#you better not be serving mother in a blonde wig when i get there!! me:

[heartz4shauna]

this one’s for all my baby girls 😉

[silkendandelion]

Million Dollar Baby (completed), A One Piece fanfiction

Sir Crocodile x OC (male) Words: 40.8k Genre: Comedy, drama, smut, fluff

Summary: Crocodile finds company for the evening in a charming man. Back to the hotel, the pair find it hard to get comfortable until Crocodile suggests dinner, a strange request for his guest.

Rated Mature for mild sexual content and language. Rating changes published per chapter.

Chapter 2

After driving several almost identical blocks with no apparent laundromat in sight, Crocodile was beginning to think he had been swindled.

“I’m going to kill those kids. Worse, I’m going to find their mothers,” he growled to no one, flipping on the radio for a brief moment before deciding the silence was better. At the next red light, he fished out a cigar, and the car behind him laid on their horn to remind him he was going to miss the green.

I despise this city.

Somehow, the number of bars along the street increased, and Crocodile found himself on the center strip in this outskirt of the larger city. At least now the bars were being competed by late-night hole-in-the-wall eateries and convenience stores hoping to get through the night selling single serving beers and prophylactics. He scanned the crowded parking meters, looking for a place to stop and buy something to drink or eat while he gathered his bearings (and hopefully got better directions this time), but that plan swiftly fell out under a cerulean neon sign that read “East Blue Bar and Grill”.

There, leaning on the parking meter, he saw him: tall to anyone except Crocodile, the silhouette of a young man standing alone, watching the cars with a swivel of his pretty head. His hair, cropped to the back of his neck, shone a deep blonde in the neon lights and—as Crocodile drew closer—was obviously a wig, no matter how handsomely the bangs fell across his cheeks. His suit was carefully ironed but obviously off the rack, hugging the long, elegant line of him only by the grace of some higher power that Crocodile couldn’t pretend to entertain, except to call upon to curse whoever had the gall to release the beauty’s tacky, snake-pattered blazer upon an unsuspecting world.

As he watched him step off the curb to approach the car at the light, a deep-seated jealousy rose from his stomach, stoked by the curve of the man’s body when leaning down to the open window pulled his suit tight to his back. Never—well, maybe not ever, but certainly not for awhile—had he been so magnetized to a stranger. It should have frightened him, yet he only wanted more. Needed, perhaps, the same way one needs a cigarette or dark liquor on the rocks.

He considered ramming his car into the back of the silver Porsche, instead pressing his fingertips into the horn with a curt ‘beep’. Stale ash fell forgotten to the wood-grained console. The beauty lifted his head up to meet his gaze, annoyed for just a moment until Crocodile replaced his cigar safely between his lips, and gestured him closer with a crook of his finger.

From the moment he had stepped off the curb, Crocodile knew exactly what kind of man he was, into what part of the city he had wandered. He was a man, after all, and not one who could refuse such an inviting offer, when their violet eyes shone in the lights of his dashboard, and were polite enough to offer curbside service.

“Has anyone ever told you not to honk your horn? It’s rude,” said the beauty, lips pursing to hold back a smirk until he knew Crocodile wasn’t looking for a fight.

“Yet here you are.” The beauty studied the car’s plush interior—and him—from roof to floor for suspicious items, additional passengers. The longer he stared, the more Crocodile wondered if the tilt of his handsome mouth was the precursor to a rejection.

“I hurt his feelings, I think, coming over to you when he called me first.”

“You didn’t have to come over.”

“Well, you looked polite enough.”

“I thought I was rude.”

His smirk turned to a genuine grin, licking the edge of his glossy lips and sending Crocodile’s insides twisting even further. Not that he gave anything away, idly sending his cigar smoke out his own open window, and waiting for the beauty to finish his assessment.

Up in the rear view mirror, the traffic was beginning to congest behind him. “I had meant to ask you for directions. You look like you know your way around here.”

“If you know that, then you also know nothing on this street is free,” the beauty teased.

“Would you like to come with me? I’m afraid my sense of direction matches my manners.” He reached into his breast pocket and placed his money clip, a generous, healthy pad, in the console behind the ash tray. “You can show me how to navigate this city, and I’ll take care of everything else.”

“Since you asked so nicely.” With consent, they were off, and the beauty slipped into the passenger seat as Crocodile pulled the car away from the curb.

“It’s a lovely car, is it yours?”

“While I’m in town. Put your seat belt on.”

“Oh? Are we actually going somewhere?” He settled himself into the leather seat. “I thought you were just teasing me, that we would go around the corner to some place around here.”

Crocodile wrinkled his nose at the windshield, taking the brief pause in conversation to stub out the last of his cigar into the ash tray. “As if I would take you anywhere so rundown. We’re going back to my hotel, I’m staying at the Rain Dinners on Alabasta Drive.”

He waited within the silence patiently for a moment, then less so, glancing back and forth at the beauty leaning against his window before nearly snapping: “I really don’t know where I’m going, you’ll have to—”

“Oh! I’m sorry, turn here!” His lean body suddenly invaded Crocodile’s space, and the car jerked abruptly in the direction he pointed.

“Are you still not in your seat belt?!”

“Sorry!”

The beauty’s laughter warmed him even more than his flush, more than the realization as they drove along that his cheap dress shirt was nearly see-through in the city’s golden lights, back-lit by flashes across the window to offer glimpses of a smooth chest and a ruddy nipple.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how much?”

The other cigar in his pocket called to him, but he stayed his good hand to the wheel. “It doesn’t interest me.”

“I suppose a Rain Dinners man who rents a car like this doesn’t have to be. Interested in cost, I mean.”

“I’d rather know your name.”

“Promise me you won’t be surprised.”

“At your name or the cost?” There it was, that handsome giggle, the flash of pretty teeth that made Crocodile want to pull over to the side of the street and press him into the backseat. Till dawn or the police arrive, until the windows were completely fogged and the seats were in such a state that his friend was sure to never loan him a car ever again. Of course, he would pay extra for any inconvenience, and laundry fees.

“Both, maybe. Call me River.”

“So, River. Where am I meant to turn next?”

“Oh,” he made a contemplating, inviting sound, what must have been deliberate because it came with him leaning back into his space, careful to keep his seat-belt secure while he splayed one hand across Crocodile’s thigh, and the other pointed down a side road. “Right there.”

His answer, a pointed brush of his nose behind his ear and an authoritative rumble, elicited an excited shiver. “Be good and sit down for me. We’re almost there.”

River blushed where his skin still prickled. “Yes, sir.”

“Call me Crocodile.”

As they arrived at the front curb of the hotel, the valet greeted them with a respectful nod, opening both their doors while the head attendant extended his palm for the keys.

“Welcome back, sir.”

He nodded back, cordial but clearly focused on the beauty on the curb who fidgeted with his hands in his pockets. “Come. You can smoke upstairs.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“It’s all right to be nervous.”

But when he spent too much time gawking at the lobby’s crown molding and crystal light fixtures, one of Crocodile’s fingers hooked onto his belt loop to tug him along.

“However—” He leaned down to whisper in his ear. “It’s not all right to look out of place. People might get the wrong idea.”

“The right idea?” River raised his eyebrow.

“It’s none of their business. Let’s not give them anything to talk about, hm?”

But as they waited for the elevator, the urge to be a little (his idea of little) mischievous became too much, especially once another couple walked up to wait beside them. Based on their sideways glances and tilted frowns, it could be assumed they were already making their own assumptions without anyone having spoken a word.

River made a show of yawning, stretching in a curvy line along Crocodile’s arm and giving an exaggerated moan of relief. The man of the other couple shifted his focus to the extra sliver of toned chest that peeked out where River’s slinky gesture popped another one of his buttons—of which there was just a few left before he was completely exposed.

“Darling, can’t we have champagne brought up for bath time?” He simpered, saccharine-sweet and emphasized by rubbing his cheek on Crocodile’s coat, making sure to arch just right to show the strangers the outline on the back of his trousers that was certainly not a pair of boxer shorts.

Lucky for Crocodile, who was determined to ignore him by staring perfectly forward at the elevator door, he was saved by the resonating ping when it finally slid open.

“Pleeease—oh.” River broke into an easy grin. “Hurry, darling. I’m absolutely aching.”

“W-welcome back, Sir.” The concierge fixed their eyes to the control panel. Frankly, anywhere was more professional than at the slinky faux-blonde that spread his thighs over both of the elevator’s couch cushions, resting his arms across the back with all the air of suggestion. “And guest.”

“Let’s go—” The stranger grunted when his wife jammed her elbow in his ribs. “I mean, we’ll catch the next one.”

Crocodile’s patience was beginning to run thin when the beauty had the gall to wave.

“You will behave yourself as long as you accompany me,” he said once the doors closed, hard and commanding obedience as he glanced at the concierge, who had yet to press the button for the top floor.

“I’m sorry, you’re just too fun to mess with.” River giggled without the barest hint of remorse.

“Try.”

Upon the opportunity to reflect in the cloistering silence, River startled to realize he meant it, that Crocodile was fun to provoke, more fun to tease, right before he found the self-awareness to reel himself in, remembering that in a little over an hour, two if he was lucky, he would descend in this elevator alone, cash in hand.

Ping was their signal to depart, with River venturing out first to explore ahead.

“Left,” Crocodile called after him, at the same time he gave a pointed stare to the concierge that leaned out of the elevator’s door to leer at River’s superfluous walk, meant for the tall businessman that trailed him, but with the unfortunate side effect of distracting anyone who happened to look.

“Step aside,” he grumbled where River crowded the door.

River side-stepped the barest amount to tempt Crocodile’s broad shoulders to bully him the rest of the way over as he finagled with the key-card. After several long, tortuously quiet tries without success, all with River watching at his elbow, he clicked his tongue.

“Whoever’s idea it was to get rid of keys should be hanged.” Mercifully, the lock eventually allowed him inside, only after more bargaining and a little unexpected humility.

Inside, Crocodile hung his coat, about to offer River the same courtesy but he was already wandering the suite, popping in and out of every room like a dog that needed to aquaint himself with his new territory before he relaxed.

‘This place is huge!’ His muffled voice echoed around the stone bathroom before he reappeared on his way to the balcony.

“We must be on the top floor,” he marveled, wide eyes curious. “And the view is beautiful. Do you spend a lot of time out there?”

“I’m not particularly fond of heights.”

“And yet you have this room on the top floor?”

“The penthouse is the best they offer, and I don’t have to go out there if I don’t want to. Part of the rental agreement, you see.”

As if he was alone, Crocodile began looking over the papers at his desk with little care to entertain his guest. Suddenly, sitting there in his waistcoat, it was never more apparent to the other man that his left hand was fake, still gloved in leather compared to his bare right that flipped through the pages.

The warm, golden lights of the suite were almost overwhelming compared to their time outside in the night, highlighting all of their secrets, from Crocodile’s obvious avoidance to River’s left hand that shook with the need for a cigarette.

Well, as long as Crocodile was stalling, so could he.

“I’m going to have a smoke before we begin, if that’s all right.”

“Go ahead,” he said, continuing to flip through his documents like it was the middle of the afternoon and they were meeting to sign a contract, instead of exchanging a service. Perhaps they were.

His pen scratched along the top-most paper, a faxed copy of his schedule, now marred with his indecisive scribbling about moving meetings. ‘Clear schedule for funeral?’, the black ink said, smearing along the punctuation when he slid it aside. That was out of the question, he wouldn’t make it in time even if he wanted to—which he didn’t. Truly, no matter how the guilt twisted his insides, having the audacity to pretend to be anything more than obligation. He supposed that to want your parents pride was a harder addiction to break than nicotine. The fax smeared further when the beauty came to sit on his desk, pressing his papers beneath dark gray trousers.

“It makes me lonely to see you so far inside your own head. Didn’t you bring me here for some fun?” He flirted, heavy-handed but smooth as silk.

Crocodile allowed himself a single touch, to run his hand down the shin of his pant leg and rest on the top of his derby dress boot, clean despite the creases along the toe and hand-painted leather sealant that implied the soles had been replaced at least once.

“Have you eaten dinner?”

River leaned back on his hands, sighing despite the tilt of his amused smile. “Your time began the moment we arrived to the room, Crocodile, surely you don’t want to spend it having dinner? Unless that’s a euphemism. Ah—sorry, I think I’ll spend the rest of my life getting used to English.”

“I already told you cost wasn’t an issue—”

“And I have a hard time believing that, no one doesn’t care about the cost—”

“Then how much?” Crocodile snapped at him, though he tried to pretend he hadn’t by stepping away to hover near the bar.

When he turned back, the beauty was still sitting on his desk. But, the guarded calm in his eyes told Crocodile he was exactly one more mis-delivered phrase from him fleeing the room. And then he would be alone.

Which was exactly what he couldn’t bear, not now.

“I apologize for raising my voice. Perhaps I’m more tense than I believed… Do whatever makes you comfortable, your usual disclaimer,” he said, and then poured two short glasses of a dark liquor from the hotel’s selection.

“Do you drink?” He asked, struck by the realization he had made another assumption. To his relief, the beauty seemed to relax a little, sighing a second time and coming off the desk to approach him.

“Not spirits usually. No sense wasting what you’ve poured already.”

Crocodile knocked his back in a single swallow, worrying the man beside him until he replaced the crystal decanter among the wall. Watching such a rigid businessman take a shot for courage, removing his cravat and setting himself down in the armchair beside the phone was decidedly amusing, believing he was nervous about the intimacy and not for… extenuating circumstances that he could not begin to guess.

After swallowing his own, he took a seat on the adjacent ottoman, letting his hands rest on Crocodile’s knees in a gentle press that he hoped was both enticing and comforting. “We can have dinner if you want. I like seafood.”

And champagne, Crocodile thought to himself as he reached for the receiver. “Yes, the kitchen, please.”

Once he had rattled off everything he thought his guest might like, topped with champagne and an uncharacteristic ��surprise me” when offered dessert, he finally acknowledged the impish hands that had begun to absently massage at his thighs.

“Mischievous, aren’t you?” He teased quietly, careful to be gentle with the thawing air between them.

“Who, me? Never,” replied River as he stood. Crocodile watched him shed his jacket, eyes drifting down the length of him as he draped it over the back of the couch and began to roll up the sleeves on his dress shirt.

“Are you married?” River fished for small talk in the comfortable silence.

“No, never,” he answered easily. Either honest or a very good liar, River decided.

“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“Not for a long time. My business keeps me away for long periods.”

“A charming personality cannot float a relationship alone, after all,” River said, coming back to lower himself into Crocodile’s lap, slowly to not startle him away. The gentle press of two arms slipping around his waist, firm but suggesting their hold could be broken in an instant—tempted him to sit.

“So you’re a comedian too? Not just gorgeous,” Crocodile rumbled at him, his good hand rubbing his spine through his shirt.

“I am so many things: lover, poet, amateur cook—karaoke champion.”

“Is that so?” Crocodile gave him his first honest smile of the night, pressing his grin into the hand that touched his cheek, scratching the beginnings of his stubble.

Such honest, innocent enjoyment, that flickering expression of happiness, made River’s chest tight so abruptly it nearly startled him off his lap. He couldn’t ever recall wanting to kiss his client, certainly not before anything had even happened. Moreover, he would rather leave empty-handed than make tonight the exception.

The doorbell startled them apart while Crocodile gestured for the food to be taken to the dining table.

“If there’s anything else you want, tell me. I can call them back,” he said, pointing to the spread the staff had laid out, including an ice bucket for champagne and a chilled selection of chocolate covered fruits. It felt wasted, when he was putting in the level of effort expected of a lover, and River was simply on the clock.

He swallowed around his dry throat, hoping his resolve would steel. A lot of clients had bought him dinner, it was not an exception.

Crocodile loosened the top button on his shirt, and reached for the champagne. He had used dinner as an ice breaker for a lot of intimate endeavors in the past, this wasn’t any different.

And so, dinner became dessert on the couch, touching only where their thighs brushed, and where Crocodile slipped chilled pieces of chocolate between his lips. They abandoned the empty platter soon after, taking the ash tray to the sitting area for a night cap, reaching for the same glass and pretending to watch the TV that droned on with a movie neither could recall the name.

“It’s getting late,” River said suddenly, quietly in the dark, the room lit by just the television and some semblance of lights in other rooms.

“Are you allowed to stay the night?” Crocodile ventured, even quieter.

“I can do anything I want.”

He didn’t ask if he wanted to stay, didn’t speak aloud that he would pay fairly for the hours he had kept him already. Even if the answer was “no”, he was sure the champagne would allow him to sleep, though he wasn’t sure his pride would ever recover.

So, he chose not to elaborate. After all, he believed leaving the decision up to River absolved him of any culpability for what transpired between them next.

Instead, he sat hypnotized as he watched him reach for the remote, flipping the TV volume to mute and rising to his feet. Up close, a beauty mark beside his eye caught his gaze, among another near his navel when he removed his shirt completely. His belt jingled loud in the silence, trousers falling to the floor as he stripped himself down to almost bare.

Crocodile’s hand squeezed the arm of the chair to resist touching without permission, or he might foolishly press his thumb to the silvery whisper of a scar on the soft plane of his hip, cut by the tight line of his panties—black, silk, and little more than a string on the sides.

The cool blue light from the television slipped into all the rivers and valleys of his toned body, carving him out for the sweep of Crocodile’s dark eyes as they roved over every endless inch. If either of them heard the stitches of the arm chair creaking when River lowered himself to the carpet to crawl to him, well, they didn’t mention it. To Crocodile, the world had become so small suddenly, narrowed down to the beauty between his legs, the one heating his skin where he opened his shirt to slide warm palms into his clothes.

“You have to tell me what you want,” Crocodile spoke first, all tobacco and smoke in the inches between their lips. Tell me what I’m allowed to have.

“I want whatever you want.”

Right. Regardless of the fluttering in his stomach, he understood any amount of prying that might make River voice his own desires would hardly be worth making him uncomfortable, especially when he was so good at his job the way the manual wrote it.

“What do you do?”

“No kisses on the mouth, but I can top or bottom for you, whatever you like. And I’m prepped already,” he replied, like it didn’t make Crocodile’s breath catch. “The night is still young, so don’t think you have to choose only one or the other.”

While River’s handsome cock was an offer by itself, a respectable weight between his legs even half-hard and pulling his panties taut, Crocodile knew exactly what he wanted from this night: to lose himself in someone, and loose his frustrations on a willing participant.

A playful hum between his knees captured his attention, and he stared down at the traitorous monument of his cock, having burst from his open zipper most presumptuously when mischievous fingers helped themselves. Whatever teasing words River had for him, he couldn’t bring himself to be irritated as gentle fingers tested the pull of his foreskin.

“He is the most honest part about you. Why don’t we let him lead?” said River, ending his question by guiding him between his lips and over the velvet of his tongue. Behind him, the sumptuous curve of his back was surely deliberate, determined to please with all five, vulnerable senses.

Crocodile believed if he could also manage to please him, all the misfortune in his life that led him to this moment would be worth it.

And oh, was it worth it.

Chapter 3

[mst3kproject]

Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow

This movie has no dogs, which is a shame because the title definitely sounds like a lost episode of Scooby-Doo.  What it does have is Elaine Dupont from I Was a Teenage Werewolf (and the Beach Girls and the Monster) and Russ Bender from It Conquered the World (he also wrote Voodoo Woman, which makes him indirectly responsible for Curse of the Swamp Creature), in a genre crossover that reminds one of Catalina Caper and is even less successful. It’s also even less funny.

Our heroes are a bunch of super-cool hot-rodding thirty-year-old fifties teens who speak in painfully embarrassing slang. They’ve been evicted from their headquarters and need some new digs, but all their efforts to find a place have come to naught… until an elderly lady offers them her house at Dragstrip Hollow. It sounds like it’ll have everything they need, as long as they don’t mind that it’s haunted.  The gang is a little unnerved by strange events their first evening at the house, but ultimately decide that if nothing else, it’s the perfect place for a Hallowe’en party.  What they haven’t realized is that with everybody in costumes, the monster in the basement will be able to walk among them un-noticed!

