might refer to people who weren’t there, and they, too, made the adjustment.

One day, she shouted for my help. A housepainter in white overalls, she told me, was painting over the portrait of one of our daughters that hung on the living-room wall. The man didn’t speak; none of Diana’s human apparitions ever spoke, though their mouths would move without sound, and sometimes they would respond to stern rebukes. I could say things like “I’ll see the painter to the door.” But often the damage had been done. In the case of our daughter’s portrait, it continued to exist, for Diana, partially erased. She referred to the painting as “the half-faced child.”

Some medications work for Parkinson’s patients with hallucinations, but for Diana they all seemed to make things worse. In November of 2019, a new kind of confusion about both space and time took hold. One morning, I found her with her suitcase packed, ready to travel. When I asked where she was going, she wasn’t sure. “Away,” she said. She wasn’t sure why. But, she insisted, “we certainly can’t stay any longer in this person’s house, in a place where we don’t even speak the language.”

Christmas approaches, and I return to the present tense. Everything that happens after this feels like it’s still happening now. Slowly, through the winter, Diana’s benign hallucinations become terrible and threatening presences. (Meanwhile, in China, a new and deadly virus is unleashed on the world.) Diana loses her ability to sleep, a common and debilitating feature of Parkinson’s. Because she is either sleepless or tormented by nightmares, I am also unable to sleep. For a while, I am able to soothe her and offer comfort, but often her dreams continue unabated when she wakes up. Eventually, I am simply incorporated into them. When I ask her if she is awake, she says she does not know.

Her eating also becomes a problem, and I know that she is not getting proper nutrition. I use the blender again and again, counting calories, mixing in anything containing protein. She is getting very thin. I sleep only when she sleeps and eat a quick sandwich as I cook for her. She looks at me one morning and says, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Because Diana hides things, then promptly forgets where they are, I often find myself searching for her medical-insurance cards, her driver’s license, some kind of I.D. with her picture on it. She sends me on a wild-goose chase all over the house. This drawer. That closet. But I can never find what we need. The hallucinated people begin to take on more life than the living. And they have names. Not generic and rather charming names like the Flowery Man but monosyllabic American names like Bob, Pete, Dick, George, Jack. No one seems to have a surname. “Jack who?” I ask her. She gives me a straight look and says, “Jack the Ripper.” She keeps asking, “Who’s in charge?” I wish I knew.

In March, as the pandemic descends on the Midwest, I try to explain why she cannot go out or see friends. She doesn’t understand. I don’t dare leave her alone, even for a short trip to the grocery store. She begins going outside when my back is turned, and she frightens some of the neighbors with things she claims to see. I make rules. No phoning friends after 10 p.m. No going outdoors after bed or going downstairs for breakfast in the middle of the night. I finally move to a bed in a separate room.

With the country in lockdown, I can no longer reach Diana’s neurologist in Chicago. Local doctors help us refill some of her medications over the telephone, but have nothing to offer that might help the dementia that is now clearly part of the picture. My most recent reading makes me wonder whether she might have not Parkinson’s but something called Lewy body dementia, which produces vivid hallucinations. Its terrifying symptoms are believed to have led to the suicide of the actor Robin Williams. Diana talks about “jumping in the river.” (The St. Joseph River is only a few hundred yards from our front door.) Neighbors offer to do some shopping for us, but as the pandemic gets worse I hesitate to ask them for more help. When I finally make contact with two or three “senior helper” organizations, I am told that all their programs are on hold. I can do nothing but try to continue on my own. I begin taking pills myself—sedatives washed down with glasses of Merlot. We are living on cans of beans and prescription drugs.

There are still moments when Diana is very happy. Sometimes, she seems to be in a state of bliss. She stands at the open doorway and gazes into the sky. I stand behind her. “Look!” she says. “Why can’t you see?” I tell her that I’m trying, but maybe need some help. She becomes angry and shouts, “The gods! The gods!”

One day, I find Diana clutching a balled-up blanket to her breast. “What have you got?” I ask her. “A dead baby,” she says. I have never seen such terror in her eyes. I have never seen it in anybody’s eyes.

At some point—a day later, two days later—police arrive at the door. In the street, an ambulance is flashing its colored lights. The three policemen at the door have masks on, and I’m initially frightened by this, because I don’t know that many people are now wearing them. Someone has called the police about a lady who lives here who may need to go to the hospital. I stand there gazing stupidly at the policemen. They ask if they can talk to the lady. I tell them she’s my wife. Diana is on the sofa, more or less catatonic.