This is yet another movie that sounds like a good time but is actually almost unwatchably boring.  A party in a haunted house with a monster who just wants to have a good time?  I’m up for that!  But Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is only an hour long, and spends most of that time dithering around doing absolutely nothing.

There are two potential main characters.  One is Lois, a young woman who’s far more interested in cars and racing than in boys and makeup, much to her parents’ chagrin. Her mother believes this is a phase she’ll grow out of, but her father keeps trying to encourage her to be more feminine and never gets very far.  This sublot drops out of the movie halfway through, without ever coming to any kind of conclusion.  Lois is also at odds with Nita, a member of a rival racing gang.  Lois spends most of the movie refusing to be goaded into a racing rematch with Nita, but eventually gives in, and their climactic race takes place off-screen while we watch the band at the Hallowe’en party try to play their instruments while dressed as bedsheet ghosts!  Nothing comes of it.

The only thing Nita’s gang does through the whole movie is show up at parties they haven’t been invited to, exchange insults with Lois’ friends, and then leave.

The other potential hero is the reporter who’s doing a series of articles on rebellious teenagers.  He quickly makes friends with the kids, becoming an honourary member of their club, and apparently helps them search for a new headquarters. In spite of this, he doesn’t actually have an arc.  He sympathizes with these young people from the beginning, and based on the questions he asks it’s pretty clear he wants to show that their cars and racing are a harmless hobby rather than a gateway drug to crime.  This opinion doesn’t change over the course of the movie.  Neither does his insistence that the house is not actually haunted, even as unseen hands light his cigarette for him and untie his bow tie.

Most of the movie is totally useless – like the slumber party at Lois’ house, which serves no purpose except to make a joke about women taking too long in the bathroom.  I’m sure that was already tired and unfunny in the 50’s. Or the old lady’s opinionated pet parrot, who provides annoying commentary that makes already not-funny scenes even less funny.  I was sure the parrot was going to be a plot point, because one of his demonstrated talents is imitating a police siren and the hot rodders are worried about getting in trouble with the cops.  Surely during a climactic race the parrot will trick Nita into pulling over, allowing Lois to take the lead!  But no, that can’t happen because that would be useful.  Nothing in this fucking movie is allowed to be useful.

All of this bullshit, with the slumber party and the stupid parrot and the old lady being bad at playing the flute… and the rival gang showing up and then leaving… and the musical numbers, one of which has no lyrics except a guy saying Geronimo! and then firing blanks at the ceiling, and this is played twice… and Lois’ parents and the reporter hanging around and the short guy with the tall girlfriend… all of this drags on and on and on and takes up three quarters of the movie and has literally nothing to do with the plot!  The fact that the club needs a new place to hang out is introduced pretty early but then gets shoved aside until almost the end.  You’d think we ought to see them trying to find a place until eventually being forced to settle for the creepy old house in the middle of nowhere, but no, we sit through forty minutes of nonsense and then suddenly arrive at characters talking about it.

The haunted house must be the actual plot because it’s the title, but it isn’t worth waiting for.  When the club arrives to take a look around, there is indeed a monster creeping around causing mischief.  And it’s definitely a monster, not a ghost – although there is also a ghost. In fact, when we get a good look at the beast shortly thereafter… it’s the fucking She-Creature.

I’m not even kidding.  It is literally the She-Creature without the dumbass blonde wig and with the chitinous tits toned down into chitinous pecs.  This thing creeps around and growls at people, then turns up at the party to dance with a couple of girls before getting its mask ripped off (I told you this was an episode of Scooby-Doo!) to reveal, and I promise you I did not make this up, I could not make this up, a bitter stuntman with a high squeaky voice. He looks a little like Lois’ father and I thought for a moment we were doing a Beach Girls and the Monster thing here… but no, he’s a totally different character.  Why is he dressed up as a monster haunting this old house with a collection of special effects equipment he keeps behind the fireplace?  Because nobody appreciated his performance as the She-Creature.

He actually says that.  Fuck this movie!  The monster suit isn’t even bad enough to be funny.  In fact, it looks better here than it did in The She-Creature or Voodoo Woman, possibly because the lighting allows us to actually see it!

Oh, and as I mentioned, there’s also a ghost, but he left because he didn’t like the rock and roll music.

In order to find the creature’s secret lair, they ask ‘Amelia’, the nerdy guy’s superintelligent, talking, self-driving hot rod.  This machine speaks in a deep, somewhat ghostly voice, and isn’t mentioned or even hinted at until the movie’s almost over.  People accidentally blundering into secret rooms behind the fireplace is a time-honoured tradition in movies, but apparently that wasn’t good enough for Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow.  No, they had to have a deus-ex-machina supercomputer fire-breathing car figure it out without even saying what the clues were.  Fuck!

I’ve watched several films for this blog that left me with the impression that the people making them knew what parts go into a movie but not how to put them together.  I don’t think the makers of Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow even knew what movies are made of – or if they did, they were actively contemptuous of that ingredients list.  Their film seems to have been cobbled together from bits of several stories, without including enough of any single one to really get a plot.  Remember Face of the Screaming Werewolf, which really was made of random bits of two other movies?  Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is about as coherent as that.  It feels like there’s at least another hour of material missing somewhere, which would deal with things like Lois’ relationship with her parents or the rivalry between the two racing clubs.  It feels like anything that would help unify this story, or bring proper closure to any of the plotlines, was deliberately left on the cutting room floor, just to piss me off!

I only laughed once in the entire movie, at a bit where the parrot complains about his mistress’ bad driving (he wails and me so young!).  The rest of the time I couldn’t even find it ironically funny.  When I wasn’t rolling my eyes at the attempted jokes I was staring at the screen in bafflement because I couldn’t figure out what the movie was trying to do. What ought to be plot points are quickly forgotten, or else resolved with nonsensical trifles and then thrown away. The result is confusing and ultimately deeply frustrating.  I mentioned Scooby-Doo, but that’s not even a fair comparison, because the unmasking of the villain in Scooby-Doo always includes the reveal of a master plan.  The monster in Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is just fucking around.

I hate this movie.  It’s not even a movie.  It’s just a bunch of unrelated things that happen to the same set of characters, without even any laughs to make it worth watching.  They could have filmed an hour of their asses pressed up against a windowpane, and it would have annoyed me less.

[hateswifi]

Rising from the Ashes: Of Dates and Disguises

So this is Part Seven here is to my Master List and Part Six.

--------------------------------

He texts back his Angel asking to go out this Friday night. She responded positively. He told her that he would pick her up from work. She told him not to overdo it or she wouldn’t talk to him again for a month. He promised he would try and keep it lowkey. Damian fell asleep with a smile on his face and a place in mind.

She wore a red a three-quarter sleeve dress the flows out between her elbow and wrist, the skirt is flowy and ends above the knee. She wore cute ankle boots and black tights. She grabbed her black mini purse. It was still cold, so she grabbed her navy blue winter coat has fluffy faux fur on the hood. The next day of Marinette’s work went well. 

She excitedly waits outside of Lucky Spot for Damian. She hears her phone ring, she picks it up. "Hi, Angel. I'm running a bit late. I got caught up in a bunch of traffic. I thought I would be out in time, but I'll be around ten minutes late. Can I pick you up at your apartment?" Damian asks speaking louder than need be.

"Damian, that sounds super loud are you ok? Are you safe?" Marinette asked, walking towards her apartment.

"Yes it's just traffic," Damian says. "Umm, I gotta go.."

"Oh ok," She said while hanging up. She finished walking home, texted Damian her address, and turned on the news. Robin and Red Hood were fighting Mr. Freeze. Well, they finished fighting they had Mr. Freeze in cuffs and was in the GPD's custody. Robin ran off out of view, the reporter talked about the fight when she heard a knock on her door. She got up quickly while turning off the t.v. and answered the door.

"Hey Damian," She smiles as she sees the boy, normally perfect black hair was quite messy, but handsomely messy, his green eyes sparkling in her dim lights. "Welcome to my humble abode. Would you like to take a look around?" 

"That would be lovely," Damian said, closing the door behind him.

"Just let me remind you that I've only been living here for a couple of days and not everything is decorated or how I would like it to be," Marinette explained, quickly. "This is my kitchen and living room it's an open floor plan." If you follow me this way I have what will be my sewing room once I sell this twin bed. This is my bedroom, it's a mess right now so I'm just going to close this real quick. Then the bathroom is right here."

"This is quite a nice apartment for only being here for a couple of days," Damian compliments. "It doesn't look like you have much stuff though. Did you not take any of your stuff with you? Did your family not give you any housewarming gifts?"

"I recently lost my parents, that's part of the reason I left," Marinette said her face falling a bit. "They died when our house burned down, so I started from scratch. The things I own now were either left by the last tenant left, hand-me-downs from Chloe, or things I recently bought."

"Well I'm sorry for your loss, but I know you're strong. I'll be here if you need my support, Angel, as your friend or something more," Damian said, Marinette ran over and hugged him.

"Thank you, Damian. That means so much to me," Marinette said into his chest.

"You ready for dinner, Angel?" Damian asked, rubbing her back.

"Yes, just as long as it's nothing over the top as I said last night," Marinette said, looking up at the handsome boy breaking away from the hug.

"Yes, come on," Damian said as she locked the door. They walked downstairs, Damian then opens the door to his car for her. 

"So where are we going?" She says, buckling her seat belt.

"It's going to be a surprise," Damian smirked, looking forward at the road, safety first.

"Can't wait," Marinette said, looking at the window, watching the city go by. "The city is so beautiful. Oh! I forgot to ask, did you get caught up in the Mr. Freeze traffic. I saw it on the news, man it must have crazy growing up in this city."

"You saw that?" Damian asked, looking over at the beautiful girl.

"Yes, it was the traffic light boy," Marinette smirked. "and Red Hood. They took him down quite fast, but Robin left quickly after Mr. Freeze was in cuffs."

"Traffic Light Boy?" He asks, remembering what Ladybug had said the night before. He smiles, knowing that the girl he wants as his girlfriend, is even more amazing than he thought. 

Marinette blushes as she explains. "I didn't know Robin's name when I moved here, but my first impression was a traffic light. The designer in me died just a bit but since it's a right of passage, and it's quite honorable."

"We're here," Damian said, getting out of the car then he opens the door for Marinette. "Welcome to the first restaurant my father took me to when he first got custody of me from my mother."

"This looks so homey, what food do they serve," Marinette asked, taking a seat on a stool at the counter.

"Burgers, french fries, hotdogs, milkshakes, and pizza. I hated American food growing up because my mother had me on a strict diet," Damian said. "It's still not my favorite, but I want you to have the full American experience. Do you want to get a little of everything and just split it?"

"Sounds good," Marinette giggles. "So you've heard about me. What can you tell me about you?"

"I grew up with my mother Talia and my grandfather. They were big on self-defense, I spent a lot of time on learning martial arts; I have achieved many black belts. I don't want to talk about myself, I want to hear more about you," Damian said. The waitress came over and took their order.

"I started designing at a young age because I didn't want to be in my parents' bakery shadow. They were the best in Paris, but I didn't want to disappoint them if I wasn't as good as them. As a thirteen-year-old in collège, I started designing for Jagged Stone. I also was found by Gabriel Agreste after winning a competition. He then let me release my line," Marinette told him. The food had arrived and as Damian said they split everything. "So what do you want to do after you're done with school?"

"As the only true blood heir to Wayne Enterprises my brother decided that I would inherit the company, but they would always help me," Damian said, taking a bite of burger. "How do you like American food?"

"It's pretty good, but it seems super unhealthy. I think I'll stick to homemade Parisian food for a while. Next time I'll make the food," Marinette said, pulling out her wallet from her purse to pay.

"Ok you know that I am a son of one of the richest men in the world, but you insist on pay, why?" Damian asks, taking her wallet before she could pull out money.

"Because, my prince, you were first Damian, Titus' owner. The boy I first met was adorably nervous, complimented me, and insisted on paying for breakfast as a sorry for being tackled by his dog," Marinette said. "I'll pay the tip. It's a tip or all meal."

"Fine," Damian said, giving her back her wallet. He paid the part he said he would. They left and he held the restaurant door open then also opened his car door for her. Damian walked Marinette up to her apartment.

"Thank you, Damian, for walking me up to my apartment," Marinette said unlocking her door then turns toward him.

"Thank you for coming with me. You make me happy, Angel,"  Damian said looking down at her. Marinette leaned up and kissed his cheek. He leaned forward and whispered. "Angel, may I kiss you?"

"Prince, I thought you would never ask," Marinette leaned up and met his lips. They are incredibly soft. They broke their chaste kiss. "Goodnight my Prince."

"Wait, Angel, will you be my girlfriend?" Damian said stopping the door before she could finish closing it.

"I would love that," Marinette said hugging him. 

"Thank you, Angel, for making my life brighter," he said, kissing her head. "Good night, Marinette."

"Good night, Damian," She closes the door with a smile, she slides to the ground.

The next morning Marinette got up and put on a straight long brown with blonde highlights wig she had bought earlier that week. She put on green contacts and wore the horse miraculous. She wore an emerald green shirt and her black skater skirt, all paired with green converse. 

“Hey, Chloe,” Marinette said into her phone. “I’m about the teleport is it ok if I use your room.”

“Ya I’m here now, I’ll be waiting,” Chloe said then hung up. 

“You heard Chloe, girls,” Marinette said looking at the kwamis. “Kaaliki full gallop. Full forth!"

The portal opened and she stepped through, now standing In Chloe’s room. She detransforms and hugs her friend. 

“I haven’t seen you in forever!” Marinette said. 

“It hasn’t been a week,” Chloe said. 

“It feels like longer though. Guess what?” Marinette said breaking the hug now looking at her friend. 

“What, you got  Titus owner to be your boyfriend,” Chloe guesses, rolling her eyes. Marinette blushes. “Wait seriously? You’ve been in America for five days and you already have a boyfriend? I guess I need to come to America too. Help me pack my bags?”

“Chloe his name is Damian and he’s super sweet,” Marinette smiles. 

“Lila’s fake boyfriend’s name is also Damian,” Chloe snickers and then mimics. "Her Damiboo is so shy." They laugh together and Chloe takes a closer look at Marinette. "So who are you today?" Chloe asks

"Today I am Ann Prince, and I am here to visit my dear childhood friend, Chloe," Marinette said in a British accent, twirling.

"Hello Ann I'm happy to see you again, it has been ages," Chloe says, hugging her long lost friend. "What do you have planned for today?"

"Well, I would love to see the friends your friends you speak so highly of. If I remember correctly Adrien and Kagami have a fencing tournament, then Kitty Section has a performance," Marinette said with a smile.

"I'll text my friends to let them know that my dear friend Ann is coming," Chloe said texting them. "Want some lunch before the tournament?"

"I woke up, got dressed and came here, so breakfast would be better," Marinette said as they leave Chloe's room.

"How about brunch?" she says closing the door. "There's a small cafe near here we can go to."

"That would be lovely," Marinette said as they walk together in sync they talk about everything they had missed. They eat eggs and benedict. They talk about their futures, how Chloe is doing in school, and most importantly Christmas. 

When they arrive they sit in the front row. They're on the quieter side careful not to draw attention to themselves. After Kagami won the girl's division she came and sat with Ann and Chloe. She smiled seeing the bluenette turned brunette. 

"Good job you guys! Hi, my name is Ann, I'm one of Chloe's childhood friends," Marinette greeted, still speaking in her British accent. 

"Hi, I am Adrien Agreste, and this is my beautiful girlfriend Kagami," Adrien said, hugging Ann.

"Hello, Ann," Kagami said also hugging her. Lila and Alya walk up to the group.

"So who is your new friend, you're all so quick to replace Marinette. What? Is she a bully too?" Aha sneers. 

"Well I am Ann Prince, it is a pleasure to meet you," she said, holding out a hand with a sickeningly sweet smile.

"Ann you don't want to hang out with these people, they are bullies," Lila warned smiling.

"Lila, why are you here?" Adrien said, stepping in front of Ann.

"I came to see you of course Adrihoney! You are my boyfriend!" Lila screamed, wrapping her arms around his neck.

"Lila, I've told you many times that we are not dating. I'm dating Kagami and have been for two years," Adrien said.

"We both know your father is making you date her. I'll be here for when you can finally be free from her cold claws," Lila said, walking off with Alya tailing behind her.

"Well, you guys ready to head to Kitty Section's performance?" Marinette asks.

"Sounds like a plan, Ann," Chloe said, locking elbows as they walk out of the school.

Kitty Section is playing at the TVi studio as part of a competition judged by Uncle Jagged. Apparently, he had been a bit quieter since his niece's funeral. She was excited to see her friends and her uncle even from afar. Luka won the best guitar solo, but Kitty Section did not win as a group. 

"Hi, Luka! My name is Ann and I'm an old friend of Chloe. It's nice to meet you," Marinette said still in her British accent, hugging the bluenette. "Congratulations, I loved your guitar solo! The rest of your group was pretty good." 

"Thank you, Ann, you guys ready for dinner? I’m starving," Luka said turning to the rest of the group.

"That sounds great! I haven't eaten since before the competition," Adrien said, rubbing his stomach.

They ate dinner together. They chatted and she told them the news of her and Damian. She told them about the Gotham heroes and everything in between. They told her about their Christmas plans. They smile as the pay and say goodbye. She left to go talk to Master Fu.

"Master Fu, it's good to see you, she says bowing. "I ended up in America, how are you able to get me the correct papers?"

"It's good to see you again Ms. Marinette. I like the wig and contacts a simple but good disguise," Master Fu compliments. "I just have my connections, don't worry it's nothing illegal."

The process didn't take long and soon she was heading back to Chloe's room. She opened the door to see her friends sitting down watching an anime. She sat down on the couch her friends and watch half an anime before they're interrupted by a bing.

Prince: Hey Angel how are you doing

"Aww Damian is texting," Marinette said, smiling at her phone.

Angel: Pretty good. what've you been up to today?

'Prince: I had a couple of meetings today. They were boring, but I'm alive. How bout you'

Angel: Chloe video called me so I could watch Adrien and Kagami's tournament. Then Kagami video called me so I could watch Luka's performance. It was fun. Want to come to my apartment tomorrow for a homemade meal

Prince: I would love that

Angel: Great see you, tomorrow prince

Prince: It sounds like you're getting ready for bed, but do you realize it's only two o'clock

Angel: Seriously I didn't even realize it

Prince: Lost in a design?

Angel: No, Adrien recommended us all a different and new anime, Sword Art Online. It's pretty good

Prince: Well I hope you enjoy it. Dick is telling me to pay attention. Bye Angel.

Angel: Good luck, Prince.

Marinette smiles, standing up while saying. "Guys. I should be going. It's already eight here, two in Gotham. I'll miss you guys, I'll be back for Chinese New Year and regular New Year." 

"Well we can't wait to see you again Ann," Adrien said, hugging the girl the rest join in the group hug.

"Kaalki, full gallop," She transforms back into Mare. "Thank you for announcing my moving, by the way. Full forth. See you guys soon." Then she was gone. She had taken some French food she had missed a bit. She put the food in the kitchen, and grabbed her sketchbook, wanting to sketch her new found inspiration from being home. After a couple of hours of designing, and a shower she went to bed early because of jet lag sorta.

---------------------------

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[westernhoodrat]

Meet Dani

The following is an excerpt from my first book that I recently self published on amazon. If you’re interested in science fiction, adventure, or just a good story? Give it a read, let me know what you think and consider checking out The Map: Book One of the Edwina Chronicles.

Chapter 4

August 4th, 3108 AA 

Olympus, Gaea (Colonial Capitol City)

     The warehouse was grubby, grease-coated and run down; piles of star ship parts sat idly all about it. The lights were dim and the air was stale with the scent of old oil and a haze of drifting dust. It was like a giant mouse nest, that had been patched together out of scrap metal and broken engines. In the middle of this vast stillness, something stirred, tussling through the dust, occasionally clanging parts together and hammering on metal.  Beneath the layers of scrap and decay was a small blonde girl toiling away at a fighter engine, mumbling to herself. She wore a tattered old blue mechanic’s jumper and oil-soaked leather boots. Her fingers seemed held together by various bandages and bits of gauze and they were currently clinging tightly to a hammer and pair of pliers. She had a small, but lean face with a long nose and jawline. A pair of round brass colored goggles clung tightly over her bright blue eyes. Her hair was unkempt and long, the only thing holding the thicket in place was a pair of green welding goggles and a bit of wire tying it back into a ponytail. A small patch on the right breast of her jumpsuit read “Dani.”

    Dani was arguably the best mechanic ever to be dishonorably discharged from the Colonial Corps, and she had worked her whole life to be so. Her father had been a mechanic, her father’s father before him and so on for almost eight generations. But unfortunately Dani had a fondness for making unorthodox modifications to regulation equipment; one such modification had literally blown up in her face. Now, she found herself stuck in an enormous warehouse on a dead planet, trying to piece together old ships and sell scrap just to get by. 

    “Be an ace mechanic Dani!” she muttered to herself, mocking the advice her father had given her years before. “It’s a great career oppawtunity!” she balked in her heavy Gaean accent. She angrily ratcheted a nut on to a bolt. “This war’ll never end! Don’t you worry love! You’ll always ’ave me!” She shook the parts in her hand. “Then the old geezer goes an’ dies!” She let out a heavy sigh, looking around at the enormity of the pile around her. She was a small speck in a sea of particles and shadow, trying to swim her way out. She rubbed her forehead vigorously “You’re alright Dani, deep breafs old girl, deep breafs.” 

     She  had been just a girl of eight when the war started. Her father was arguably the best human mechanic in the galaxy at the time, so he joined up and for nearly eight years Dani and her father “lived off the fat,” as he used to call it. But when she turned sixteen it was her turn. She was at the top of her class in basic, outpacing her fellow students by light-years. It wasn’t fair really Dani had practically  grown up inside an engine block. To her it was as comforting as her mother’s womb. She had advanced to deployment nine months ahead of schedule and at his request served in her father’s division. But her father never lived to see the Colonial victory. It turned out that stomach and lung cancer were the reward for all his hard work in the war effort and for the first time that she could remember, Dani was alone. She became angry and over time her skills were overshadowed by her grief. She began to experiment and modify things out of boredom and frustration. Then one day she’d managed to modify an engine on board a frigate without the proper authorization, it had exploded, almost killing all two hundred and eighty crew members on board. They discharged her, instead of sentencing her to a penal colony, leaving her to rot on the surface of the rotting corpse of Gaea. 

     It had been hard at first. When she’d stepped back on the surface from Gaea’s orbital blockade she didn’t understand what had happened to humanity. Before she had gone into orbit the planet was lush and green, but when she came back, all victory had won mankind was a homeworld that couldn’t give anymore in the way of resources. Gaea had been stripped and mined and farmed to the point of exhaustion. The soil was sterile, the water was poisoned and they lived in a constant, storming, dust-ridden wasteland. But the war had been won. The soil was sterile, the water was poisoned, and humans lived in a constant, dust-ridden wasteland. But the war had been won.

     There had been more people on Gaea when she’d first stepped back on the ground. Some were just trying to get by and others were eating them alive, sometimes quite literally. Roving gangs of violent, broken men, back from the farthest reaches of the galaxy had taken what they learned in war and turned on the very people they’d been fighting for. The learning curve had been steep in the beginning, but over time she’d learned that it was survival of the fittest. She hadn’t killed anyone, she didn’t want to for that matter, but she had given a number of fellows a good clout on the head with a wrench when they came around trying to take her things, steal her water or worse, she never let them though, not once. After a while the gangs in her area figured out that they better not come around the old warehouse looking for trouble, because Dani could take care of herself. After she’d established those boundaries life got a little easier. She managed to sell what little scrap she could to folks looking to patch up homes and huts after the storms, she’d rewire engines to provide heat or cold as needed. But that didn’t stop her from thinking, dreaming, hoping that some day she’d get out. 

     Suddenly she heard a loud crash from the far side of the hangar. 

     “What the ’ell was that?” she whispered as she shot up and began looking around frantically. Another clank came from her left, echoing through the large building. She grabbed her large pipe wrench and went running in the direction of the noise. She slowed her pace as she came to a corner near the building’s entrance, pressing her back to the wall, raising the wrench to her chest and gripping it tightly. 

    No. she thought. Not again, her heart began to race as the thought of fighting off the gangs and robbers made her fear for her life, made her wonder if they had grown bold enough to attack her again, or worse, managed to find real weapons, guns and the like. It made her wonder if today was the day they’d get her.

     She gently peeked around the corner to find a heavily armed man and what appeared to be a dog with a bomb strapped to its chest. 

    Robbers! she thought as she bit her lip. The man was glancing around the room as the dog seemed to almost mutter at him with a series of groans and whimpers. 

    “It’s alright Nugget, I think the computer was right, we just need to have a look round. Try to relax.” He turned and smiled at it before it barked back at him in response. His accent was different than how any of the thieves she know spoke. He sounded like the people in the High Command, the big-wig military types who were the only ones allowed out of the muck and mire on Gaea. They lived in a great black tower complex which was guarded like a fortress and had access to what few resources were left on the doomed planet. For a split second the pair unknowingly turned their backs to her. 

     Alright Dani girl, ’ere’s your chance, she thought, taking a deep breath and leaping out from behind the wall, flying at the man and swinging the pipe at his head. 

   Quickly and without warning the man turned around, reached out and caught the wrench with a thud, just before it reached his temple. “Oh hello!” he said with a devilish smile. He ripped the wrench from her hands and pushed Dani to the ground with his boot, dropping her weapon with a dust laden thud. Dani crashed flat on her back with her legs in the air. The force of her landing made her fuzzy as she tried to draw focus back to the pair. The dog was snarling, hackles up, poised to strike. The man looked down at her in delight. 

   “Who the ’ell are you?!?!” Dani shouted at them.

    The man placed his hand on his chest. “I am Captain Ashley Odessa Cumberge and this is Nugget.” He gestured towards the dog, who was still snarling at her, its eyes nearly popping out of its skull. “Nugget?” She looked up at him. “Heel.” He smiled at her as she immediately relaxed and moved to a seated position. He stood up straight and extended his hand to help her up. “Sorry about that, but you were about to hit me in the head with a rather large wrench.” He grinned. “I don’t know about you, but I’d say that’s just a little rude.” Dani eyed him skeptically until she took his hand, pulling herself up. 

    “What do you want gov?” She shrugged at him wiping her hands on her pant legs. 

     “Ah! Yes, well we are looking for a mechanic.” He pulled a small, blue handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to her. 

    “Well you’ve found one.” She grimaced at him, blowing her nose with his hanky. 

    “Indeed.” Ash nodded. Now it appeared it was his turn for skepticism. “But we are looking for a very specific mechanic. Specialist Daniel Colbert, so if you could perhaps point us in his direction it would be much appreciated,” he finished as she handed him back his hanky. Ash stared at it for a moment in minor disgust. “Please, call it a gift.” 

    “Thanks,” she replied, shoving it into her pocket. “Well that’s me mate,” she said, still dusting herself off, only half paying attention to him. 

    Ash paused for a moment and eyeing her with a frown. “You?” he raised an eyebrow.

    “Yeah.” She replied looking down at Nugget.  “Hi doggy!” She smiled as Nugget began to wag her tail. 

    “Daniel?” Ash continued his eyes glancing around. 

    “Yeah,” she repeated, rolling her eyes. “My dad was brilliant wiv a wrench, but he couldn’t spell to save ’is life. So he wanted a Danielle, got a Daniel. But call me Dani.” She stuck her hand out to shake his. Ash shot her a fleeting, half-hearted smile before gingerly shaking hers.

    “Specialist.” Despite the smile, his face went slack and his doubts about her identity floated in the air, as heavy as the dust between them.

    “What’s wrong?” she scoffed at him.

    “You’re a world class, ex-military mechanic?” He forced another smile as his brows drew together. 

    “Yeah why?” She sassily put her hands on her hips, cocking them to the right. 

    Ash eyed the thin, mousey girl, with the rats nest of hair on her head, long crooked nose and obnoxious demeanor. He seemed taken aback. In his experience all the top military mechanics were broad shouldered, square-chinned men and while a woman in the service wasn’t out of the ordinary, one had to be particularly well educated to work on star ships. A slight, young girl whose name wasn’t spelled correctly and who spoke in a manner consistent with that of the rabble who now inhabited what remained of Gaea didn’t seem right. Her mannerisms and appearance were slovenly and simply not in keeping with military standards. 

    “I apologize.” He said softly. “I believe I have made a mistake.” He turned to exit the building.

    “Wait a minute!” she shouted, grabbing him by the shoulder, spinning him around and sticking her index finger in his face. “You can't just march in 'ere with this adorable little dog, ask me one stupid question an' expect to walk off without explainin' yourself!” She grabbed him by his collar. “Now what do you want fancy man?”

    “My dear,” he let out a little laugh and a smile, raising his palms. “I need the best mechanic in the universe to maintain my ship. It is unlike any other that has ever traveled through space. Your name was at the top of the list when I looked through the Colonial database. But now that I’ve met you, I dare say they can’t be right. No offense.” he said, grabbing her wrist and pulling his collar out of her clutches. 

    “A mistake?” she said, raising both eyebrows and rocking back on her heels, crossing her arms. “Oh really? You don’t fink someone like me couldn’t be the best mechanic in the whole universe? Why? Because I’m a girl?” Dani was turning red, as she began to tap her foot. 

    Ash again raised his eyebrow and shrugged. “Well…,” he began to explain.

    “Right well let me tell you somethin’ Cap’n Ashwin Odooly Cabbage!” she pointed her finger at him. “My father only ever taught me ‘ow to do one fing in ���is world an’ at was ‘ow to take care of starships!” She threw her hands in the air, waving them at him. “My entire life people ’ave tried to tell me I am not who I say I am! But I swear on me father's grave an’ ’is father’s before ’im that there ain't an engine in the universe I can’t fix!” She pointed at him again as her eyes widened. “And if you fink that you can judge ’is book by its cover an' walk out without a piece of me mind you’ve got it all wrong!”

    Ash stood in aghast, eyeing her for a moment. “Cumberge.” he said sharply.

    “What?” she snapped at him.

    “My name is Cumberge, Specialist.” He stood at attention. “What do you know about maintenance on a zero point energy engine?” 

    “I know ’em inside an’ out if yew really 'ave one? I heard they was too expensive to put on most military ships. Even so, we was trained at length on ’em. The principal construction is the same as a combustion, but it only works if you've got it paired wiv a jump drive an’ everyone knows they don't exist.” She calmed down as she spoke, her face turning back to the pale color it normally was, her attitude now shifting from one of anger to arrogance. 

    “Hmmmm…” Ash responded. “What if I told you we’ve got one?”

    “Right! Now who’s tellin’ lies?” She laughed. “You’ve got a ship outfitted wiv a jump drive?” she asked skeptically. 

    “We do.” Ash smiled looking at Nugget. 

    “And I'm supposed to believe you because you’ve got all those guns an’ medals, eh?” She let out a laugh. “Besides you ain’t no captain anyway.”

   “I beg your pardon?” 

    “Look at that old bomber. Blue and gold ain’t the Colonial colors no more, everybody knows ‘at. They’re black an’ red now.” She turned up her lip in a sneer. “So tell me another one ‘captain’.” 

    “Oh yes, just as I am supposed to believe you are the best mechanic in the universe because you’re covered in dust and oil? If I’m not mistaken you’re wearing the same colors as I.” 

    “You’re damn right I am!” She pointed a finger at him before thumbing her chest. “An ’is is my father’s jumper you geezer so don’t you tell I’m wearing the wrong colors.” 

    A pause followed between them as the mood grew sullen. They eyed each other a while longer, each having just as much cause to mistrust the other. Ash looked down at Nugget, who whimpered at him. “Look I don’t know if you are who you say you are but if you can get my ship to work, I can offer you a place on board.” 

    “Oh yeah? What's in it for me?”

    “Well I can’t promise much, nor can I guarantee your safety, but I can promise that it’s a damn sight better than this place.” He looked around at the piles of junk. 

    Dani paused then and thought about the years she had been there, how long it had been since she had worked aboard an actual star ship, how much she missed her father and how badly she wanted to redeem herself. 

    “What are you doin’ wiv the ship?”  she questioned. After all, this fellow was awfully strange and seemed to appear out of no place; for all she knew it could be some sort of trap or ploy to get her out of the hangar, kill her and take her stuff, or sell her into slavery. But then she remembered that nobody had guns on Gaea, except the big wigs in the tower of course, especially ones like the one this fellow had. 

    Ash paused for a moment, seeming to choose his words with care. “That information my dear is on a need to know basis; however, in the very near future we are looking to acquire a very special map.” He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Does that suffice?”

    Dani thought again for a brief moment. “Anything illegal?” she eyed him.

    “Ah. Well there might be a bit of trouble involved, but nothing serious.” Ash replied looking down at his dog, who squeaked back. 

    Dani looked down at her dirty boots for a half second of hesitation then said. “Alright Captain. I’ll take a look at your ship, but no funny business?” 

    “I would never dream of it.” 

    “An’ first I 'ave one more question, before we go.” 

    “Yes?” 

    She pointed to Nugget. “Why do you ’ave explosives strapped to your dog?!?!” She shouted, her brow furrowing. “She’s a cute dog an’ you don’t see many of them runnin’ around now do ya?” Dani did have an affinity for cute things and this dog was the cutest thing she’d seen in years, even if it was ready to attack her.

    Ash smiled. “She’s not a dog.“ He shook his head. “She’s a bomb.” He turned and began to walk away, Dani exchanged a look with the mutt who seemingly shrugged at her. “Come Nugget.” The dog followed him quickly as the two put distance between themselves and Dani. 

    “What?” Dani shouted, shaking her head and wrinkling her nose.

    “Coming Specialist?” Ash called.

    Dani looked around at the hangar one last time, with a sigh and then ran after them without the slightest notion of what was to come next. 

[caramelslate]

Day 1 of Moms Made Fullmetal Week!!

It’s a bit late becaue work, but here it is!

Prompt:  Family or Love or Baby-talk

Ao3 link here.

Riza was pulled from her deep slumber by something tugging on her hair. She groaned and turned to the other side, willing for sleep to come back. Still, the tugging continued. Riza groaned and turned her head towards the bedside table at the clock sitting there: ten in the morning.

As a soldier, it was drilled into every one to be a morning person. This proved to be a huge problem for Rebecca who still had to set three consecutive alarms, all within 5 minutes of each other, just to be able to get up. Riza, however, is a morning person, ever since she was a child. So during their time in the military, she was usually the one to wake Rebecca up instead of suffering through the shrill noise of all her alarms.

It was rare enough for her to be home during a weekday, much less for her to be sleeping in. Usually, off days are spent by doing the extra chores around the house, paying bills, or doing laundry. But a particular nightmare kept her up during the night until Roy found her sleeping and curled up on the chair in the living room, an open book on her lap. She must’ve gone back to bed in the early morning hours and was not even aware of it.

As she started to rub the sleep from her eyes, something tugged on her hair again.

At first, she thought it was Hayate. Usually, her dog is well mannered but if he wants something, like his breakfast, for example, he climbs up the bed and snuggles with her. Riza thinks this behavior started to happen when Roy moved in and he lets Hayate up the furniture and even on the bed. His complaints of inhaling dog fur became nonexistent when Riza said that if he doesn’t want dog fur to get everywhere, he has to let Hayate sleep on his bed by the door. Still, she finds the dog curled up by their feet every night.

She turned around, with every intention of scolding Hayate for climbing up the bed again and chewing her hair but instead of a black wet snout, it was something else.

William. Her son.

It seemed surreal to even say that. Now even months later, she found the idea of becoming a mother and a wife seem more like a dream than her actual reality. But here she was, in bed at 9 am on a Tuesday, in a beautiful family house near the city, with her son.

Will’s chubby fingers are wrapped around a fistful of her hair, giggling and laughing. His eyes, very much like his father’s, are shining with delight. He released his grip and flapped his arms up and down, delighted to see her awake. With her reputation as a veteran in the war, especially with the title “Hawk’s Eye”, people tend to look at her and see a ruthless soldier. Detached and cold, only serving the country to fulfill her duty. Some see a hero, some see a murderer. Others who know more of her look at her and see a friend, a colleague, a confidant. Yet, now, nothing else matters because this boy in her arms only sees someone he loves, someone who is his mother.

Riza sat up, a smile etched on her face. She took the boy into her arms and said, “Why are you here, how did you get here?” Her question was answered by a piece of note she found by the bedside table.

He woke up at 6 this morning, so I took him to his crib but he started crying and just stopped as soon as I placed him down beside you. Was out like a lamp within minutes after lying down. Guess he also sleeps better besides you too. I sent Kathy to do all your chores for today so you can stay at home for once. She’ll probably be back before noon.

Just take it easy today. -R

Damn, that man is late for work again. This statement comforted her, the thought of the baby being left alone with her sleeping made her feel uneasy. It was tough during the first few months but she was getting better at leaving him from time to time. It also eased her mind to find something who they trusted to look after their son while both of them are at work. Fuery suggested one of his younger sisters as a temporary nanny. This helped the young girl too as she was going to the city for university and needed extra income. Fuery vouched for her and she trusts him. Having Kathy around the house is a godsend. Also, the fact that the baby likes her is another good thing.

She smiled. “You were crying this morning? Are you hungry? Do you miss Momma?”

Will’s answering laughter is the most beautiful sound she has ever heard. With everything that happened in her life, all the ups and downs, the countless times she came close to dying and losing everything, it was all worth it because of him.

She knows she did not deserve anything she has today. Not the doting husband, the beautiful son, not even the freedom she received. Not when she robbed the people she killed in Ishval.

Still, she would give everything up for her son. Everything.

Riza felt him tugging on her hair again, this time he was chewing on the blond strands.

“You like my hair, do you? Hmmm.” She swayed him slightly from side to side, the way he likes.

After the Promised Day, she decided that she was done with the long hair and got her hair cut up the way she had when she was younger. Partly in preparation for Ishval as scorching hot weather will surely be irritating while having long hair. Also, she welcomed the thought of something new in her now monotonous life, devoid of dealing with immortal super-powered creatures who wanted to take over the power of God.

Now almost a year after her last haircut, it just fell back behind her, brushing against the top of her tattoo.

Her son suddenly became quiet. Leaning over to him, she found him snuggled against the crook of her neck with one fist around her hair and the other inside his mouth.

So he has a fascination with her hair too. Like father, like son then. Maybe she should take a rain check on getting that haircut appointment?

“Honey, don’t.” Riza carefully pried her son’s chubby fingers away from her hair. She stood up, Will in her arms, and headed into the kitchen. Someone, probably Roy made eggs and coffee for her before they left. She lowered the baby down the bassinet they had set up in the living room and fixed herself a plate and much-needed coffee.

She loved lazy mornings like this as she rarely got them. Just her and the baby in the house. Riza quietly watched him in the bassinet, clutching a wooden toy soldier painted with a blue Amestris uniform. Ed has said it seemed fitting when he saw it at an antique store during one of his travels. He figured he’d give it to him when he dropped by shortly after the baby had been born.

She leaned over and stared at him. Will stared back with wide eyes that brought a soft smile to her face. He giggled and reached out his arms, wanting to be carried.