When I step onto the front porch, I notice some of our neighbors watching from their yards. I am asked questions about Diana and who has been looking after her. I begin to fear that I’m about to be arrested. Someone suggests that maybe it would be good for her to be completely checked out in the E.R., and possibly admitted for a day or so. The next thing I know, two of the ambulance men are bringing a stretcher up to the porch. One of them asks if he can talk to my wife. Finally, I’m able to say something. I say no. They are immediately suspicious. To my amazement, I hear Diana saying, “I’ll talk to them. It’s O.K.” They ask her what’s wrong. She describes a few of her hallucinations. She’s worried about what’s happened to the dead baby. What dead baby? I try to intervene, but already she’s explaining that she had the dead baby in her arms just a moment ago. Perhaps it has rolled away. She gets down on one knee and reaches under the sofa. “Oh, good,” she says, reappearing with the blanket. “Here it is.”

While the medics are conferring with one another, Diana suddenly says, “I think I should go to the hospital.” The ambulance guys seem delighted by this. Diana is put on the stretcher, and the ambulance disappears. No one asks what I think should be done. No one asks me to come along. In the confusion, the blanket has been left on the front porch. When everyone is gone, I take it inside.

That night, Diana is admitted to the hospital for observation. I won’t be able to visit her, because of covid restrictions. I am frantic: they’ll get all the Parkinson’s meds mixed up, they don’t know her schedule. What will happen if she misses a dose of Sinemet?

What transpires in the next days and weeks is sometimes vividly clear and sometimes swirling in a surrealistic fog. At some point, it is decided that I, too, should be examined in the hospital. In the E.R., I am told that I am suffering from exhaustion, malnutrition, and dehydration. I end up on the same floor as Diana. By the time I arrive, she has told everyone that she is a movie director working on a documentary about art therapy in hospitals. From my bed, I explain to her doctors, who are different from my own, as much of her medical history as I can. I am allowed to talk to Diana only by phone.

Social workers keep appearing with documents for me to sign. My daughter Laura and I have agreed, in theory, that eventually Diana will have to move into an assisted-living community. A new facility for patients with dementia has recently been built near Laura’s house, in Worthington, Ohio. Laura wants to take Diana there, and I have to admit that I am no longer able to look after her. I am barely able to look after myself. I sign the papers giving Laura power of attorney for Diana and me. There are decisions to be made, bills to be paid, and I am flat on my back in the hospital.

Covid is tearing through the country. The hospital is filling up with patients, my bed is in demand. My doctors ask if I want to be sent home or to spend three days in the psychiatric hospital associated with the general hospital where I am being treated. They talk about rest, recovery.

Where I end up is not a health spa but more like a boot camp. Before I am moved, all my possessions are taken away. No shoelaces, no belt. At the new facility, I am given a handful of large and small pills every three hours. At night, all patients are on suicide watch. I barely sleep. While I am in the psych ward, Diana is driven in a long-distance ambulance to the care facility in Ohio, where, after a fourteen-day quarantine, she will now live. How Diana deals with this news, what she understands and doesn’t understand, I do not know. She still thinks she is directing a documentary film. I am not allowed to see her before she leaves.

In the second psych ward where I find myself remanded, I am the oldest patient by far. The program of endless group therapies seems designed for adolescents. At seventy-nine, I am too weak to do many of the things demanded of me. When I do not immediately respond to the pills I’m given, there is talk of electroconvulsive therapy. I object, and an online hearing is convened, where a judge concludes that, although I must stay beyond the hospital’s mandatory seventy-two-hour observation period, I do not have to undergo shock therapy.

Meanwhile, I am terrified of covid. Locked out of our rooms for most of the day, we are all in one another’s way, and patients share a common bathroom. One day, I am required to cut off my beard. Looking at myself in the mirror, I discover the corners of my mouth locked in a permanent grimace. The beard has hidden this from me: I can’t smile.

I try to explain to the staff that there has been some kind of mistake, that I need to rescue my wife, who has been taken to Ohio. The things I say to the nurses and therapists must sound mad. When I am finally allowed to see the chief psychiatrist, I hear the desperation in my voice. I watch the unbelieving faces of everyone around me, and wonder how often Diana saw the same incredulity in my own face.

Somehow, our family lawyer gets in touch with a woman named Mary, a registered nurse and “personal health-care advocate,” who is the one to finally secure my release from the psychiatric facility. I am asked to sign some papers that I haven’t read, and then I am free. On the way home in an ambulance, driving back the same way Diana came, I consider asking the attendants riding alongside me if they have heard of the Flowery Man, the topiary trees, the little people—any of Diana’s hallucinated cast of characters. For years I have tried as hard as I could to see these things, to share Diana’s view of the passing world. In her absence, returning to the home where I must now begin to live by myself, I long all the more to understand the reality that she inhabits.