Riza reached down and took him into her arms. She put her feet up the coffee table and settled the baby on her lap. Once again, she found him with a tendril of hair between his fingers.

“Aw, you really love my hair, do you? Is it just the hair or is it me? What do you think?” She playfully moved her thighs up and down, rocking Will slightly, making him burst into adorable giggles again. “Should I just make a wig or something and leave it with you at night, huh? That’s disturbing, so no but what do you think? Should mommy cut her hair again? Hmmm, say Mama. Come on, honey, say Mama? I won’t cut my hair if you say Mama, sweetheart.”

“I don’t even have a say in it?” a voice spoke up.

Looking up, Roy was taking off his jacket and hanging it on the back of the armchair. He strode over them and kissed the top of her head and then the Will’s, and sank down beside her on the sofa. Noticing the empty plate and cup on the coffee table, “You just got up?” he asked.

“First off, you never had any say in it. It’ll always be this little guy’s opinion. Second, why are you here? It’s barely noon?” Usually, during weekends, when Roy has to leave for work, he usually gets home until after lunch, but it’s barely 11 and he’s already here.

Roy leaned back and sighed, putting up his boot on top of the coffee table next to hers. “They just needed me to attend a couple of meetings and go over some paperwork, which I finished,” he added that last part as an answer to Riza’s questioning gaze. “So once all that was done, I got up and went home. Already missed your lazy morning with the little guy. I don’t wanna miss lazy afternoons too.” He had his arm resting across her shoulder, a finger absentmindedly twirling a tendril of hair.

See? Like father, like son.

Riza rested her head against his shoulder and both of them watched in awe of their son babble unintelligible words like he was making a speech for the entire nation. She sighed.

“What?” Roy looked down at her. She shook her head. “Nothing. Just thinking.”

“Okay, now I am scared.” Roy muttered which earned him an elbow to the ribs.

Looking at their small apartment, at the dirty dishes on the sink, clutter on the counter, and then to the little human on her lap. “I just didn’t think we’d end up here.” she confessed. “With everything that happened in the past few years, I can’t imagine, not in my wildest dreams, that I’d actually be here, married and a mom, being all domestic. That was the last thing I ever imagined. I mean, we were all too busy trying to stay alive and not get caught arranging a coup.

Roy chuckled. “Are you reminiscing?” Riza snorted then rolled her eyes. “No, I’m just happy.”

Her husband looked down at her with this look in his eyes and pressed his lips against her temple and tugged her closer to his side. “So, the scary Hawk’s Eye baby talks, huh? Roy teased. Riza aimed another well-placed dig into his ribs and leaned away, rocking Will a little, her hands splayed across his back. Beside her, Roy is doubled over, arms across his stomach, fake betrayal etched across his face.

“Oh, stop being a baby. We already have one.” Riza rolled her eyes. Of course, she remembered aside from a baby, she also has a man-child husband too. “And if you ever let that out, I will drag you to the range to keep your ego in check.”

Roy leaned back in and tugged her back to his side, “Don’t worry Mustang. Your secret’s safe with me.”

She made him remember those words when Rebecca made it slip that everyone in the team knows about the baby talk the week after.

[myaekingheart]

Top 5 accessories for cosplaying? (Like, Favorite wig, necklace, dress, etc and if you have photos I’d love to see them. 😂)

OH MAN THIS IS ANOTHER GOOD ONE, THANK YOU JESSIE xD

1. HANDS DOWN, my Rapunzel wig.  This little baby is truly my labor of love and the pinnacle of my Rapunzel cosplaying experience. I’ve actually always felt kind of competitive about my Rapunzel cosplay? Like I was never a good enough Rapunzel cosplayer, and it took a lot of work and money hrmmm for me to feel this confident and proud of how far I’ve come, and this wig is like the end-all, be-all for that. The dress is gorgeous, don’t get me wrong, but the wig just really pulls it all together. Ever since I saw usagi-kirov’s amazing Rapunzel cosplays, I knew I needed to have a super long wig. It took a lot of trial and error to finally get where I am now with it, and I couldn’t be more in love with it. It tops out at 13ft long, and as much as I hate having to clean out all that hair, a part of me wants to expand on it EVEN MORE in the future, until it reaches maybe 30ft! 

I’d like to say I’m a very detail-oriented person and this is especially true of things I’m passionate about, like cosplaying Rapunzel. As such, I felt extremely compelled to go the extra mile with my wig and add in a special little detail to it that I think makes the whole thing even better: Rapunzel’s brunette strand. 

In the movie, as a quick refresher, Mother Gothel tries to snip a lock of baby Rapunzel’s hair when she breaks into the castle in the very beginning of the movie. She finds, however, that when the hair is cut, it “turns brown and loses it’s power.” That little strand of hair that Gothel cut never grew back, and Rapunzel displays it to Eugene after they escape death in the cave after the dam breaks and she heals his injured hand with her hair.  Adding this to my own cosplay was probably the best impulsive decision I ever made. The strand itself is a clip in that was originally long and white and bought for a now-defunct Anna cosplay. I got really inspired one night, so I grabbed a pair of scissors and a brown sharpie and voila-- Rapunzel’s brunette strand! Even if you can’t always see it when I’m cosplaying, I always love the fact that it’s there and that I can always pull my blonde hair back and show it off whenever the timing is appropriate. I just feel like it adds an extra little dose of magic, you know? 

2. Pascal Now this little guy has been with me since 2012 and is honestly one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I found him for $7 on Ebay by a company named Bullyland, and while he’s tiny he’s super screen accurate in design and just the cutest damn thing. I’ve brought him lots of places with me over the years, including Oktoberfest at my grandparent’s church and Bok Tower in Florida! As well as pretty much every con I’ve attended as Rapunzel, too <3

3. Satchel (Wow this is really becoming all Tangled props, isn’t it? Whoops!)  Now this one I have yet to break out at a convention but I will tomorrow and I am so excited to! I’ve been itching for a replica of Eugene’s satchel from the film for ages, but I didn’t think I was skilled enough to make one on my own, and the internet is a wonderland for people of all different styles and skill levels to sell their own renditions. I put off getting an actual one for so long, and ended up even settling for a slightly-similar brown cross-body bag instead for the longest time, but then came my lord and savior mothership supreme HOT TOPIC. As part of a recent Disney collection, they released a replica of the satchel and I knew my time had come. My parents were gracious enough to buy one for me and bring it up on one of their trips to my college town and I can honestly say, I am absolutely in love with it. It’s so screen accurate and beautifully made, and the inside lining is purple with the Corona sun emblem! It’s honestly just one of my absolute favorite things and I am so grateful to have been able to get my hands on one. 

4. Rapunzel’s Crown I don’t really wear this one out just because she’s delicate, but this is another beauty I couldn’t be happier to get my hands on. I had wanted a replica of Rapunzel’s beautiful crown for so long, and even more than the satchel, but had the hardest time getting one for years. Disney had released an official replica in 2010 when the movie was released, and it was available until late 2011/early 2012 I believe? But it was so gorgeous, and I wanted one so badly, but I was never able to actually get one, they had sold out way too quickly-- go figure. Disney has never released another crown quite like this one since, so I was heartbroken when I was completely unable to get one. This was really before “princessing” took a huge boom back when Angel-Secret, Fairytale Wigs, and Secret Honey’s Halloween line were really household princess cosplay names (or at least for me). Much like the satchel, there were sellers online creating Rapunzel tiara’s but they were always either not quite what I wanted or way out of my price range. I felt like the only way I’d be able to really get what I wanted was to try and make it which my then-fifteen year old self really did not master. I had first tried sculpting one...we don’t talk about the results of that. I nicknamed that attempt “The Sand Mound” because that is exactly what it looked like: a mound of sand. Then I tried using a cheap plastic tiara that I got in a Barnegat, NJ Target one summer as a base and that worked for a while but it still wasn’t really what I wanted, was super top heavy, and really poorly made to the point where it was just falling apart. It wasn’t until 2015 when I finally found a reasonably priced, screen accurate Rapunzel tiara, the crown of my dreams. It was made by an indie company named Moonfire charms, who has since stopped making the crown, and is one of my most prized possessions, honestly. It’s just so beautiful and detailed and well-made, even if it is a little top-heavy, too, and I’m too scared to wear it to a convention for fear of it breaking on me (which I have good reason to fear because it actually came damaged when I ordered it and they were gracious enough to send me a new one free of charge). Looking back, this one is actually even more screen accurate than the Disney Store one was, so I guess things worked out for the best in the end, anyways! 

5. Dinglehopper I know what you’re thinking: how can a fork be one of your favorite cosplay accessories? Well, listen, this dinglehopper thank-you-very-much is just super magical, okay? When I was putting together my Ariel cosplay, I thought it would be cute to have a dinglehopper as a prop but I wasn’t too concerned about buying one. It was something that I was just kind of “whatever, I’ll just grab a fork” about. But then I came across this vintage serving fork that my mom had, I think it may have belonged to her grandmother, and I instantly knew this was the fork. 

“It’s her! She’s the one I’ve been looking for!”  Seriously, though, this fork just has a certain je ne sais quois about it that makes it feel like it was ripped straight from a fairytale. Maybe because it’s antique. Maybe because it has some rose detailing on the handle. Maybe I’m just a sap. Who knows? But this fork is definitely a precious keepsake that I just love incorpoating into my Ariel cosplay. 

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Not-So-Very Lovely

by Viorica

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Alternate title: "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Rape House"~

I can't figure out what happened to Stratford this year. Last year's season was brilliant, with at least eight shows that I'd happily see over and over again. This season, not only has the quality of the productions dropped drastically, they seem to have given up on having any kind of coherent theme running through their program. Last year's playbill- which included

Fuente Ovejuna

,

The Trojan Women

,

The Taming of the Shrew

, and

Shakespeare's Universe: Her Infinite Variety

- was full of plays that examined the role of women throughout history. This year, not only do they not have any theme, someone appears to have thought that a good follow-up to shows like

Fuente

, and

Trojan Women

was a show that derives its humour from the sexual enslavement of women. Hilarity!

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum

is one of Sondheim's lesser-known musicals, and for good reason- the majority of the songs are rather bland and forgettable. The show's main "appeal"- if you can call it that- comes from the jokes. The story revolves around Pseudolus, a slave living in Ancient Rome, who wants nothing more than to gain his freedom. Pseudolus belongs to Hero, a dopey young man who still lives under the thumb of his overbearing mother. One day, his parents leave for a visit to the country, and Hero confesses to Pseudolus that he's fallen in love with a girl who lives in the neighbouring brothel. That is, it's referred to as a brothel- since the show repeatedly establishes that the women within are the spoils of war, who are bought and sold with no say whatsoever in the matter, it's actually more accurate to call it a rape house. Hero promises Pseudolus his freedom if the woman can be freed and united with Hero, and hijinks ensue, culminating in a revelation from Hero's long-lost neighbour, Erronius.

You can probably spot the musical's first problem just from the paragraph above- the entire plot revolves around

a fucking rape house

. Not only that, but nowhere in the text is it ever suggested that the existence of this place is in any way wrong. On the contrary, the fourth musical number takes place in said house, whilst the women therein are paraded in front of Pseudolus and Hero, and Pseudolus barely restrains himself from groping them. Each of them women fits into a different stereotype- the Cleopatra-wigged Egyptian twins, the dominatrix, and even a goddamn African warrior princess, complete with a leopard-print bikini, spear, and war whoops. Sexism: now with bonus racefail!

But, you might think, it can't be all bad. So the courtesans are one-dimensional sex objects- what about Hero's love interest? Surely she has a vested interest in freeing herself, and is canny enough to see Hero as a way out of her situation?

You might think that, but you'd be wrong. Philia (as she turns out to be named) is in fact a total ditz, the dumbest of dumb blondes. Her big musical number, "I'm Lovely", is all about her complete uselessness at doing anything besides being ornamental:

I'm lovely, All I am is lovely. Lovely is the one thing I can do. Winsome, What I am is winsome, Radiant as in some Dream come true. Oh, isn't it a shame? I can neither sew Nor cook nor read or write my name. But I'm happy Merely being lovely, For it's one thing I can give to you.

Now compare it to Pseudolous's first big song, "Free":

When I'm free to be whatever I want to be, Think what wonders I'll accomplish then! When the master that I serve is me and just me-- Can you see me being equal with my countrymen? Can you see me being Pseudolus the citizen?

Not only is she useless at pretty much everything, she has no willpower. Although she falls in love at first sight with Hero, that doesn't stop her from flinging herself upon anyone who she thinks has a claim to her. You see, Philia has been sold to Miles Gloriosus, and shows no emotion whatsoever about it. If someone tells her that he owns her, she'll automatically flop to the ground and spread her legs apart, adding even more of a disturbing submissive subtext to the whole thing. Of course, she ends up trotting off into the sunset with Hero, but I doubt she'd have shown any kind of resistance if she'd ended up being carted off by Miles.

Everything resolves itself eventually- Philia is freed, as are the rest of the courtesans (though as their pimp gleefully informs the audience, "I'll just get more!") Pseudolus is freed

and

gets the dominatrix courtesan into the bargain, Hero's parents (who consist of a long-suffering father and a shrewish, domineering mother- gotta squeeze more negative female stereotypes in there!) bless their son's marriage, Miles Gloriosus gets the Egyptian twins, and Erronius is reunited with his long-lost children, allowing the show to squeeze in one last rape joke:

Erronius: My virgin daughter!

Hysterium (a slave disguised as Philia): I'm not a virgin!

Erronius: Those filthy pirates!

Ha ha! Gang rape is hilarious!

I suppose it's pointless to indict a musical written in 1962 for lack of political correctness, but that's no reason not to blame the people who keep it alive by routinely staging it. Apparently, it's very popular as a school production. Want to trivialise women who are raped and sold into sexual slavery?

Funny Thing

! Because

The Boys From Syracuse

just didn't have enough rape jokes.Themes:

Theatre

,

Minority Warrior

~

bookmark this with - facebook - delicious - digg - stumbleupon - reddit

~Comments (

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)

http://francoisdillinger.blogspot.com/

at 05:46 on 2009-07-26Not much to add. But here's a

here's a link

to some fail at Comic Con.

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Rami

at 07:00 on 2009-07-26That doesn't sound particularly savory, I'll give you that -- and you would have thought that by the latter half of the 20th century they would have known better.

I've not seen it, and I know very little of Sondheim in general -- I've seen a couple of productions of Into the Woods and that's about it. Is there any kind of way in which the play could be seen as ironic?

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Nathalie H

at 15:00 on 2009-07-26I would say that the song

Lovely

is definitely supposed to be quite ironic. However, that doesn't necessarily vindicate it, and from what I remember of seeing this show (albeit a few years ago) I'd say that the Power of Irony ® does not save this show from its general sexism fail.

(Disclaimer: not seen this for a few years. Didn't notice most of this stuff when I did, and am slightly ashamed of that. Therefore, comments I make are mostly based on knowledge of the song 'Lovely' rather than much I remember about the show of a whole. However, I do agree that the score's not that great.)

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Viorica

at 16:37 on 2009-07-26

Is there any kind of way in which the play could be seen as ironic?

According to Wikipedia, some directors have chosen to cast Pseudolus as female, which *could* be seen as ironic- one female slave attains freedom through the enslavement of other women. However, it's mostly up to the direction, not the text itself, which doesn't have any nudge-wink "We're really deconstructing all this sexism!" moments. So it's up to each individual production to draw attention to it. The one I saw didn't, though when I raised the issue afterwards, several of my (female) group members said that they'd felt the same way.

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:40 on 2009-07-26Ladies and gentlemen, a Defence of Sondheim on Three Fronts. These will be Point Out The Parody, Concede The Worst Parts, and Shift The Blame.

Yes, this is not the jewel in Sondheim's crown. It comes very early in his career, only slightly after

West Side Story

I think, and, more importantly, it isn't really a full-blooded Sondheim musical. It's a play by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart with songs by Stephen Sondheim. The original idea was Shevelove's, and though Sondheim was involved from an early stage he always felt that his work on the show didn't really fit what the other two writers were doing. When he asked his friend James Goldman about it, Goldman said, "The book [for those who aren't musical buffs, this is the term for spoken dialogue, and sometimes also the general plot, in a musical] is written on a kind of law-comedy vaudeville level with elegant language, and you have written a witty score, a salon score". Sondheim found it was too late to really address the problem, but he later used to advise people, "Make sure you and your collaborators are writing the same show". (I'm getting this from pp.151-152 of

Meryle Secrest's biography of Sondheim

, by the way.) So to some extent one needs to look at the score (including lyrics) separately from the book, because the same criticisms may not apply equally to both. Having said that, he did collaborate on a show which is undeniably pretty much Carry On Up The Tiber (even if it does have what I maintain is a more than averagely sophisticated score), so clearly a certain amount of fail there. But before I entirely leave the blame-shifting part of the defence, let me observe that really the only criticism that's made above for which Sondheim himself is responsible is the song

Lovely

, which I suggest doesn't deserve the criticism.

As Nathalie's already said,

Lovely

is definitely and quite transparently ironic. It's principally Sondheim taking the mickey out of himself, specifically out of the lyric he'd written a few years earlier for the

West Side Story

number

I Feel Pretty

. The song is, as Viorica says, "all about her complete uselessness at doing anything besides being ornamental". Philia is a spoof of the standard one-dimensional love-interest. What Sondheim didn't like about

I Feel Pretty

was that it was the female lead singing un-ironically about how she derives her entire feeling of self-worth from the fact that a boy likes her and this makes her feel attractive. Which is what

Lovely

is sending up. And, to be fair to Shevelove and Gelbart, I think Philia is written fairly consistently throughout the whole show as being utterly useless is every respect, and her admirer Hero is similarly written as a rather feeble adolescent who is fixated on her for no better reason than that she's pretty. Remember that he's played in the film by Michael Crawford, and this was before

Phantom Of The Opera

, opposite Annette Andre who had mostly played dumb blondes in TV series like

The Avengers

and

The Prisoner

. You don't cast it that way if you want the audience to see the leading romantic couple as anything other than complete nit-wits. The point is rather missed by comparing Philia's big number to Pseudolus'. Pseudolus is the main character and drives most of the plot. Philia is a comic device whose purpose is to be completely passive and uninteresting. A much fairer comparison is to Hero, whose

own solo song

is an equally feeble and empty-headed genre-self-parody.

... Forum

as a whole is an uncomfortable combination of homage and piss-take, with Sondheim being almost exclusively on the piss-take side but the other writers hedging their bets. The plot and the characters are cut and pasted together from Plautus, and some of the humour comes from caricaturing the already exaggerated comic tropes of Roman comedy (which was still worth doing in 1962 when a reasonable number of people had studied Plautus in school). That's one of the main reasons why Pseudolus is the only really interesting character: in Roman comedy the slaves are the only remotely multi-dimensional characters. Now in a sense

... Forum

is a step backward from Plautus because Plautus actually has some reasonably well-developed female slave characters; but that, I suspect, is because the other thing the show is trying to parody is the post-vaudeville tradition that in the UK produced things like the

Carry On

franchise, which went mainly for the one-dimensional female leads that

... Forum

parodies (and which is also where the ghastly parade of racially-stereotyped sex-slaves comes from, because although there is national stereotyping in Roman comedy it has quite a different character). The show is a commentary on one ancient comedy tradition and one contemporary one. It isn't a very successful commentary, largely because its non-musical writers spend at least as much time simply indulging in the bad habits of both traditions as they spend making fun of them. But you can't really look at it outside the context of Roman comedy and 1950s low farce because it makes no sense without that background.

And that's why Viorica is entirely right to suggest that it probably shouldn't be staged any more, except for audiences who have some familiarity with Plautus and with '50s comedy. It doesn't make sense any more in the same way that

Avenue Q

won't make sense in 40 years' time. But that's also why I don't think it's right to accuse it in quite the way this article does. In particular I think the criticism that

... Forum

doesn't "suggest[..] that the existence of [Marcus Lycus' establishment] is in any way wrong" falls a little flat. (I replace "rape house" with "Marcus Lycus' establishment" in that quotation not because I want to suggest the establishment isn't an abominable thing but because "rape house" is too tendentious, "brothel" is, as Viorica observes, too benign, and "place where men pay a pimp to have sex with slaves who clearly never consented to their involvement in the enterprise as a whole and are clearly not getting paid but who apparently do expect to and are expected by others to consent to specific acts of intercourse" is too long.) What, one has to ask, is the alternative? Point out that slavery is wrong? I would be more worried, frankly, if anybody had felt in 1962 that that might not be taken for granted by everyone in the audience. Replace the sex-slaves with free women freely choosing to have sex for money? That would be a flagrant anachronism, would entirely destroy the plot, and would in any case only make it 'okay' provided one took the view that entirely unexploitative prostitution is possible and acceptable, which is far from universally accepted. Have no such establishment in the story at all? Sex-slavery is so central to Roman comedy that its removal would make it completely pointless to do a musical based on Plautus in the first place. I guess you could say that in that case they just shouldn't have done a musical based on Plautus. That's a respectably coherent view, I suppose, but a little puritanical for my tastes. As it is, they do almost as well as anyone could do without abandoning the whole project: the pimp is clearly not meant to be a sympathetic character; the only character who seriously proposes to exploit any of the women in question is Miles Goriosus, who is as close to a villain as the play has; and the sex-slaves are indeed all freed at the end. To object that the pimp will only buy some more is effectively criticisizing the show for omitting to abolish the whole system of slavery as part of the ending, which is a bit like criticizing

Rent

for daring to have a happy ending without having one of the characters discover a cure for HIV.

... Forum

has problems, and probably shouldn't be done any more - certainly not in schools - but one has to look at it as a parody, albeit one that intermittently falls off the wagon when Sondheim isn't writing it.

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Viorica

at 21:02 on 2009-07-26

Philia is a comic device whose purpose is to be completely passive and uninteresting

So . . . she goes from being a one-dimensional female character because the creators didn't bother to flesh her out to a one-dimensional female character who is such because the plot demands it? That's not much better.

the only character who seriously proposes to exploit any of the women in question is Miles Goriosus

Not quite. During "The House of Marcus Lycus", Pseudolous drools over each of the women as they are paraded in front of him, and only turns them down (with visible disappointment) when Hero points out that they aren't who he's looking for. Even in the most throwaway jokes, like Hysterium's "Isn't it amazing?" in the clip you linked to, it's being played for laughs, and given the actual nature of what

does

go on there, it sits very uncomfortably with me.

I never noticed the parallels between "I Feel Pretty" and "Lovely", but then I never read the former as Maria deriving her self-worth from her relationship with Tony. Rather, it seemed to be capturing the first-relationship giddiness that the character is experiencing at the time. It could have been done without the theme of "I find myself attractive because a boy likes me.", it seems, if not better, than certainly more relatable than "Lovely"

Philia's status as a parody of dumbass love interests is questionable, simply because unless you're actively looking at it that way, it isn't really obvious. Which goes back to what you said about it being a parody of vaudeville- if you aren't familiar with what the original writers were going for, it just reads as an extended dumb blonde joke. Hero is similarily stupid, but it just doesn't carry the same connotations.

To object that the pimp will only buy some more . . .

My objection isn't so much that Lycus intends to buy new girls, it's that the lines is thrown in as part of the Big Happy Finale. "I'm free!" "I have Philia!" "I've found my children!" "I'm gonna buy some more slave chicks!" It's rather jarring to see it presented as something we should be happy about.

probably shouldn't be done any more - certainly not in schools

Unfortunately, what sparked this article was the annuncement that my local youth theatre is putting it on next year. :/

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Wardog

at 16:36 on 2009-07-27I'm a bit embarrassed ... I actually saw the film of this with Michael Hordon and, uh, I wasn't offended in the slighest. I didn't think it was a great musical, to be honest, in that there was Jamie mentions above a definitely disjunction between what the songs were trying to do and what the script was.

I'm not say, by the way, Viorica, that I don't think you should find it offensive and I definitely agree that it probably shouldn't be regularly taken out of the Sondheim box but I saw it as basically not especially decent parody...

And it does have some lovely Sondheimish moments.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 18:44 on 2009-07-27

I'm a bit embarrassed ... I actually saw the film of this with Michael Hordon and, uh, I wasn't offended in the slighest. I didn't think it was a great musical, to be honest, in that there was Jamie mentions above a definitely disjunction between what the songs were trying to do and what the script was.

I can go you one better--I was in this play in high school and wasn't offended by it. The four male leads were played by the four buddies who were the most talented in their senior class and it was fun to watch. (The four leads not including Hero.) I think it just played as so vaudevillian it didn't occur to me to read it that way. I have only positive associations with it just from that production.

In fact, when I think of "I'm Lovely" I rarely remember Philia singing it. I mostly remember the scene where Hysterium sings it in drag.

It's not all that memorable for songs, certainly. The two that mostly survive are Comedy Tonight (a song that starts out saying nothing should be taken seriously) and Everybody Ought to Have a Maid, a celebration of sexual harassment on the job. Which is pretty bad, but probably beaten out by even more blatantly sexist songs in other musical.

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Nathalie H

at 19:07 on 2009-07-27Jamie: Thanks for all the background, you've really illuminated what's going on here - why I always felt it was a poor show compared to Sondheim's usual fare, with which I am fairly familiar although not quite in that level of detail, and also why anyone felt the need to write the bloody thing in the first place!

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Dan H

at 10:49 on 2009-07-29

I'm a bit embarrassed ... I actually saw the film of this with Michael Hordon and, uh, I wasn't offended in the slighest.

I think the thing about the film is that it's so clearly of its time that it's quite hard to be offended by it because it was so clearly made in the 1960s and is so clearly parodying a style of comedy that was very popular at the time. Of course as Jamie observes part of the issue is that it's not an especially good or consistent parody.

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Jamie Johnston

at 18:55 on 2009-07-31

So . . . she goes from being a one-dimensional female character because the creators didn't bother to flesh her out to a one-dimensional female character who is such because the plot demands it? That's not much better.

- Viorica

Sorry, I seem not to have explained very well. My point is not that the plot demands her to be one-dimensional. That would, as you say, be no excuse. My point is that the show itself is making a point about the fact that the plot demands her to be one-dimensional. This is actually one of the few points on which I'd argue that

... Forum

rises above being iffy but often enjoyable to actually be a rather clever and admirable piece of work, because here the parody isn't just of 50s comedy or of Plautus but of an extremely common fictional trope. How many stories have there been throughout history, and continue to be, in which the leading boy falls in love with the leading girl based solely on her beauty, sometimes without even having had a single conversation with her, and in which her beauty is therefore her sole relevant characteristic. Usually it turns out that she does have many other attractive features, and sometimes even some unattractive ones, but when you look carefully you still find that these make no difference at all to the boy's love for her or to anything else in the story, so they're entirely irrelevant and are really just after-thoughts added on to disguise the fact that the writer has no interest in her as a human being.

... Forum

mocks this type of story ruthlessly and, I'd suggest, fairly effectively, by making it utterly explicit that the leading girl's beauty is not only her sole relevant characteristic but in fact her sole characteristic. D'you see what I mean?

I'll concede the point about the scene's in Lycus' house. Yes, we're being invited to laugh at the fact that these various men are leering over women who haven't chosen to be leered over, and that probably isn't a good thing, even though to a great extent we're laughing not at the women's predicament but at the way the men's brains entirely stop working as soon as they see a bit of thigh. Similarly it's a fair point about Lycus' comment in the final scene, although I'm not sure that we're necessarily supposed to be glad that he's going to buy some more slaves; but nor is it supposed to totally spoil our enjoyment of the show, which it would if we really thought about it, so yeah.

As to

I Feel Pretty

, yes, there are certainly much more charitable readings of that song, but the one I mentioned is, as I understand it, more or less Sondheim's own feeling about it, which is what lies behind his spoof of it in

Lovely

. My own feeling about the song is somewhat different though still not altogether positive, principally because it makes Maria seem a bit obnoxious. But I try not to think too hard about

West Side Story

because the music is so utterly fabulous and the story is so utterly bleh.

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Arthur B

at 19:09 on 2009-07-31

But I try not to think too hard about West Side Story because the music is so utterly fabulous and the story is so utterly bleh.

I think this is a common problem with most adaptations of

Romeo and Juliet

, since the motivations of the characters are simply baffling to modern audiences. (Then again, I think

Romeo & Juliet

works best if you assume that Shakespeare's attitude towards the young lovers is absolutely cynical, and that the tragedy isn't in the woeful and awful things that society does to people in love so much as it's in the idiotic and ridiculous things that people in love do to themselves.)

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 19:54 on 2009-07-31

My point is that the show itself is making a point about the fact that the plot demands her to be one-dimensional. This is actually one of the few points on which I'd argue that ... Forum rises above being iffy but often enjoyable to actually be a rather clever and admirable piece of work, because here the parody isn't just of 50s comedy or of Plautus but of an extremely common fictional trope.

That's how I've always taken it--it hits that idea pretty hard, I think. And that's very Sondheim. It reminds me of "Kiss Me" from Sweeney Todd, another song that sends up the trope of young lovers in love for no other reason than the girl has yellow hair. And in that song, imo, he manages to mix the mocking of the trope with real sympathy for the girl's predicament. Anthony comes across as maybe a bit foolish for claiming to be in love with a girl he's only seen, but Joanna is grasping at her only chance to escape a horrible fate.

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Shim

at 22:29 on 2009-07-31

...the motivations of the characters are simply baffling to modern audiences.

It's a shame the way good stories of their time end up seeming nonsensical. Admittedly people do adaptations, but some don't lend themselves to that either. For example, farces are a problem because the embarrassments characters are trying to avoid are often irrelevant now. The old chaperone, breach-of-promise and so on school of things is out too.

On that note, I feel modern comedy sometimes struggles because you have to stretch things further and it's hard to do that well. Being found by the Bishop visting another woman's husband doesn't cut it any more - now you have to be in your underwear and covered in caramel. Or whatever.

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http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/

at 19:51 on 2009-08-02OK, I'm rather late to the conversation here, and I haven't seen the musical, but: it would be completely anachronistic for any of the characters to suggest that sex-slavery was anything other than The Way Things Are. And a completely straight portrayal of a morality that's so alien to our own could, if done well, be both deeply unsettling and very good. I'm reading Plato's

Republic

at the moment, and I'm getting that sensation a lot.

Incidentally, it was interesting to hear about Miles Gloriosus. I've noticed a tendency for characters called Miles in fiction to be villains.

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Jamie Johnston

at 23:38 on 2009-08-02Of course, anachronism and its geographical equivalent (what's that called, anyone? anatopism?) were themselves notable features of Roman comedy, so one could do quite interesting things with that...

When you've finished with the Plato, try to find Betrand Russell's summary of it in his big ol'

History of western philosophy

: it'll reassure you that no, it isn't just you, Plato's ideal state really does sounds absolutely horrifying.

Villains called Miles? Interesting. In this particular case the name is actually lifted directly from the plot of one of Plautus' comedies,

Miles gloriosus

, meaning 'the full-of-himself soldier' (which is what the character in

... Forum

is).

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Wardog

at 22:54 on 2009-08-03Hehe!

Anyway, I think you can count yourself lucky, Miles. Characters called Kyra are invariably prostitutes.

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Viorica

at 01:45 on 2009-08-24My mother went to see it this afternoon, and brought back a program. This passage (from the director's notes) stuck out:

All great musicals have serious underpinnings, and this one is no exception. It involves a love story, of course, as most musicals do, but the driving force of the plot is the quest of the central character, the slave Pseudolous, for his freedom. For all its zaniness and goofiness, Forum has at its core a real concern for human rights and human dignity, and it is from that essence that the show draws its emotional life.

. . . yeah.

[afroavocadowitch]

News reports & helpful information on POS & POS Equipment.

A St. Vincent album drop is as much about the latest costume that Annie Clark is trying on as it is about the music. With her past two releases, as she gained an increasingly large following, she transformed into (by her own account) a near-future cult leader (for 2014’s St. Vincent) and a dominatrix at a mental institution (for 2017’s Masseduction). It’s not just a promotional shtick. Even if the particulars of what it means to inhabit these creative personae are fuzzy, they all work as part of a greater oeuvre, carrying through themes visually, sonically, and even in her live performances. On her Masseduction tour, Clark had an unwavering commitment to latex bodycon suits, and a faceless guitar tech meekly brought her guitars out, all but laying them at her feet.

For the release of her sixth studio album, Daddy’s Home, the Dallas-reared musician instead embraced a moment in time: the seventies. Early singles garnered comparisons to the original musical chameleon, David Bowie, and a slew of other artists prolific in the early and middle part of the decade. The album cover revealed her slouching in a fuzzy coat, slip dress, thigh-high stockings, and a cropped blond wig. Promotional videos and images nailed the intended aesthetic: Clark told Rolling Stone in February that she was inspired by “the color palette of the world of Taxi Driver” and “Gena Rowlands in a Cassavetes film.”

The resulting album is a lush audio buffet and a sharp departure from the art-pop Clark has honed in her past two LPs. Lead single “Pay Your Way in Pain” mostly closely resembles the dystopian dreamscape heard on Masseduction, if hit with club drugs and viewed in black and white. But much of the rest of the album is noticeably more demure. “Live in the Dream,” a six-and-a-half-minute Pink Floyd–inspired journey, trips along with blooming melodies and glittery guitar that finally snaps into blistering focus. (If there were any way for the musical reference to be missed, she begins the song with an unmistakable “Hello,” nodding to “Comfortably Numb,” and the next song references the “dark side of the moon.”) The smooth bass line of “Down and Out Downtown” opens up into surreal layers of sound, coasting over a hazy New York after a night out at the bars. 

Clark and producer Jack Antonoff clearly had fun with Daddy’s Home. There is sitar (a lot of sitar), there are mellophones, and there is a Greek chorus of backup singers, including Donny Hathaway’s daughter Kenya. There are musical references and inspirations you could argue about for days. It’s an anachronistic joy. 

After mental institution dominatrix, the seventies in New York—the city where Clark now splits her time when not with family in Dallas—should have been easy enough to convey, as a broad inspiration rather than an album-specific identity. And judging by the festival success of bands like Greta Van Fleet, who, despite their protestations about the comparison, often sound like a carbon copy of Led Zeppelin, plenty of listeners are here to embrace nostalgia. 

And yet, among the entire St. Vincent discography, the rollout of Daddy’s Home seems to be the most confusing for both fans and critics to parse.

That’s largely because of another component of the buildup to the album’s May 14 release: Clark’s father was released from prison in 2019, after serving ten years for his involvement in a multimillion-dollar penny-stock manipulation scheme. And now that, well, Daddy’s home, this song collection mines the seventies albums they listened to together when she visited him in Oklahoma, where he moved after his divorce from Clark’s mother. 

Clark, often famously bored and frustrated with the press, has made sure to underscore that she never wanted to share the story of her father’s incarceration, which first publicly surfaced in a 2017 New Yorker profile. When writer Nick Paumgarten asked if she felt shame about her father’s crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.” Daddy’s Home was her attempt to lean into this family trauma on her own terms. She needed a way to, as she told NPR, tell her own story with “humor and compassion and not the kind of salaciousness” you might find in a “tabloid story.” 

Early reviews and interviews have focused on the tiny autobiographical glimpses Clark gave us, often trying to shoehorn the album into a neatly packaged family story. And when that fails, critics have fallen all over themselves talking about the album’s retro pastiche—which, to be fair, is prominent, as if we’re plunked on a shag carpet, flipping through her dad’s vinyl collection. But the artists she drew from, including Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, and, hell, even Bowie, arguably never had to answer for themselves in the tell-all way that we expect Clark to. 

If the men named by critics and the musician herself have been the noted musical influences for the album, women are the lyrical inspiration. These songs are full of odes to female artists and creators who “were maligned for being brave and speaking out,” Clark told Bustle. Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Marilyn Monroe, and Tori Amos all make appearances in “The Melting of the Sun,” a dinner party of tough women set to a warbly ooze of Wulitzers and sitar. (“Saint Joni ain’t no phony / Smoking Reds where Furry sang the blues / My Marilyn shot her heroin / ‘Hell’, she said, ‘It’s better than abuse.’ ”) A shout-out to long-departed Warhol superstar Candy Darling, a transgender actress and Velvet Underground muse, brings the album to a close, a wistful, key-driven offering to the woman Clark deems the “queen of South Queens”: “Candy, darling, I brought bodega roses for your feet.” 

Zackery Michael

Darling and Monroe epitomize the glamour we bestow upon women who die young, who weren’t here long enough to take control of their own narrative. They are remembered largely for their beauty and ability to embody the desire projected onto them by others. Mitchell, Simone, and Amos, on the other hand, enjoyed (or continue to enjoy) long lives and robust careers. They’re part of a canon of songwriters that Clark almost surely hopes she will be able to join. 

But Clark, at present, seems to fear landing in the gulf between these two groups—unable or unwilling to tell her own story as she wants it told, and fearing that her work alone won’t be enough to speak for itself. 

That anxiety would explain the tension in Daddy’s Home. Despite the album’s title, the lyrics are only vaguely personal; listeners will find meaning in them only if they already know the story, one Clark has been asked about countless times on her current press junket. And she fills that distance between wanting to claim her own story and wanting privacy with wall-to-wall seventies nostalgia to the point of distraction at times. That’s perhaps by design, but it’s still jarring. Clark’s commitment to world-building brings the otherwise lovely slow turn “The Laughing Man”—brushed with steel guitars, brimming with ethereal guitar work—to a grinding halt with a line: in a tender moment of reflection with a childhood friend, Clark sings of “half-pipes and PlayStations.” It’s an uncomfortable jolt into the present.  

But the greatest moments of Daddy’s Home come when she forgets the theme almost entirely. Even then, those moments are centered on the cultural norms that we expect of women. In the chunky, lyrical slow-build of “My Baby Wants a Baby,” punctuated by more of the slick production but this time with more cherry-picking, the narrator explores her own guilt about not being fully onboard with a partner who’s ready to settle down and start a family. She frets that her child might inherit her eyes and her mistakes, about how the responsibilities of parenthood could fundamentally alter her focus: “But I wanna play guitar all day / Make all my meals in microwaves / Only dress up if I get paid / How can it be wrong?” 

For most men, being great is enough to merit whatever distance their genius requires. We’ve celebrated and valorized famously reclusive or prickly men, reminding ourselves that tolerating their egos and their mistakes is all part of the process. For years, Clark has railed against the idea that female songwriters must be confessional, and her own mechanisms for avoiding that have been clear. Whether Clark returns to her more developed caricatures on future albums remains to be seen. But she’s given us a peek behind the mask, even if it’s at a distance. In a different world, she wouldn’t have to. 

This post was published here.

We trust that you found the article above of help or of interest. You can find similar content on our blog: www.easttxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback in the comments section below. Let us know which subjects we should write about for you next.

[pezonesnegros]

News reports & helpful information on POS & POS Equipment.

A St. Vincent album drop is as much about the latest costume that Annie Clark is trying on as it is about the music. With her past two releases, as she gained an increasingly large following, she transformed into (by her own account) a near-future cult leader (for 2014’s St. Vincent) and a dominatrix at a mental institution (for 2017’s Masseduction). It’s not just a promotional shtick. Even if the particulars of what it means to inhabit these creative personae are fuzzy, they all work as part of a greater oeuvre, carrying through themes visually, sonically, and even in her live performances. On her Masseduction tour, Clark had an unwavering commitment to latex bodycon suits, and a faceless guitar tech meekly brought her guitars out, all but laying them at her feet.