When covid insinuated itself into the facility in Worthington, Ohio, in November, I had been at home for five months. For a couple of weeks, I had managed to communicate with Diana through screens. This confused her, though, so we started using the telephone instead. The last time I saw her face was on Zoom. She told me that she had something beginning with the letter “C.” Then she suddenly smiled her wonderful smile. “What a sweet little girl,” she said, following a hallucination with a sharp turn of her head.

Diana almost survived covid. After testing positive, she spent several nights at the hospital, but was sent back to her facility with a normal temperature and a negative test result. For a few days, I was able to imagine seeing her again, even touching her. I had it all figured out. I would be among the first in line to be vaccinated, among the first to embrace a loved one who had been unreachable for so long. I didn’t care how many hallucinated people came along, as long as Diana was around to see them.

Then her blood-oxygen level dropped. She was not likely to live through the night. Laura put the phone to Diana’s ear, and I read the first poem I ever wrote for her—about waking together in a small Left Bank hotel in Paris before we were married. Finally, I started reading from a book of poetry I had written about her struggle. The dedicatory poem is about the Greek goddess Artemis, known by the Romans as Diana. Its final lines return to Diana the mortal, my wife:

If she could change, she Might be like the woman called by her Roman name Reading in a book beside the fire in my own house. She has come down all these years with me

I couldn’t continue. “You’re doing great, Dad,” my daughter said, “but she wants to know about the Flowery Man.” So I told her everything I knew. ♦

John Matthias, a professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, has published some thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoir, translation, and criticism.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/living-with-a-visionary

[carridine-blog]

The Perfect Stereoscope

This post features a collection of images that I’ve labelled “stereoscopes” over the years.  Some are conventionally, some are unconventionally stereoscopes.  Before jumping in I wanted to offer the chance to appreciate the perfect stereoscope.  This stereoscopic image was constructed of no less than ten individual photographs.  They were combined in photo-editing software and together compose an image both visually pleasing and analogically philosophical.

Stereoscopes:  How to Make a Finger Hotdog

A stereoscope allows the perception of three-dimensions from two dimensional images.  How it works: two images show the same thing from slightly different points of view mimicking binocular vision.  One image for each eye.  The two images unite in the mind and create the perception of depth.  Many people people have difficulty seeing the desired effect.  This most often turns out to be because they have difficulty allowing their eyes to see independently one from the other. If you have trouble see the depth here is a brief how-to do that.

1. 2. 3.

Starting simple:

This shape is excerpted from this larger one.  I like the image because the high contrast makes it almost calligraphic which makes the sudden appearance of three dimensions all the more dramatic.  Calligmagic!

You can make stereoscopic images simply starting with a video clip.  A panning shot traveling roughly 10 centimeters (the space between the eyes) will provide the two images needed.  Take screen captures until you find the ones that work.  Here’s one I did of a bust of Dante I saw in a little cabinet in a big antiques place.

The following caption is a bit repetitive but repetition is good for learning, no?  The difference in the screen grabs in the next one though

  Here is the possibility of seeing William Blake’s life mask in three dimensions without being in its actual presence. I constructed this stereo-image by screen-grabbing two images from a video featuring the mask.  The video camera was moving just enough during the shot to provide these two aspects. The two slightly different aspects simulate views from two different eyes.   The video is for Patti Smith’s cover of “Smells like Teen Spirit.”

  Here is a stereoscope or comic strip I made with  Blake’s Lifemask and two of Messerschmidt’s sculptures.

This is from a post originally named “to stay near the well spring.”

Commenting on an old my post of mine,  Nick Mullins said, “Looking through artists’ websites, I sometimes see a thumbnail that looks really interesting, but when I click on it to get the full-sized image, I find that the real image is nothing like what I thought I was seeing in the thumbnail. Sometimes I have gone back and tried to do a sketch from what I thought I saw in the thumbnail. Your discussion of the fish that became a man in a tarp reminded me of that. Sometimes an accident of vision is more interesting than the reality.”

(Here’s an elaboration of what I replied to him:) Yes my efforts have always included either accident or collaboration — you get to new places faster. Plus, employing accidents it’s easier to appreciate what others might see in my work.  It’s only in recent years that I’ve realized that what I simply straight-forwardly produce is a new place to a person seeing it for the first time. It was the most obvious thing but it hit me like a thunderbolt.