For the release of her sixth studio album, Daddy’s Home, the Dallas-reared musician instead embraced a moment in time: the seventies. Early singles garnered comparisons to the original musical chameleon, David Bowie, and a slew of other artists prolific in the early and middle part of the decade. The album cover revealed her slouching in a fuzzy coat, slip dress, thigh-high stockings, and a cropped blond wig. Promotional videos and images nailed the intended aesthetic: Clark told Rolling Stone in February that she was inspired by “the color palette of the world of Taxi Driver” and “Gena Rowlands in a Cassavetes film.”

The resulting album is a lush audio buffet and a sharp departure from the art-pop Clark has honed in her past two LPs. Lead single “Pay Your Way in Pain” mostly closely resembles the dystopian dreamscape heard on Masseduction, if hit with club drugs and viewed in black and white. But much of the rest of the album is noticeably more demure. “Live in the Dream,” a six-and-a-half-minute Pink Floyd–inspired journey, trips along with blooming melodies and glittery guitar that finally snaps into blistering focus. (If there were any way for the musical reference to be missed, she begins the song with an unmistakable “Hello,” nodding to “Comfortably Numb,” and the next song references the “dark side of the moon.”) The smooth bass line of “Down and Out Downtown” opens up into surreal layers of sound, coasting over a hazy New York after a night out at the bars. 

Clark and producer Jack Antonoff clearly had fun with Daddy’s Home. There is sitar (a lot of sitar), there are mellophones, and there is a Greek chorus of backup singers, including Donny Hathaway’s daughter Kenya. There are musical references and inspirations you could argue about for days. It’s an anachronistic joy. 

After mental institution dominatrix, the seventies in New York—the city where Clark now splits her time when not with family in Dallas—should have been easy enough to convey, as a broad inspiration rather than an album-specific identity. And judging by the festival success of bands like Greta Van Fleet, who, despite their protestations about the comparison, often sound like a carbon copy of Led Zeppelin, plenty of listeners are here to embrace nostalgia. 

And yet, among the entire St. Vincent discography, the rollout of Daddy’s Home seems to be the most confusing for both fans and critics to parse.

That’s largely because of another component of the buildup to the album’s May 14 release: Clark’s father was released from prison in 2019, after serving ten years for his involvement in a multimillion-dollar penny-stock manipulation scheme. And now that, well, Daddy’s home, this song collection mines the seventies albums they listened to together when she visited him in Oklahoma, where he moved after his divorce from Clark’s mother. 

Clark, often famously bored and frustrated with the press, has made sure to underscore that she never wanted to share the story of her father’s incarceration, which first publicly surfaced in a 2017 New Yorker profile. When writer Nick Paumgarten asked if she felt shame about her father’s crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.” Daddy’s Home was her attempt to lean into this family trauma on her own terms. She needed a way to, as she told NPR, tell her own story with “humor and compassion and not the kind of salaciousness” you might find in a “tabloid story.” 

Early reviews and interviews have focused on the tiny autobiographical glimpses Clark gave us, often trying to shoehorn the album into a neatly packaged family story. And when that fails, critics have fallen all over themselves talking about the album’s retro pastiche—which, to be fair, is prominent, as if we’re plunked on a shag carpet, flipping through her dad’s vinyl collection. But the artists she drew from, including Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, and, hell, even Bowie, arguably never had to answer for themselves in the tell-all way that we expect Clark to. 

If the men named by critics and the musician herself have been the noted musical influences for the album, women are the lyrical inspiration. These songs are full of odes to female artists and creators who “were maligned for being brave and speaking out,” Clark told Bustle. Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Marilyn Monroe, and Tori Amos all make appearances in “The Melting of the Sun,” a dinner party of tough women set to a warbly ooze of Wulitzers and sitar. (“Saint Joni ain’t no phony / Smoking Reds where Furry sang the blues / My Marilyn shot her heroin / ‘Hell’, she said, ‘It’s better than abuse.’ ”) A shout-out to long-departed Warhol superstar Candy Darling, a transgender actress and Velvet Underground muse, brings the album to a close, a wistful, key-driven offering to the woman Clark deems the “queen of South Queens”: “Candy, darling, I brought bodega roses for your feet.” 

Zackery Michael

Darling and Monroe epitomize the glamour we bestow upon women who die young, who weren’t here long enough to take control of their own narrative. They are remembered largely for their beauty and ability to embody the desire projected onto them by others. Mitchell, Simone, and Amos, on the other hand, enjoyed (or continue to enjoy) long lives and robust careers. They’re part of a canon of songwriters that Clark almost surely hopes she will be able to join. 

But Clark, at present, seems to fear landing in the gulf between these two groups—unable or unwilling to tell her own story as she wants it told, and fearing that her work alone won’t be enough to speak for itself. 

That anxiety would explain the tension in Daddy’s Home. Despite the album’s title, the lyrics are only vaguely personal; listeners will find meaning in them only if they already know the story, one Clark has been asked about countless times on her current press junket. And she fills that distance between wanting to claim her own story and wanting privacy with wall-to-wall seventies nostalgia to the point of distraction at times. That’s perhaps by design, but it’s still jarring. Clark’s commitment to world-building brings the otherwise lovely slow turn “The Laughing Man”—brushed with steel guitars, brimming with ethereal guitar work—to a grinding halt with a line: in a tender moment of reflection with a childhood friend, Clark sings of “half-pipes and PlayStations.” It’s an uncomfortable jolt into the present.  

But the greatest moments of Daddy’s Home come when she forgets the theme almost entirely. Even then, those moments are centered on the cultural norms that we expect of women. In the chunky, lyrical slow-build of “My Baby Wants a Baby,” punctuated by more of the slick production but this time with more cherry-picking, the narrator explores her own guilt about not being fully onboard with a partner who’s ready to settle down and start a family. She frets that her child might inherit her eyes and her mistakes, about how the responsibilities of parenthood could fundamentally alter her focus: “But I wanna play guitar all day / Make all my meals in microwaves / Only dress up if I get paid / How can it be wrong?” 

For most men, being great is enough to merit whatever distance their genius requires. We’ve celebrated and valorized famously reclusive or prickly men, reminding ourselves that tolerating their egos and their mistakes is all part of the process. For years, Clark has railed against the idea that female songwriters must be confessional, and her own mechanisms for avoiding that have been clear. Whether Clark returns to her more developed caricatures on future albums remains to be seen. But she’s given us a peek behind the mask, even if it’s at a distance. In a different world, she wouldn’t have to. 

This post was published here.

We trust that you found the article above of help or of interest. You can find similar content on our blog: www.easttxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback in the comments section below. Let us know which subjects we should write about for you next.

[afrolatinxsunited]

News reports & helpful information on POS & POS Equipment.

A St. Vincent album drop is as much about the latest costume that Annie Clark is trying on as it is about the music. With her past two releases, as she gained an increasingly large following, she transformed into (by her own account) a near-future cult leader (for 2014’s St. Vincent) and a dominatrix at a mental institution (for 2017’s Masseduction). It’s not just a promotional shtick. Even if the particulars of what it means to inhabit these creative personae are fuzzy, they all work as part of a greater oeuvre, carrying through themes visually, sonically, and even in her live performances. On her Masseduction tour, Clark had an unwavering commitment to latex bodycon suits, and a faceless guitar tech meekly brought her guitars out, all but laying them at her feet.

For the release of her sixth studio album, Daddy’s Home, the Dallas-reared musician instead embraced a moment in time: the seventies. Early singles garnered comparisons to the original musical chameleon, David Bowie, and a slew of other artists prolific in the early and middle part of the decade. The album cover revealed her slouching in a fuzzy coat, slip dress, thigh-high stockings, and a cropped blond wig. Promotional videos and images nailed the intended aesthetic: Clark told Rolling Stone in February that she was inspired by “the color palette of the world of Taxi Driver” and “Gena Rowlands in a Cassavetes film.”

The resulting album is a lush audio buffet and a sharp departure from the art-pop Clark has honed in her past two LPs. Lead single “Pay Your Way in Pain” mostly closely resembles the dystopian dreamscape heard on Masseduction, if hit with club drugs and viewed in black and white. But much of the rest of the album is noticeably more demure. “Live in the Dream,” a six-and-a-half-minute Pink Floyd–inspired journey, trips along with blooming melodies and glittery guitar that finally snaps into blistering focus. (If there were any way for the musical reference to be missed, she begins the song with an unmistakable “Hello,” nodding to “Comfortably Numb,” and the next song references the “dark side of the moon.”) The smooth bass line of “Down and Out Downtown” opens up into surreal layers of sound, coasting over a hazy New York after a night out at the bars. 

Clark and producer Jack Antonoff clearly had fun with Daddy’s Home. There is sitar (a lot of sitar), there are mellophones, and there is a Greek chorus of backup singers, including Donny Hathaway’s daughter Kenya. There are musical references and inspirations you could argue about for days. It’s an anachronistic joy. 

After mental institution dominatrix, the seventies in New York—the city where Clark now splits her time when not with family in Dallas—should have been easy enough to convey, as a broad inspiration rather than an album-specific identity. And judging by the festival success of bands like Greta Van Fleet, who, despite their protestations about the comparison, often sound like a carbon copy of Led Zeppelin, plenty of listeners are here to embrace nostalgia. 

And yet, among the entire St. Vincent discography, the rollout of Daddy’s Home seems to be the most confusing for both fans and critics to parse.

That’s largely because of another component of the buildup to the album’s May 14 release: Clark’s father was released from prison in 2019, after serving ten years for his involvement in a multimillion-dollar penny-stock manipulation scheme. And now that, well, Daddy’s home, this song collection mines the seventies albums they listened to together when she visited him in Oklahoma, where he moved after his divorce from Clark’s mother. 

Clark, often famously bored and frustrated with the press, has made sure to underscore that she never wanted to share the story of her father’s incarceration, which first publicly surfaced in a 2017 New Yorker profile. When writer Nick Paumgarten asked if she felt shame about her father’s crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.” Daddy’s Home was her attempt to lean into this family trauma on her own terms. She needed a way to, as she told NPR, tell her own story with “humor and compassion and not the kind of salaciousness” you might find in a “tabloid story.” 

Early reviews and interviews have focused on the tiny autobiographical glimpses Clark gave us, often trying to shoehorn the album into a neatly packaged family story. And when that fails, critics have fallen all over themselves talking about the album’s retro pastiche—which, to be fair, is prominent, as if we’re plunked on a shag carpet, flipping through her dad’s vinyl collection. But the artists she drew from, including Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, and, hell, even Bowie, arguably never had to answer for themselves in the tell-all way that we expect Clark to. 

If the men named by critics and the musician herself have been the noted musical influences for the album, women are the lyrical inspiration. These songs are full of odes to female artists and creators who “were maligned for being brave and speaking out,” Clark told Bustle. Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Marilyn Monroe, and Tori Amos all make appearances in “The Melting of the Sun,” a dinner party of tough women set to a warbly ooze of Wulitzers and sitar. (“Saint Joni ain’t no phony / Smoking Reds where Furry sang the blues / My Marilyn shot her heroin / ‘Hell’, she said, ‘It’s better than abuse.’ ”) A shout-out to long-departed Warhol superstar Candy Darling, a transgender actress and Velvet Underground muse, brings the album to a close, a wistful, key-driven offering to the woman Clark deems the “queen of South Queens”: “Candy, darling, I brought bodega roses for your feet.” 

Zackery Michael

Darling and Monroe epitomize the glamour we bestow upon women who die young, who weren’t here long enough to take control of their own narrative. They are remembered largely for their beauty and ability to embody the desire projected onto them by others. Mitchell, Simone, and Amos, on the other hand, enjoyed (or continue to enjoy) long lives and robust careers. They’re part of a canon of songwriters that Clark almost surely hopes she will be able to join. 

But Clark, at present, seems to fear landing in the gulf between these two groups—unable or unwilling to tell her own story as she wants it told, and fearing that her work alone won’t be enough to speak for itself. 

That anxiety would explain the tension in Daddy’s Home. Despite the album’s title, the lyrics are only vaguely personal; listeners will find meaning in them only if they already know the story, one Clark has been asked about countless times on her current press junket. And she fills that distance between wanting to claim her own story and wanting privacy with wall-to-wall seventies nostalgia to the point of distraction at times. That’s perhaps by design, but it’s still jarring. Clark’s commitment to world-building brings the otherwise lovely slow turn “The Laughing Man”—brushed with steel guitars, brimming with ethereal guitar work—to a grinding halt with a line: in a tender moment of reflection with a childhood friend, Clark sings of “half-pipes and PlayStations.” It’s an uncomfortable jolt into the present.  

But the greatest moments of Daddy’s Home come when she forgets the theme almost entirely. Even then, those moments are centered on the cultural norms that we expect of women. In the chunky, lyrical slow-build of “My Baby Wants a Baby,” punctuated by more of the slick production but this time with more cherry-picking, the narrator explores her own guilt about not being fully onboard with a partner who’s ready to settle down and start a family. She frets that her child might inherit her eyes and her mistakes, about how the responsibilities of parenthood could fundamentally alter her focus: “But I wanna play guitar all day / Make all my meals in microwaves / Only dress up if I get paid / How can it be wrong?” 

For most men, being great is enough to merit whatever distance their genius requires. We’ve celebrated and valorized famously reclusive or prickly men, reminding ourselves that tolerating their egos and their mistakes is all part of the process. For years, Clark has railed against the idea that female songwriters must be confessional, and her own mechanisms for avoiding that have been clear. Whether Clark returns to her more developed caricatures on future albums remains to be seen. But she’s given us a peek behind the mask, even if it’s at a distance. In a different world, she wouldn’t have to. 

This post was published here.

We trust that you found the article above of help or of interest. You can find similar content on our blog: www.easttxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback in the comments section below. Let us know which subjects we should write about for you next.

[anagamitofotografia]

News reports & helpful information on POS & POS Equipment.

A St. Vincent album drop is as much about the latest costume that Annie Clark is trying on as it is about the music. With her past two releases, as she gained an increasingly large following, she transformed into (by her own account) a near-future cult leader (for 2014’s St. Vincent) and a dominatrix at a mental institution (for 2017’s Masseduction). It’s not just a promotional shtick. Even if the particulars of what it means to inhabit these creative personae are fuzzy, they all work as part of a greater oeuvre, carrying through themes visually, sonically, and even in her live performances. On her Masseduction tour, Clark had an unwavering commitment to latex bodycon suits, and a faceless guitar tech meekly brought her guitars out, all but laying them at her feet.

For the release of her sixth studio album, Daddy’s Home, the Dallas-reared musician instead embraced a moment in time: the seventies. Early singles garnered comparisons to the original musical chameleon, David Bowie, and a slew of other artists prolific in the early and middle part of the decade. The album cover revealed her slouching in a fuzzy coat, slip dress, thigh-high stockings, and a cropped blond wig. Promotional videos and images nailed the intended aesthetic: Clark told Rolling Stone in February that she was inspired by “the color palette of the world of Taxi Driver” and “Gena Rowlands in a Cassavetes film.”

The resulting album is a lush audio buffet and a sharp departure from the art-pop Clark has honed in her past two LPs. Lead single “Pay Your Way in Pain” mostly closely resembles the dystopian dreamscape heard on Masseduction, if hit with club drugs and viewed in black and white. But much of the rest of the album is noticeably more demure. “Live in the Dream,” a six-and-a-half-minute Pink Floyd–inspired journey, trips along with blooming melodies and glittery guitar that finally snaps into blistering focus. (If there were any way for the musical reference to be missed, she begins the song with an unmistakable “Hello,” nodding to “Comfortably Numb,” and the next song references the “dark side of the moon.”) The smooth bass line of “Down and Out Downtown” opens up into surreal layers of sound, coasting over a hazy New York after a night out at the bars. 

Clark and producer Jack Antonoff clearly had fun with Daddy’s Home. There is sitar (a lot of sitar), there are mellophones, and there is a Greek chorus of backup singers, including Donny Hathaway’s daughter Kenya. There are musical references and inspirations you could argue about for days. It’s an anachronistic joy. 

After mental institution dominatrix, the seventies in New York—the city where Clark now splits her time when not with family in Dallas—should have been easy enough to convey, as a broad inspiration rather than an album-specific identity. And judging by the festival success of bands like Greta Van Fleet, who, despite their protestations about the comparison, often sound like a carbon copy of Led Zeppelin, plenty of listeners are here to embrace nostalgia. 

And yet, among the entire St. Vincent discography, the rollout of Daddy’s Home seems to be the most confusing for both fans and critics to parse.

That’s largely because of another component of the buildup to the album’s May 14 release: Clark’s father was released from prison in 2019, after serving ten years for his involvement in a multimillion-dollar penny-stock manipulation scheme. And now that, well, Daddy’s home, this song collection mines the seventies albums they listened to together when she visited him in Oklahoma, where he moved after his divorce from Clark’s mother. 

Clark, often famously bored and frustrated with the press, has made sure to underscore that she never wanted to share the story of her father’s incarceration, which first publicly surfaced in a 2017 New Yorker profile. When writer Nick Paumgarten asked if she felt shame about her father’s crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.” Daddy’s Home was her attempt to lean into this family trauma on her own terms. She needed a way to, as she told NPR, tell her own story with “humor and compassion and not the kind of salaciousness” you might find in a “tabloid story.” 

Early reviews and interviews have focused on the tiny autobiographical glimpses Clark gave us, often trying to shoehorn the album into a neatly packaged family story. And when that fails, critics have fallen all over themselves talking about the album’s retro pastiche—which, to be fair, is prominent, as if we’re plunked on a shag carpet, flipping through her dad’s vinyl collection. But the artists she drew from, including Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, and, hell, even Bowie, arguably never had to answer for themselves in the tell-all way that we expect Clark to. 

If the men named by critics and the musician herself have been the noted musical influences for the album, women are the lyrical inspiration. These songs are full of odes to female artists and creators who “were maligned for being brave and speaking out,” Clark told Bustle. Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Marilyn Monroe, and Tori Amos all make appearances in “The Melting of the Sun,” a dinner party of tough women set to a warbly ooze of Wulitzers and sitar. (“Saint Joni ain’t no phony / Smoking Reds where Furry sang the blues / My Marilyn shot her heroin / ‘Hell’, she said, ‘It’s better than abuse.’ ”) A shout-out to long-departed Warhol superstar Candy Darling, a transgender actress and Velvet Underground muse, brings the album to a close, a wistful, key-driven offering to the woman Clark deems the “queen of South Queens”: “Candy, darling, I brought bodega roses for your feet.” 

Zackery Michael

Darling and Monroe epitomize the glamour we bestow upon women who die young, who weren’t here long enough to take control of their own narrative. They are remembered largely for their beauty and ability to embody the desire projected onto them by others. Mitchell, Simone, and Amos, on the other hand, enjoyed (or continue to enjoy) long lives and robust careers. They’re part of a canon of songwriters that Clark almost surely hopes she will be able to join. 

But Clark, at present, seems to fear landing in the gulf between these two groups—unable or unwilling to tell her own story as she wants it told, and fearing that her work alone won’t be enough to speak for itself. 

That anxiety would explain the tension in Daddy’s Home. Despite the album’s title, the lyrics are only vaguely personal; listeners will find meaning in them only if they already know the story, one Clark has been asked about countless times on her current press junket. And she fills that distance between wanting to claim her own story and wanting privacy with wall-to-wall seventies nostalgia to the point of distraction at times. That’s perhaps by design, but it’s still jarring. Clark’s commitment to world-building brings the otherwise lovely slow turn “The Laughing Man”—brushed with steel guitars, brimming with ethereal guitar work—to a grinding halt with a line: in a tender moment of reflection with a childhood friend, Clark sings of “half-pipes and PlayStations.” It’s an uncomfortable jolt into the present.  

But the greatest moments of Daddy’s Home come when she forgets the theme almost entirely. Even then, those moments are centered on the cultural norms that we expect of women. In the chunky, lyrical slow-build of “My Baby Wants a Baby,” punctuated by more of the slick production but this time with more cherry-picking, the narrator explores her own guilt about not being fully onboard with a partner who’s ready to settle down and start a family. She frets that her child might inherit her eyes and her mistakes, about how the responsibilities of parenthood could fundamentally alter her focus: “But I wanna play guitar all day / Make all my meals in microwaves / Only dress up if I get paid / How can it be wrong?” 

For most men, being great is enough to merit whatever distance their genius requires. We’ve celebrated and valorized famously reclusive or prickly men, reminding ourselves that tolerating their egos and their mistakes is all part of the process. For years, Clark has railed against the idea that female songwriters must be confessional, and her own mechanisms for avoiding that have been clear. Whether Clark returns to her more developed caricatures on future albums remains to be seen. But she’s given us a peek behind the mask, even if it’s at a distance. In a different world, she wouldn’t have to. 

This post was published here.

We trust that you found the article above of help or of interest. You can find similar content on our blog: www.easttxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback in the comments section below. Let us know which subjects we should write about for you next.

[chiseler]

VENUS IN GORILLA FUR

Von Sternberg's films with Dietrich are all unique and great, and all crazy. Some of them almost work as stories (Shanghai Express comes closest, arguably), but Sternberg wasn't really interested in stories, or character, or so he would declare. His artistic sensibility was formed by Vienna's Volksprater, the sprawling funfair where Harry Lime takes his gullible pal for a spin on the big wheel in The Third Man, and evolved to make him an early and profitable collector in abstract art. Plus, his film training was in the lab, dealing with film on a purely photochemical basis. If he could have made films by placing each individual grain in the right place, you get the impression he might have gone for it.

Blonde Venus (1932), the fourth of six Marlene Dietrich vehicles which propelled her from German near-obscurity to American mega-stardom then almost back to obscurity again, has a plot that just about sustains momentum.

To begin with, we see Herbert Marshall, a somewhat superannuated medical student, stumble upon Marlene and some friends bathing nude in the Vienna woods (Mendelssohn accompaniment). This is taken from an incident in Sternberg's boyhood, recounted in his autobiography, when he accidentally barged in upon a bevy of nude bathing beauties. Where Marshall teases Dietrich with what are supposed to be cool remarks, and kind of comes off as a jerk, in reality little Joe was chased off by his water nymphs, screaming imprecations at the terrified and humiliated kid. Humiliation went on to be the central emotion of his cinema.

Flash-forward a few years, and Marshall and Dietrich are man and wife, with a child in the adorable form of little Dickie Moore. But Marshall has given himself radium poisoning in his lab work -- he can undertake an experimental cure in Europe but the cost is astronomical.

Radium poisoning was a hot topic at the time, since the manufacturers of luminous watch dials had been cheerfully poisoning their female staff, with horrific consequences. The lawsuits made the news, and Ben Hecht made a comedy out of it all called Nothing Sacred. Everyone knew there was no cure, but in this movie there is.

Dietrich goes back to work as a nightclub entertainer to help hubby, and her act proves to be the legendary "Hot Voodoo" number where she emerges from a gorilla costume in front of a chorus line of blacked-up "native girls," dons a Harpo Marx with with fake arrows through it, and intones, with an arrogant, "I'm-really-too-good-for-this" sleepy smirk, the following --

Those drums bring up the heaven inside me

I need some great big angel to guide me

Hot voodoo, makes me wild

Oh fireman, save this child

I'm going to blazes

I want to be bad!

The blissed-out stripping away of mock gorilla hide is, apparently, the Birth of Venus, and it somehow suggests a goddess entering our world, while also serving as a sort of cabaret version of the story of Darwinian evolution.

The film spends some time setting up a rival artiste called "Taxi," then does little with her, and there's a tension between Sternberg treating this partially black milieu with respect or at least paying it the compliment of attention (Hollywood's Mitteleuropean emigres generally displayed more progressive attitudes on race than the home-grown directors) and maybe using the dark faces as decadent local, ahem, color.

A comic stuttering bartender is credited as a possible Clarence Muse on the IMDb, but it ain't him. I think it may be Charles R. Moore, who played a few humorous stereotypes for Preston Sturges later.

Anyway, Dietrich's act excites the attention of smooth politician Cary Grant, passing through that early phase of his career that consisted of gazing worshipfully at Paramount blondes Dietrich and Mae West. He pays for Marshall's op, but this breaks up the marriage because when he gets back from Europe, health restored, he mistrusts his wife. The movie now turns into a custody battle over little Dickie, which Dietrich attempts to win by taking to the road.

Wanted posters start to appear, hilariously showing Marlene in her Harpo wig and arrows. It would have been even better if it had been the gorilla costume.

Dietrich, a mother herself, had wanted to make a film about this aspect of femininity, and Sternberg had knocked together a scenario, but then Paramount had had to threaten them with legal action to force them to go through with it. Making for a slightly tense set, I imagine. This was after Sternberg's wife had sued Dietrich for alienation of affection. Cary Grant later told Peter Bogdanivich that he could see what the pair were "up to" and that he "wasn't going to get mixed up in that."

Future Charlie Chan actor Sidney Toler cameos as a sleazy detective on Marlene's trail, and even better, Hattie McDaniel is a maid in a plausibly deniable house of ill repute in New Orleans. Like nearly all African American actresses, McDaniel was pretty much forced to specialize in maids, but though her physique (round) and physiognomy (round-eyed) suggested stereotypes, her personality leant itself to intelligent skepticism, and this frequently comes across in her roles. So Hattie is on to the deceptive Toler from the start.

Nevertheless, Dietrich gives up her son, and the money Marshall gives her to begone, in the sort of fit of perversity Sternberg's characters are always falling prey to.

It's left to Cary Grant to play cupid, making this about the last time he himself wouldn't get the girl, and certainly the only time he lost her to Herbert Marshall, or anyone called Herbert for that matter. 

Dietrich's film about motherhood didn't convince the critics. Irene Dunne and Margaret Sullavan could play self-sacrificing moms, but this German siren? However (smotheringly?) devoted Marlene may have been to her real child (who cameos in The Scarlet Empress, playing Marlene as a kid), she couldn't transmute that into a compelling screen narrative. Little Dickie Moore is essentially a MacGuffin to motivate the plot's toing and froing, as featherweight a device as Marshall's non-fatal fatal illness. The film succeeds as Sternberg intended it to, as a record of the mediated play of light on various textures including a certain woman’s face moving in rhythm with an atmospheric soundtrack.

That beat gives me a wicked sensation

My conscience wants to take a vacation

Got voodoo, head to toes

Hot voodoo, burn my clothes

I want to start dancing, just wearing a smile...

by David Cairns

[charlinert]

As Easy as Falling 37/?

New Chapter of As Easy As Falling….

Summary:  Felicity Smoak had everything figured out until tragic news causes her to rethink her life. As part of dealing with tragedy she embraces her adventurous side in the form of skydiving. Will love be waiting for her between the clouds or will she let tragedy keep her away from falling?

Read from the BEGINNING AO3

***************

CHAPTER 37

It’s the morning of December 31st. It’s her wedding day and in the distance she can hear faint voices downstairs and the moving of furniture as the Queen Manor is being transformed into the wedding venue they have spent the last few weeks planning this big event around.

The day starts off with spoiling, first with breakfast in bed served by Raisa, followed by a long relaxing bath in one of the guest suites she’s gotten comfortable in, reserved specifically for her bridal preparations.

Sitting at the vanity in her fluffy robe, she takes in the image staring back at her through the mirror. The dark black circles under her eyes are almost completely gone. The redness of her cheeks is back and the long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders is an image she hasn’t seen in months.

It’s strange seeing the long blonde hair again, especially since she’s grown used to her bald head and short curly hair of the wig for quite some time now. She’s sure Oliver will be surprised as well, she just hopes he’ll like it, seeing that she hasn’t seen him in two days.

Not seeing each other isn’t something they exactly planned, but with all the last minute preparations for the wedding and her moving into his apartment, which Oliver and Dig decided they would handle on her behalf, they became so busy and before they knew it, they were in two different buildings; Oliver in their apartment and her under the watchful eye of Colonel Thea Queen.

Their apartment – it still seems strange thinking about things as theirs now and although it’s been challenging not waking up next to him these last two days, by the end of the night they will never willingly be separated again. They will be husband and wife!

The excitement of this realisation brings her attention to the butterflies in her stomach as she plays with the blonde locks between her fingers.

She wanted to do something different with her hair for their wedding. It’s not that she didn’t like the wig she was wearing, she just needed something special for her special day. She made an appointment with Gina to discuss if this could be made possible, maybe an updo wig, anything that was different from what she normally wears.

Of course when Felicity arrived at the appointment Gina completely freaked out at the news of Felicity getting better and almost did a back flip when she saw how Felicity’s hair was already growing out and blonde for that matter. Gina assured her that she had the perfect solution for her wedding hair and it wasn’t long after that, Felicity was scheduled for an appointment at Fab Hair Studio with world renowned hair stylist Linda Fernandez.

Linda was so excited to meet Felicity, especially after speaking to Gina on the phone. What Felicity thought was the styling of a new wig, turned out to be no wig at all. Linda created a new product that is going to revolutionise hair extensions as we know it and Felicity didn’t mind one bit having to be the guinea pig for this product. If she didn’t have to wear a wig again, she would be as happy as a pig in mud.

So here she is. You can barely see where the extensions were attached to her own hair. She loves her new look because she looks, in the words of Linda, fabulous baby!

She smiles at herself, recollecting the events of the last few days and it makes the excitement even more palpable.

“Aunty ‘listity!” she hears the three year old calling, evidently very confused about the amount of doors in one hallway.

“I’m here Sara, follow my voice honey!” Felicity calls back, when the door to her room opens with quite a bit of force and the cutie pie comes running straight for her, her little arms stretched out for a hug.

After the hug, Felicity’s attention immediately moves to Sara’s hair and the dusty pink bows carefully styled between her natural curls.

“Look at your hair! You look so pretty!” Felicity fusses, putting Sara right into princess fairy mode, twirling in the middle of the floor so Felicity can have a full three sixty degree angle of her hair.

She’s extremely adorable and Felicity makes a mental note to ask the photographer to take some pictures of Sara twirling in her flower girl dress.

Once Sara is done twirling the little drama queen does a small curtsy and walks back to Felicity, who playfully picks her up and places her on the vanity so they are eye level.

“So, what have you been doing today?” she asks the toddler who is gently tangling her chubby little fingers through the new blonde locks.

“We had bweakfast with uncle ‘liver.” the tone of her little voice slightly increases as she gets to the end of the sentence. Something new Felicity notices is that Sara is suddenly substituting her ‘r’s’ for ‘w’s’. It’s not on every word though. Must be something she must have acquired from her friends at the new kindergarten she’s been attending twice a week.

“Oooh, uncle Oliver’s breakfasts are the best.” Felicity agrees. “What did he make you?”

“We had pancakes with fwuit and sywup. I like the sywup ones but mommy says Sara can only have one.”

“That must have sucked. I also like the syrup ones.”

Sara nods her head in agreement, “but daddy says I must listen to mommy because the baby makes mommy grwumpy.”

Baby? Is Lyla pregnant?!

“Baby?” Felicity asks innocently.

“Yes, the baby in mommy’s tummy silly!” Sara jokes, still stroking Felicity’s hair.

John and Lyla probably decided not to announce it yet with everything going on, so she decides not to press further. They will announce it when they are ready.

“So cutie, does uncle Oliver like your hair?”

“Yes, but daddy says he has hearts in his eyes.”

“Hea…”

“Sara Diggle!” a stern voice interrupts Felicity before she can ask the next question.

The little girl immediately drops Felicity’s hair sitting up straight where Felicity has placed her on the vanity and her little eyes become as big as saucers. She obviously knows that voice. The familiar voice of her mother clearly spelling out ‘you are in big trouble young lady’.

“What have I told you about running off like that?” Lyla asks, coming into the room.

Sara holds out her arms so Felicity can put her down on the ground. She immediately moves over to her mother.

“I’m sowwy mommy. I wanted to show aunty ‘listity my hair.” Sara looks down at the ground, pouting her lips.

This little girl is very crafty. She knows exactly how to play her parents and Felicity has to hold her laugh otherwise it might complicate this situation.

“It’s okay honey.” Lyla says sighing at the sight of her three year old and bends down to Sara’s level. “There’s a lot of strangers in this house today okay, so please don’t do that again. If I lose you, where am I going to find another Sara?”

“From the internet?” she asks innocently.

“The internet?” Lyla asks confused, probably thinking that they will have to have the ‘where do babies come from’ conversation earlier than expected if her daughter thinks you can order babies off the internet.

“Yes! Uncle ‘liver says aunty ‘listity can find anything on the internet.”

This little statement makes them both laugh as Lyla hugs her little girl, telling her she’s not angry anymore.

“I’m sorry about that Felicity. I hope she didn’t bother you.”

“She’s no bother at all. She’s my favourite.” Felicity answers winking at Sara as the toddler attempts to do the same ending with both her eyes closing at the same time.

“Speaking of hair. Yours looks stunning! Is it a wig?”

“Actually no, it is a wedding gift from the company that made my original wig. It’s human hair extensions and now I don’t have to wear wigs anymore. I got it done yesterday.”

“So I gather Oliver hasn’t seen it yet?”

“No he hasn’t. I just hope he likes it.”

“Felicity, you could wear a garbage bag and that man will still look at you as if you hung the moon.”

Felicity can feel the blush on her cheeks thinking about how intense their gazes can get at times.

“And by the looks of it, you’re sporting heart eyes too.”

‘hearts in his eyes’

“Oh heart eyes!” Felicity exclaims, putting two and two together now.

“I have known Oliver Queen for a while now and he’s changed quite a bit, but one thing is for sure…he will never be able to change the way he looks at you.”

Felicity’s far off gaze is quickly interrupted when the Colonel and the hair-and makeup team start to bundle in the room.

“Come on Sara, let’s leave aunty Felicity alone, while she gets ready.” Lyla instructs the toddler, who is mesmerised by the equipment being packed out in the room.

She runs over to Felicity and kisses her cheek. “See ya later!” she yells as the runs to catch up with her mom already halfway out the door.

XXXxxxXXXxxxXXX

“Knock knock.” Felicity looks over at the bedroom door seeing her mom peeking through.

“Come in mom. Thea’s just zipping me up.” Felicity says with a smile as she takes in her appearance in the floor length mirror in the guest suite.

“Oh honey!” Donna exclaims, “you look absolutely beautiful!”

Felicity spins around meeting her mother’s outstretched arms, “I can’t believe my baby is getting married!” squeezing her daughter tighter.

“Yeah, it’s kind of surreal for me too.” Felicity softly says still embracing her mom.

“Now, now ladies, no smudging our make up today okay?” Thea instructs, but she can hear the strictness of her voice has some sort of crack in it. They are all feeling a little emotional today, with good cause. There’s so much promise in today. Not just is she marrying the love of her life, she’s also on the verge of being in remission after she thought she would never have a future. She tries to take a deep breath, pushing back the forming tears in her eyes and focuses on Moira also joining them in the room.

“Oh my, Felicity! You look simply radiant!” Moira compliments squeezing her hand and giving Donna a side hug.

Her two mothers have become relatively close and she’s thankful for it. They are two very different women but the thing she admires from them the most is that they both are strong and she’s learned so much from both of them.

“I think you all look absolutely beautiful too.” Felicity compliments the three ladies now standing in a semi-circle around her.

“Since everyone is here now, I think we can start with the gifts?” Thea proposes looking over to Moira and Donna who nod in response.

“Okay, I’ll start.” Donna says as she takes the gift bag from Thea. “Honey, my gift to you for today is ‘something old’. Before your grandma Amelia died, she gave me the garter that she wore on her wedding day in the hopes that I would do the same on my wedding day. I didn’t exactly have a traditional wedding, since it was a spur of the moment thing at a Vegas chapel, but I kept this safe, hoping that one day I could pass it on to you on your wedding day.” Donna hands Felicity the gift bag and Felicity retrieves the garter. It fits in perfectly with the rest of the wedding colours as well and the little detail on the garter resembles her earrings.

“Mom!” is all Felicity manages to say embracing her mother, trying very hard to fight the tears forming again. “This is so special. Thank you.”

“It’s my pleasure baby girl. And who knows, maybe one day you’ll be able to pass it on to your daughter too.” her mom’s eyes are swimming in tears and she can no longer keep the tears from spilling.

“I hope so too mom.” she embraces her again.

Thea sees that it’s inevitable - neither one of them is leaving this room without smudged makeup and starts handing out tissues.

Donna helps Felicity sit down on the bed while she slides on the garter up to her thigh and Thea hands Moira the jewellery box containing the rose gold and diamond belt.

Once the belt is removed from the box, Felicity straightens her dress and turns so Moira can fit the belt around her waist and fasten in, making sure the ribbon falls perfectly with the back of Felicity’s dress.

“Okay, so we have ‘something old’ and ‘something new’ covered. You took care of the ‘something blue’ and I got you ‘something borrowed’.” Thea says and hands Felicity a small jewellery box containing two hair pins.

“Oh Thea!” Felicity gasps as she gently takes them out of the box, inspecting the detail on them much closer.

“It’s not real stones or anything like the rest of the gifts, but there’s a lot of sentimental value to those pins.” Thea explains, earning a sympathetic smile from everyone standing in the room. “My dad had a rule that he would never be away from home at long periods of time but there was one time when he couldn’t help it. QC was in the middle of huge negotiations on a project and it caused it him to be away from home almost the whole month, only seeing us for a day or two in between trips.” Felicity sees Moira fiddling with her fingers thinking of her late husband and without a second thought she links her arm with Moira’s as a sign of comfort.

“I hated that he was away for so long, but when he came back from his last trip to San Francisco he handed me these little pins.” Thea smiles at the memory. “Apparently he was on his way to a meeting when next to the side of the road he saw a street vendor selling costume jewellery. He said the pins immediately drew his attention, making him think of me. It was beautiful yet bold and he couldn’t help but stop and buy it for me.”

“He was late for his meeting that day but he said that he didn’t care because we would always be his first priority, he always thought of us when he wasn’t with us. It was the least expensive gift he’s ever bought me but this gift to me held the most value, because I knew, no matter where he was he would always think of me, think of our family.”

If Donna’s story didn’t bring them to tears, Thea’s sure did.

“I wanted you to wear it today because I know he would have loved you Felicity, just as much as we do….and in some way you wearing these, I know he’s here with us today, sharing in the joy.”

Felicity gently leaves Moira’s arm and embraces her sister. No need for legal titles or papers, this is what Thea Queen has become to her….a sister.

Felicity sits down behind the vanity again as Thea inserts the pins carefully into Felicity’s hair.

A quick touch up of everyone’s makeup and Felicity takes a last glance in the mirror.

“I’m ready.” she says with a broad smile on her face.

“Okay then sis, let’s get you hitched!”

Thank you to everyone who’s supporting this fic by reading and commenting and liking and such! You guys are truly awesome!!!

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[followingfallout4]

Companions reacting to a pregnant Sole going into labor in the middle of no where.