Generally I like to think that the accident or other kind of unexpected input points us to a reality we wouldn’t have conceived without it. I don’t mean that in any mystical way. I mean in just the same way a new sound of music will direct our attention to or express a mood we’ve never heard expressed before. Novelty and re-cognition are wrapped up together. Our ability to invent ways to express our experience, to share our experience, always lags behind experience itself. When someone finds a way to say something new about something true, its like a gift we already possess.

I totally get the thumbnail experience. Very often I screen capture a thumbnail at the resolution I like it and then blow it up in photoshop.   The resolution might be fuzzy but most times it retains the thing I saw in it.

It’s true of my own work. I like to work really small: I tend to make less marks and their interrelations are clearer. Then when I blow it up — used to be on xerox machines or cameras, now it’s scanners mostly — I work to catch the rhythms evident in the little one. Yeah, without projectors, cameras, etc., most of my work would be postage stamp sized.

Speaking of stamp-sized:

The first image in this post, which I’ve renamed “At the Waterfall”  is based on this one here. This one is reproduced at it’s original size.  I got the larger image from this small source by a kind of divination.   I used to use this process all the time.  It combines the two things we just talked about: seeing things in small things and seeing things accidentally. The larger image is a painting mind you: I started with a penciled-in grid and painted all those little dots myself.  So there.  The smaller image is from a photo from a black and white newspaper which I hand-colored and amended with pen. It is hard to tell now but the original photo was of a boy staring at the camera from behind a fence. The fragment I used shows (or used to show) his fingers poking through chain links in the fence.

  Stereoscope: Artaud et le Momo.

  William Blake and Robert Crumb:  Neither Two Nor One

Blake illustrates a passage in Dante’s Inferno, Canto 25 describing a six legged snake attacking a thief,  which Dante modeled after a passage in Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

Inferno XXV 58-69.

“Ivy was never so rooted to a tree as the horrid beast entwined it’s own limbs round the others; then, as if they had been of hot wax, they stuck together and mixed their colors, and neither the one nor the other now seemed what it was at first: even as in advance of the flame a dark color moves across the paper, which is not yet black and the white dies away. The other two were looking on, and each cried, “oh me, Agnello, how you change! Lo, you are already neither two nor one!“.”

Charles S. Singleton translation

“So never did the barbed ivy bind/ A tree up, as the reptile hideous/ Upon another’s limbs its own entwined;/ They clave together, — hot wax cleaveth thus, — / And interfused their colors in such wise/ That neither now appeared the same to us: / Just as in burning paper doth uprise / Along before the flame a color brown / Which is not black as yet, and the white dies. / The other two each shouted, looking on, / “O me, Agnello, how thou alterest! / Lo, thou’rt already neither two nor one!”

Melville Best Anderson translation

Style: visual identity & equivalence

I made this post card to send to James Kochalka when his daily comic AMERICAN ELF  reached the ten year mark. My image is based on a photo of Kochalka and his kids and on a somewhat famous painting by someone else.

Here’re the same elements presented as a comparison, bits of multiply reproduced (degraded) GUERNICA and grid paper atop pages from Kochalka’s THE HORRIBLE TRUTH ABOUT COMICS.   This is from a series of photographs I took: videotaped collages I made while I was designing a previous version of this web site (no longer extant.)

And here again a comparison involving the GUERNICA baby: this time posed against Minnie, Vinny,  and some Mayan Glyphs.  I appreciate glyphs, especially with regard to their foreignness. I am always looking to achieve in my drawing and writing the formal quality I appreciate most readily in markings that are illegible to me.

And finally, GUERNICA baby and some grafitti I copied from a barrier on the side of southbound Route 17, around Allendale, NJ. (Graffiti no longer extant, except in the series of photos I took.  I believe this tag says or originally said, “Messiah.”)

Another Stereoscope: Bill and Lynda B.

Stereoscope juxtaposing Plate XI from William Blake’s ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE BOOK OF JOB (1826) and Panel 2, page 74 from Lynda Barry’s THE FREDDIE STORIES (1999).  Separated by 173 years, sharing a similar vision.  I’m sure Lynda Barry has seen this image of Blake’s.   Does that make her’s a copy of  his?  Not necessarily. Blake himself found the poses and compositions for his divine visions in reproductions of Renaissance Masterworks.

I find this likeness wonderful and marvelous.  I have notes for an essay I’d like to put up as a permanent page here. For now, though, I will suggest the direction the essay would take with a quote from Paul Piehler’s THE VISIONARY LANDSCAPE (pps 19-20):

“The major poets of medieval visionary allegory regard themselves as part of a cumulative tradition, in which each allegorist recapitulates, refines and develops the thought and imagery of his [sic] predecessors, exploring new dimensions of traditional topics, and, most important, attempting to integrate earlier thought and imagery pertaining to the topic into a coherent whole …”

Is 173 years a long time? A bit too long, I guess, for any one of us to endure.   Whatever the number of years, Blake seems irrevocably long ago, from the age of revolution, the mythical time of our era’s origin. His words, images and ideas shine through history like a dead star.  He has, it seems,  joined history — that flat offensive significance of human life which the living are barred from entering.

Meanwhile, Lynda Barry has such a knack for the voices of adolescence and childhood she seems to resurrect a reader’s own past.   The memories she stirs live again.

That makes THE FREDDIE STORIES all the more a marvel: in it Freddie undergoes a “journey to the underworld” which employs imagery familiar from Dante’s journey, even Virgil’s journey. But she builds Freddie’s journey of ” psychic redemption” out of such recognizable, contemporary stuff that she invites us to our own inside of a visionary landscape that has floated along with people for thousands of years.

Style Coloring Page.

“The deeper the influence of the formal, decorative element upon the method of representation, the more probable it becomes that formal elements attain an emotional value.  An association between these two forms of art is established which leads, on the one hand to the conventionalization of representative design, on the other to the imputation of significance into formal elements.  It is quite arbitrary to assume a one-sided development from the representative to the formal or vice versa, or even to speak of a gradual transformation of a representative form into a conventional one, because the artistic presentation itself can proceed only on the basis of the technically developed forms…”

— Franz Boas, “Representative Art,” pps. 82-83 Primitive Art (1927)

  Stereoscope: Blake of the Shtetl.

Here is a stereoscope I’ve had in my possession for over 10 years. On the right is an illustration by Maurice Sendak (1928-2012).  It is one of Sendak’s illustrations for Herman Melville’s PIERRE. Under the image is a caption that reads, “an unbidden, most miserable presentiment.”    On the left is a doodle from a private letter by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) an artist to whom William Blake admitted a debt.  In the Tate Gallery’s catalog of Fuseli’s work this drawing is titled “Caricature of the Artist Leaving Italy.”  The naming of Sendak as the “Shtetl Blake” I take from Margalit Fox in her obituary of Sendak in today’s New York Times. (May 8th, 2012)

  Blake:  Stereoscope as Comic Strip.

These are plates 9 & 10 from William Blake’s little book FOR THE SEXES: The Gates of Paradise.  I grabbed them off of the wonderful site The Blake Archive.   One way to read them is as adjacent comic book panels: ‘this happens and then this happens.’  Another is to read them as slightly different views on the same thing, as in a stereoscope.  Another possibility is that they are completely unrelated.

  One day in the maze …

the rat met the minotaur.

Seriously though

Style and Stereoscope.

Human creators do not have access to the atomic level (artists anyway) and must discover their own smallest building block.  Each must innovate an idiosyncratic [mark] to which a life’s work can be devoted. Rilke speaks of it in terms of Cezanne, Rodin, and his own poetry: “Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything…”  After this discovery the artist is free to become a laborer and to spend every minute of life working at “expressing everything.”

I figured I might as well post one of my favorite all time comparison lessons on that style discovery.   Above are two well known paintings by Van Gogh.  One is painted by the artist we know Van Gogh becomes and one is painted before Van Gogh fully realized that transformation.   I think the chief difference between these two paintings is how each painting relates to itself.  The difference between these two painting styles is in the relation between what the painting conveys and how it is rendered. In the first, the smoking skull image, an idea of something is conveyed, however vaguely, without regard to how it is rendered.  The idea is communicated then we notice how it is communicated, the calligraphy in which it is written.  In the second one, the sunflower, what the painting conveys is conveyed through how it is rendered.   It contains no abstract-able message by which we can paraphrase it and do without the painting.  The painting is all.   I like to think that both paintings have the same thing to say.  They are both Van Gogh expressing something, but only in the second painting is the artist mature enough to say what he means.  In that maturity he became capable of “expressing everything.”

When Worlds Collage.

This is a collage in white grease pencil (china marker) of drawings I copied from Lynda Barry and Robert Fludd.    I chose Fludd’s drawing, which I saw for the first time on the front of a book catalog, because it uses the phrase “mundus imaginabilis.”  I mistook his drawing  as a diagram of Sufi mystic experience which I had just been reading about in books by Henry Corbin.  It turns out that Fludd’s ideas were a bit different but by the time I found that out, the drawing had been made.   I combined the drawing of the mundus imaginabilis (which now that I think of it may be the mundus imaginalis in Corbin) with drawings from Lynda Barry because it suited my abiding interest in the difference in accounts of visionary experience in different periods of history.

The Lynda Barry drawings I took from her 100 DEMONS, one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. These panels come from the introduction where she describes the writing exercise which gave rise to the book (and the title of the book): intending nothing, leaving her brush free to record her every stray thought, she captures the demons that enter her mind. If you haven’t read 100 Demons, I’m not sure what you’ve been doing. You must read this book.

I did this drawing initially as a card for my friend Avy’s 30th birthday. I liked it so much that I made three prints of it, giving one to Avy, one to my friend Kat, and one to someone else (OF).

I post this drawing today because I spoke to Kat on the phone and because today, after years of waiting, I received my copy of Lynda Barry’s latest,  THE NEAR SIGHTED MONKEY BOOK.  Years ago, I put my name on a list so that I could have it as soon as it was available but its publication was repeatedly delayed. I kept getting little e-mails from Amazon saying, “Sorry, not yet” and “oop wait a second.”  So the book finally arrives — with $7.50 due COD — and Kat  tells me Kyle bought the book for her a week ago from the bookstore!

Kat and I spent the rest of our conversation talking about writer’s block, ways of breaking it and how Lynda Barry is the coolest.   Always good to talk to you, Kat.

Two without captions.

  And finally here’s a stereoscope of me

A life mask taken when I was 30 years old.  Twenty three years ago.

A Variety Of Stereoscopes The Perfect Stereoscope This post features a collection of images that I've labelled "stereoscopes" over the years. 

[nightingveilxo]

The Lost Weekend - Directed by Billy Wilder

Alcoholism & Homoerotic Subtext

TPLOSH wasn’t the only film that Wilder made, straddling what was acceptable by the Production Code. He also made The Lost Weekend, the original novel which helped WWII veterans, but fell short in establishing the character from the novel of the same name as being bisexual.

Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Not to be confused with John from S4 wearing a coat like Sherlock.

We’ve already seen metas and discussions about how John drinks whenever he’s feeling emotion, especially about Sherlock. We have the infamous Moffat quote about the amount he drinks:

SUE: That’s a huge glass of wine [John’s] having there, isn’t it?

BENEDICT: I think that’s a whisky, isn’t it? You wouldn’t put wine in a glass like that.

STEVEN: If you watch this show carefully, there is a subtext about John drinking. John’s just hammered by every midnight!

(Like Sherlock, “he does all that anyway”.)

BENEDICT: Come on – it’s New Year’s Eve!

MARK: Even he forgets the names of his girlfriends, and that’s why!

(Umm???)

BENEDICT: Has that glass changed shape, or is that just me?

STEVEN: I think it’s just you. I don’t think he’s capable of doing that. Many and great are his powers; however … ( x)

This continues to happen, and arguably gets worse, through S4. (Consider the number of bottles of alcohol in the kitchen of John’s flat.)

How are the two related?

The Lost Weekend is a serious, painful and uncompromising, frank look at alcohol addiction that follows almost five days ('one lost weekend') in the life of a chronic, tortured alcoholic, and failed writer. The dark-tempered,  melodramatic social-problem film was both a critically- and financially-successful endeavor. This was Billy Wilder's fourth directorial effort, after The  Major and the Minor (1942), Five Graves to Cairo (1943), and the    classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944). The film was given a subtitle for its British release: The Lost Weekend: Diary of a Dipsomaniac.

It was also a revolutionary, ground-breaking motion picture - because it was the first time that Hollywood had seriously tackled the taboo subject and created social awareness of alcoholism as a modern illness. Previous   films had only made fun of drunks and lushes (e.g., The Thin Man series, or W.C. Fields' films). Its release was threatened when the alcohol industry offered to purchase the film's negative and remove it from circulation, but then praised and supported the film following its popular release (and critical success).

Audiences, critics and the studio (before its release) viewed the film's subject matter as sensational, controversial, daring, and starkly real. The drab, gritty black and white cinematography of the expressionistic film emphasized the menacing, warping, and harrowing power of alcohol, as some of the booze-soaked scenes were shot through or in the presence of numerous whiskey bottles and shot glasses. The main character, an alcoholic writer, loses his money, his freedom, and his sense of reality when confined in an alcoholic ward.

Miklos Rozsa's eerie score featured the first use in a feature film of electronic music - from an instrument called a theremin that produced oscillating, wailing, other-worldly sounds to express the drinker's distorted perceptions of reality during the nightmarish sequences.

The film's screenplay (by director Billy Wilder and screenwriting partner     Charles Brackett) was based on Charles R. Jackson's 1944 best-selling novel     of the same name, although its unconvincing, rehabilitative 'happy ending'     conclusion was more optimistic, upbeat and hopeful than the one in the novel.  The novel also changed the protagonist's troubled bi-sexuality and confused     sexuality to frustrations due to creative writer's block.

The film was nominated for seven Academy Award nominations and received     four major accolades: director Billy Wilder scored a double-win, both as    Best  Director (Wilder's second directorial nomination and his first Oscar    win),  and co-writer of the Best Screenplay (his fifth screenwriting nomination    and  first win). Popular matinee idol Ray Milland, cast against type, won    the Best  Actor award for his greatest career role as the hopelessly-obsessed    drunkard,  and the film also captured the Best Picture Oscar, defeating nominees    including  Hitchcock's Spellbound and Leo McCarey's The Bells of    St. Mary's    (both with Ingrid Bergman), Michael Curtiz' Mildred Pierce, and the musical Anchors Aweigh. Its other three nominations  were Best Score (Miklos Rozsa), Best Film Editing (Doane Harrison), and Best B/W Cinematography (John F. Seitz). Jane Wyman also was cast in a different role than her normal characterizations as a bright, loving, patient and happy screen ingenue. It was the first  Best Picture Oscar winner to also win the Cannes Film Festival's top prize, now known as the Golden Palm (Palme d'Or).

The film had enormous impact, especially upon returning combat-fatigued GIs from WW II who were adjusting and struggling with their own difficulties in civilian life and often turning into alcohol dependents. In fact, its success  spurred further black and white, post-war dramas dealing with social-problems, e.g., returning war veterans in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), anti-Semitic prejudice in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), treatment of the mentally-ill in The Snake Pit (1948), and political demagogues in All The King's Men (1949). ( x )

In Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (2013) Blake Bailey recounts Jackson’s life and analyzes his soaked literature, revealing his bisexuality and wounded narcissism. Jackson’s idols were Shakespeare and Fitzgerald, and he saw himself destined for literary glory, “a kindred of Poe and Keats and Chatterton.” “Don is both tragic clown and audience staring back at the performer in silent contempt and ridicule, while hovering above is the triumphant novelist –Jackson – and hence the implicit irony of Don’s self-loathing,” muses Bailey. Every chapter in his book (“The Start,” “The Wife,” “The Joke,” “The Dream,” “The Mouse,” “The End”) is equally persistent narrating Don’s fight against “the old Demon of Ennui,” frantically approaching his conflicted concept of suicide: “a refusal to submit, to conform, a demonstration that the spirit with honor is unwilling to go on except in its own way… Romantic rubbish! An end like this was abject, immoral, worse than unmanly.” ( x )

[mastcomm]

The Knicks Are Trying Something New: a Rebrand

“The New York Knicks are the premier global brand in basketball, period,” Steve Stoute, a music executive and the founder of the ad agency Translation, declared recently over breakfast.

That night, the Knicks were blown out at home by the Memphis Grizzlies. Fans at Madison Square Garden chanted “Sell the team!” at James L. Dolan, the Knicks owner. The New York Post reported that an irate Dolan had directed security guards toward one teenage chanter. A brawl broke out at the end of the game, and multiple Knicks players were later fined.

One of them, Marcus Morris Sr., told reporters after the game that a Grizzlies player had “a lot of female tendencies on the court.” Morris — who would be traded in eight days — apologized on Twitter amid rapid backlash. One week later, Steve Mills, the Knicks president, left the team two days ahead of the trade deadline and less than two months after Coach David Fizdale and an assistant, Keith Smart, had been fired.

That’s just this season. The Knicks will most likely miss the playoffs for the seventh straight year, creating the longest streak of postseason absences for the franchise since the 1960s. The last two decades have seen a sexual harassment lawsuit against the parent company of the Knicks, botched draft picks, whiffs on most superstar free agents and a turnstile of head coaches (13, in fact). The team has long been a punchline, both in and outside New York City.

In an effort to change the public perception of the team, the Knicks announced last month that they had contracted with Stoute’s agency “to help elevate the team’s overall brand positioning and connection to its fan base.”

“You’ve got to put a product on the court that people believe day in and day out every night has an opportunity to win and compete at a high level,” Stoute said, adding, “Then I believe there’s a lot that can be done around building buzz and excitement around the optimism.”

Hiring Translation is a rare acknowledgment by the Knicks that they may be losing clout. And it just so happens that across the Brooklyn Bridge, the Nets, a resurgent franchise with a modern arena and plausible dreams of a championship within the next three years, are primed to pick off some of the Knicks’ loyal fans. Stoute’s goal is to play prevent defense in the marketing sphere. But how can he improve a brand if its most important facet — the on-court play — is among the least competitive in the marketplace?

Stoute is a lifelong Knicks fan who said he wants every young basketball fan in the New York area rooting for his team. He founded the music distribution company UnitedMasters and has worked with several musical artists, including the rappers Jay-Z and Nas. His ad agency’s recent partners include State Farm, the N.F.L., Nike and Anheuser-Busch.

Stoute declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal with the Knicks, but the collaboration, he said, started with his connections to the team’s front office. He convinced the Knicks executives that the team could do more to connect with fans. Stoute was vague about his plans but suggested that a change in social media strategy was coming. (The Knicks declined to comment for this article.)

A core goal of the partnership, Stoute said, is to make the Knicks a desirable destination for free agents again.

“One thing I’ve learned about the organization is they’re going to be aggressive at getting great players and bringing great talent to the city,” Stoute said. “That’s the part of the commitment that fires me up.”

Last summer, after Dolan said during a radio interview that the Knicks were going to have a “very successful off-season,” the team missed out on every superstar free agent. Two of them, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, went to the rival Nets, but Stoute dismissed any notion that the Knicks have a culture problem.

“You know how many teams missed on free agency? Every other team,” Stoute said. “One team got two guys. And the other team — which led to an investigation — got the other guy.” He was referring to Kawhi Leonard’s landing with the Los Angeles Clippers and allegations that people close to him had requested benefits not allowed under league rules.

But the Knicks’ inability to draw top superstars has lasted most of the 21st century, except when they traded for and re-signed a willing Carmelo Anthony in 2011 and 2014 and signed Amar’e Stoudemire in 2010. In October, Durant said in a radio interview that the “whole brand of the Knicks is not as cool as, let’s say, the Golden State Warriors,” the ultimate indictment of a team in a league that prides itself on reaching younger demographics.

“I don’t think that Durant, who moved to the market, can necessarily make that statement in a very factual way,” Stoute said. “That can’t be the case when you see all the business results.”

From that perspective, the Knicks are a resounding success. In most industries, when companies perform poorly for a long time, they go out of business. But the Knicks continue to make more money and haven’t needed to cut prices. The franchise was valued by Forbes last year at $4 billion, the highest in the N.B.A. and up from $3.6 billion the year before. The team is in the biggest media market in the country and has a dedicated, if beleaguered, fan base.

“But brands are also tenuous, and they ebb and flow based on what’s going on,” said Rick Burton, a sports management professor at Syracuse University. “In the case of the Knicks, what’s been happening on the court has not lifted the brand to the levels it’s been at before.”

There are signs that the relationship with consumers is fraying. According to ESPN, the Knicks sell an average of 95.1 percent of their home seats, good for 18th in the 30-team league. This number has declined every year since 2016, when it was 100 percent. In contrast, the Nets have risen from 83.6 percent in 2016 to 92.7 this season. The Knicks rank 11th in attendance, drawing an average of 18,836 people a game. In 2016, that number was 19,812 — fifth in the N.B.A.

Burton said there were ways to improve a team’s brand even if the on-court play remained poor. For example, the Knicks could change the experience at the arena. This could include buzzier halftime acts. Burton cited the model of a minor-league baseball team, which may draw fans more for the chance to enjoy an evening outside than for the quality of the baseball. (One key difference: Minor league baseball games are almost always much cheaper to attend than Knicks games, which can cost individuals and families hundreds of dollars.)

“Steve may come in and say: ‘We can make the game experience better. Even though we can’t control the product on the court, we can give people the perception that they’re getting their money’s worth,’” Burton said.

He continued, “But it’s really hard if the Knicks continue to lose.”

Stoute also seemed to be keenly aware of the fan antipathy toward Dolan, a reclusive owner who has banned fans and Charles Oakley, a popular former player, from Madison Square Garden. At first, Stoute demurred when asked if part of his job was to improve Dolan’s personal brand: “I work for the Knicks and Madison Square Garden. There’s a lot of companies I work for. They’re all owned by somebody. I work for the Knicks and Madison Square Garden.”

But later, in response to another question, Stoute said: “The one thing I would want if I was any sports fan: Is your owner aggressively willing to spend to put winning on the court? Forget the outcome. Is the owner’s mind-set aggressive at winning? We’ve got that.”

Ultimately, though, Burton said, “the owner doesn’t suit up.” Fans buy tickets and turn on the television to watch what the players do. For the last 20 years, that experience has not been pleasant for the loyalists. Asked if he can improve the Knicks brand if the team doesn’t play better, Stoute paused for several seconds. If all goes well, his work will entice the best players in the league to be on the court wearing a Knicks jersey.

“That’s a great marketing question,” Stoute said. “That’s my job. My job is to change public perception so that it does affect the won-loss record.”

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