AN: Oh I’ve got a thing for romanced companions ones :D Thank you for the request! Because of this I now know what to do if a woman (or me for that matter) is about to gonna give birth in the middle of nowhere or in a car or sth. I’m learning some life skills here! ;) PS: the first ones got a bit long I tried to kinda restrain myself after those to avoid tldr but man this ask is technically fanfic/oneshot material. Prologue: Sole’s eyes widened. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She figured she could make it back to Diamond city in time to give birth to this kid and settle down there for a while... take it easy. Clearly she had been mistaken. This baby was coming and nothing was going to stop it. She looked over at her companion, who was still oblivious to what was happening, and pointed at a very, very shabby looking hut-like thing in the distance. “Let’s check that out.”  She figured that was exactly how far she was still going to get. As soon as they closed the door behind them she hunched over, stumbled over to the remnants of a bed and grabbed on to the upper arm of her companion. She looked him straight in the eye. “ Looks like this baby isn’t waiting around for the due date. I’m having this baby. Now. “ 

Codsworth “ Oh dear! Okay, it’s happening! Let’s... let’s get you comfortable, Mum!” Codsworth put on a brave face and tried his best to keep his cool but could not for the life of him hide his panic (or excitement, Sole wasn’t entirely sure) in the slightest. Sure, he wasn’t exactly programmed to help bringing children into the world but he was sure that they would manage, after all "it is a beautiful and natural part of life, mum". His peptalk, including those exact words, served more to soothe himself than to soothe Sole, “Codsworth I appreciate you wanting to make me feel better but let’s focus on this tiny human getting out safely rather than on peptalking me, please?” “ Certainly! Oh, it will be such a beautiful child! I bet it’ll have your eyes,Mum.”  “ Codsworth... I’m in a lot of pain.” “ Err... right. What should I do?”  “ Get out water, some clean cloth or clothing to wrap this kid in, anything helpful.” Another contraction hit her. “ Right. Now.”   Codsworth tried to hide that he felt at a loss considering he had no clue on how to proceed next. In between contractions, Sole just told him what to do next as he meticulously followed her every instruction. He hated that he couldn’t help her with the pain but it’d have to do. 

Danse: Danse stayed remarkably calm and got out of his power armor. Sole kept his eyes on him. Sure, she hadn’t expected him to be the kind to go  frantic but he was far too calm... did he think she was kidding or something? “ I’m not joking.” “ I am aware of that. There is no need for concern. Breathe in, breathe out and relax.I won’t let anything happen to you or this baby.”  “Danse, I know for a fact that ‘how to be a midwife’ is not part of the Brotherhood’s training process.”  Danse smiled, she didn’t think she’d ever seen him more in love with her than in that moment. “  Ensuring that you are prepared for the mission you will embark on is part of the training. I made sure I was well-informed  and therefore know precisely what to do. Our only concern is potential complications.” Sole’s stomach turned at the idea of that being a possibility and regretted not listening when he had urged her to just lay low and stop travelling around sooner.  He took some clean cloth, water, a stim pack, a pipet... out of his backpack and took his top off. Sole’s tried to smile but the pain made it difficult.  “Danse... I appreciate the distraction but ...” “ We need to keep this child warm, body heat is ideal. I presumed you are in enough discomfort already however you can certainly opt to use your own body heat.” Sole grimaced. Yeah, she was in enough discomfort already indeed. “ No thanks. “ He got a blanked out and put it over her after helping her out of her pants, presumeably to keep her warm.  “  You might have to breastfeed the child as it will lessen the bleeding due to the hormones.” She smiled at Danse. “Thanks for having my back.”  Danse gave her a reassuring smile and brushed some hair out of her face as gently as possible. “ Thank you for being the love of my life and giving me a family. Hang in there Sole, you're going to be allright. Both of you. I will protect you, no matter what. Both you and our child. "

MacCready:  MacCready seemed to be lost in thought. “ Don’t just stand there, now what do we do?”  He sat down beside her. “ We don’t have time to get you to a doctor so we’re gonna have to make do with whatever we’ve got here. But hey, how hard can it be right?” “ You have no idea.” “ Right, sorry. Lucy made it very clear to me that it wasn’t easy when she had Duncan. The things she yelled at me, I thought I’d pull back a bloody stump considering how hard she squeezed my hand. I’ve only seen it and even I felt traumatised. I mean, damn what you women do is way more badass than anything that I...“ “ Yeah, real comforting there, MacCready.” “ *ahum* Anyway I think I’ve got this.” He grabbed a somewhat clean shirt from his duffel bag and started ripping it up after putting his coat underneath Sole. The house may have come with a bed but clean sheets were something else entirely.“ You’ve still got some purified water, right?” He looked through her stuff and lifted the bottle. ‘Found it!’ “ I appreciate you trying to stay calm but I doubt having watched it once makes you any more of a midwife than me.”  “ Someone once told me the second kid is easier though?” Sole groaned and shot him a vicious look. “Sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.” “ Okay, you’ve got this. I’ve got you. This baby is gonna be come out you’ll forget about all the bad stuff. Start with those puffy breathy things.” “ Puffy breathy things?” “ ‘C mon you know what I mean. "   MacCready focussed on her, showing to be much calmer than she was. However she noticed some tears welling up in his eyes.  “ You’re gonna be fine. “ He grabbed her hand while she was still puffing.  “ It’s always nice to see you this emotional, MacCready. “ She was expecting an excuse, from the dusty place to a full-blown twig in his eye. Perhaps onion-cutting ninja’s for the occasion. “  I’m about to see my second child. This ...  This is a big deal all right? You’ve done so much for me. You’ve given my son his life back, you’ve given me my life back and now you’re bringing another one into this world. And I get to raise them with you. Damnit Sole, I love you.” “ No cursing.” She squeezed his hand at another contraction.  “ Yeah you’re gonna have to let go cause I gotta get there now though.”

Deacon:

“ Ohkay... well I used to be a nurse once upon a time, all the doctor’s fancied me... probably because of the blonde wig and my long legs. “ “ Deacon, this is really not the time.” “ I could be telling you the same thing.” She shot him the kind of look that made him count his lucky stars for her currently not being capable of fighting him because she would’ve handed him his ass. She hissed at him; “Look I know humor is your way of dealing with stressful situations and usually I am all for it. But not. Now.” Deacon couldn’t supress a wide grin. “Well I helped get it in there I suppose I can help gettin’ it out.” “ I swear if you’re gonna keep blurting out ‘funny’ shit you’re gonna make me a single mother.” Deacon was still smiling. “ That would be a crying shame, especially because you would be dealing with the crying. Actually, maybe that’s preferable, then I get some peace and quiet.’ “ Really, Deacon? That’s your reaction? Don’t you think it’s a bit early for bad dad jokes?”  “ No. Panic. I would say panic is my reaction. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. Feel better knowing that? What do you suggest we do?”  “ Get some things ready and please, please don’t do the fake being hurt thing when I yell insults at you because my sense of self-control is at an all-time low.” “ Gotcha, By the way, you’re doing great, keep up the pushing.”  Sole groaned. “Less peptalk more getting your kid out because just like their dad it loves to get me stressed out.”  “ Aww, they take after me already.” “ Deacon, shut the hell up and get my pants off.” He opened his mouth again when Sole yelled ‘NO innuendoes.”

Gage: Gage’s eyes widened... “ Come again? This is some sort of bad joke right? Here?”  Sole shook their head. “ Not the kind of thing I joke about.” Sole doubled over, hand on her belly, at another contraction. “Some help’d be nice” He sighed and picked her up. “ Well shit boss, I’m not prepared for this.” “ Should’ve thought about that before you got me knocked up Gage.” He smiled a little." That’s what you get for always taking what you want I guess.”  “ Oh please, if you had taken anything without my say-so you wouldn’t be breathin’ anymore. For now you’re gonna have to take off that armour and make sure you get this kid out safely.” Gage sighed. “I didn’t sign up for the getting it out part.”  “ And I didn’t sign up for defeating your Overseer with a squirt gun, shit happens. We need to get this child out safely.” The look on Gage’s face shifted as he got out some clean water. Shit, what else did he need for this. Sole noticed. “ Wait... is that concern Gage?” “ I... No.” “ It actually easy, that I’d live the day to see this.” “ This is my kid too ya know. I don’t want it to have the kind of fucked up life I’ve had, but it’d be a good start if it comes out kicking and screaming. But cause someone refused to stay put I’ve gotta help you get my kid out." “  Say whatever you want, I’ve found a soft spot in that cold cold heart anyway.“ Sole winked before another contraction plastered a look of pain on her face again. “ I’ll guide ya through it Gage. But I can’t hold your hand through this cause  you’re gonna need them. So get something to put this baby on.” She decided that the last thing she had to do now is get insecure, wouldn’t help either of ‘em. “Damn boss, you’re somethin’ else. Fuck it, let’s do this.”

Hancock:

" Looks like this kid takes after their dad, life’s to the fast and the rebellious. “ “ Yeah, high five it when it gets out but help me first.” Hancock looked rather happy until he noticed just how much pain Sole was in. “ You alright?" Sole looked at them. If looks could kill... “ And people say there are no stupid questions.” She folded double, grabbing at her abdomen. “ This hurts like hell.” He guided her to the bed and let her lay down on it.  “ I’d give ya some chems but that’d be bad for the baby.” “ No kidding, I’m not having any of that filth now regardless Hancock.” “ Guess we can’t make it to Diamond City anymore? I was looking forward to finding out whether they’d really let me in with you by my side, me being the father and all that.” “ Hancock, focus. No small talk. I could use some help getting my pants off.”  “ Ah, just what you said when we conceived the little one. Good times.” Hancock winked. Sole would laugh if the contractions weren’t hurting quite as much as they were. “ “ Alright... let’s fuck this shit up.” Sole slit her eyes. “Let’s fuck this shit up? Seriously? Look I know you’re a man and all but I speak from experience when I say this is not that easy.” “ You’ve been dating a me for a while now darling, in comparison this is gonna be a freakin’ breeze. You’re a fucking superhero and I love you. Now, lay back, push and let’s hope this baby gets their looks from mommy.” 

Maxson: Maxson didn’t waste any time and picked her up. He put her down on the bed gently and seemed extremely calm.  “ Maxson, are you even processing what I just said?”  “ I know precisely what I am doing and  yes I have. We have this under control.” Sole groaned in pain. “ Speak for yourself ... the pain is getting worse.” Maxson got out a wide array of things he needed to deliver the baby . “ You do what I tell you what I tell you and there ought to be no issues.” Sole scoffed. “Sure, cause you know all about babies. Maxson, with all do respect, this is not exactly the same as commanding an army.”    Sole clenched her teeth and dug her nails into what was left of the matress on the bed before screaming out. Maxson rushed over and for a moment his facade cracked, he was worried about her, brushing some hair out of her face.  “ Are you alright?”  Sole grimaced. “ Hardly. What happened to having everything under control?”  “ Our child will be safe, it’s you I am concerned about.” “ What makes you so sure Maxson?”  “ I asked Cade what I would need to help you deliver this child if he wasn’t nearby. I have prepared for this potentially happening and have all the required equipment at the ready.” Sole screamed again, he grabbed her hand.  “ I swear I will protect you and this child. I will send a message to the Brotherhood after this and they will come pick us up in a ventibird. And then you will rest.” Sole grinned. “Never listened before.” “ I’ll lock you up if I have to, I care more about your safety than about some missions.” “ You mean you love me more than the Brotherhood? That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.” She screamed again and grabbed his hand, he didn’t even flinch as she squeezed as hard as she could. “ I love you and this child more than anything. Now focus on doing this. You are my goddamn Sentinel for a damn good reason, you can do anything. That includes this. Just... whatever you do stay with me.” 

Kent:  “I really don’t think this is the time. I mean...” Sole grimaced. “ I don’t think this kid cares about whether it’s the time for it.” Kent supported Sole and put her on the bed.  “ Are you sure we can’t make it to Diamond City?” “ On the list of things not even the Silver Shroud can do: delaying childbirth.”  Kent looked around nervously. “Okay... okay. What should I do.” “ Stop looking so panicked for starters? Just do as I say and this will be fine.”

Preston: “ We’re having this baby now? Really?” Preston could hardly hide the happiness and excitement on his face when it dawned on him that the circumstances were hardly ideal for someone to give birth. He looked around. They were in a small shack in the middle of nowhere... panic crept up on him. He looked at Sole who seemed very busy with putting on a brave face but he knew when someone was scared. He picked her up, knowing he had to be the strong one. She had enough on her mind now. “ I got you. This baby is going to be fine.” He gently put her down on the bed in the hut.  “ I was hoping for better circumstances but at least it isn’t raining, right?”  He held her hand.  “ This is not the first time I’ve helped someone getting a baby out in the world by the way.” Sole laughed a little, very faintly because of the pain.  “ You mean you’ve got a bunch of kids running around?”  He laughed and brushed some hair out of her face and helped her take off her pants and get a little more comfortable. “ No, but we do a lot in the Commonwealth. There was once a pregnant lady among the people we saved. The stress made her go into labour sooner than expected. But the baby pulled through.” Knowing that he had done this kind of thing before soothed her  a little. “ I’m going to look for things we can use. Some clean cloth, water,... You’re going to have to take your top off too I’m afraid. Saved the mother. The child’s grandmother was with us and she told us it could stop the bleeding faster. I’ll get you a blanked though.” Sole nodded.  “ You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

Nick: Nick immediately focused on getting Sole calm and comfortable on the cot in the hut. “ Listen to me, kid. You can do this. We’re going to get this baby out safely do you hear me?” Sole nodded, still biting down on her lower teeth. “ I guess it’s gonna have to come out somehow.” She smiled a little but still looked panicked. What if something went wrong? They first thought there were complications with Shaun’s birth as well but it quickly turned out to be a false alarm, she might not be as lucky this time. “ The first thing you need to do is slow your breathing, relax.” “ Easy for you to say.” The pain of the contractions wasn’t getting much better. He took off his coat and put it underneath Sole. “ That’s gonna be messed up if this kid when the baby comes out Nick. Blood doesn’t wash out easily.” “ Do you honestly think I give a damn? This is our child. I’m going to try to get you comfortable.” He did as much as he could to make Sole lay down in a comfortable position. “ It’s not my comfort I’m worried about.” Nick sat down next to her and grabbed her by the back of her neck until his forehead touched hers. “ First of all; I love you. Second; when I say push you’ll have to push. I will support the baby’s head and make sure they’re breathing, okay?” Sole nodded. Nick planted a kiss on her lips. “ Everything is going to be alright. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, I will not lose you or this baby”

Sturges; Sturges’ eyes widened. “Oh... okay, no need to panic we can do this.” Sole grimaced. “ I’m not so sure about that.”  “ Hey this is nature, you’ll be fine. I’m right here, I won’t let anything happen to you or to our baby.” He smiled at her in such a proud way that her heart melted a little.  “ This is not exactly how I wanted things to go down sturges.” “ Hey, look at me alright? You’ve got this. You’re a badass, I’ve seen you save so many people and survive against all odds, even if you can’t properly install a tap. This baby is going to conquer the world with a mom like you. Everything’s gonna be okay. I’m gonna get something to wrap the baby into, okay? Lay down and try that breathing thing.” He walked to his backpack but immediately walked back over to her and brushed some hair out of her face. “ I forgot to say one more thing... I love you.”

X6-88: “ The nearest point we can transport to the Institute is 5 minutes away. I suggest we start moving.” “ I’m not gonna make it there.” “ You are.” He lifted Sole up and carried her to the place they were supposed to be. X6 seemed to be convinced he had it all under control although he looked more stressed than Sole had ever seen him. He barely managed to get Sole to a point where she could be transported to the Institute and once there started yelling orders at each and every doctor. As they frowned at him for presuming he, as a synth, had the audacity to doing so Sole yelled that he was officially her second and would be obeyed. Especially in these circumstances. He continued his orders and Sole noticed a hint of a smile. Someone stood beside her and urged her to calm her breathing to delay the birth a little. X6 soon sat beside her, holding her hand. “ I’d hardly considered you the sentimental type.”  “ I am aware of the fact that squeezing someone’s hand aids them in getting the focus off the pain to some extent.” With her next contraction she squeezed again, hard. Part of her didn’t give a damn but she looked at X6 regardless, trying to figure out if she hadn’t hurt him. “ I can take it. Do whatever you need to do.”

[thecineastes-blog]

Grand Prix RPDR RuView: Goo Goo [Lady] Gaga (S06E01)

What do cats and RuPaul seem to have in common, they both have nine lives AND their pussies bite back! Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race has finally begun, and this time on a new network, VH1! (Which pretty much puts a nail in LogoTV’s coffin).

For Grand Prix RuView, we’ll be giving you the top moments of each episode, the shadiest moment of each episode, our favorite queen of the each episode, our least favorite queen of each episode, best looks on the runway, and our predictions for next week.

So if you’re a fan of RPDR but have been under a rock for the last month or so, you may not have heard the news that Mother Monster herself was going to be the guest judge for the season premiere. A part of me wishes that her being a judge would have remained a secret until much earlier, but I know the producers wanted to ensure an amazing ratings turn out.

The episode opens with different shots of the workroom, the number nine flashing (are they trying to remind of something?), and enough RuPaul catchphrases to anchor a boat with. I was especially creeped out by the lifesize statue of RuPaul they have now…I doubt the eliminated queens will be able to fit something that big in their overhead compartments on the plane ride home. And now Untucked will be sponsored by Hamburger Mary’s, but alas we the viewers aren’t getting a complimentary cheeseburger while enjoying the episode :-(  

Peppermint is the first queen to enter the workroom and is stunning in her cyan kimono and microbraids (eat your heart out Moesha!). The first contestant to enter can either mess up their entrance when they realize they are alone, luckily it seemed like Peppermint was there to have fun! 

The second queen to enter is Valentina, who is a vision in a scarlet red dress, and ornate flowers in her light brown hair. 

Valentina’s talking head scenes feature a black turtleneck sweater with matching beret. She’s mentioned how dramatic and theatrical her drag is…so essentially she is the Latina Judy Funnie?

 Would it be too much to ask to get a beat poetry response accompanied with bongos to what is going on in each episode from her? I didn’t think so.

Eureka walks in being very bubbly in a pink and baby blue polka dot ensemble. She is serving catfish, I just hope it comes with a side of hush puppies and okra! She definitely seems like two tons of fun to be reckoned with.

 With oversized pink t-shirt dress and huge sunglasses, it seems Charlie Hides definitely wanted to establish her comedy queen niche quick, fast, and in a hurry.

Platinum Blonde bombshell Farrah Moan adorably struts herself into the workroom, wearing a silver chainmail dress that I think she borrowed from Toni Braxton. Charlie chides at Farrah’s youth…Now’s not the time to go all Wicked Queen mode. 

Coincidentally Farrah, if Charlie ever offers you a shiny red apple, don’t eat it. She seems cute AND clueless. 

Sasha Velour screams her way onto the scene, though in retrospect I’d have loved if she had scream “BALENCIAGA!” a la AHS Myrtle Snow. She’s dressed black from head to toe, looks like Sasha has prepped for everyone else’s funeral. Who doesn’t love a weirdo!

Near and dear to our hearts, Broadway baby Alexis Michelle was just a vision in that silver catsuit and lavender wig. Loved her quoting the musical, Gypsy. It is great to see that at least a few of the New York queens not only know one another but are friendly.

 Apparently Shea Coulee did not come here to play, but slay! (I’d go on, but anymore rhyming and I’d start to sound like a bad Dr. Seuss book.] I bet Shea used the same Muppet dealer Pandora and Mimi used for her fluffy and fuzzy orange coat.

Trinity Taylor comes in, affirming that the body HAS arrived. She hates the stigma of being labelled a pageant girl…just not the stigma of plastic surgery. She won a pageant with Eureka taking first runner-up. Eureka says she is not impressed with Trinity. Could she still be bitter about losing to her? (DUH!) 

Kimora Blanc walks in like a high-end Barbie doll, if she was anymore flawless, she’d be sold at Toys R Us stores around the country.

With an awkward puppet intro, in comes Jaymes Mansfield, ready to continually mystify and stupefy everyone around her. I’m scared she stole and repainted that Madame puppet for the show…

It seems Minnie Mouse’s sexpot cousin has escaped the Magic Kingdom to be on Drag Race this season, oh wait it’s just Nina Bo’nina Brown! She is confident and sassy and has already shown her makeup skills are enviable. 

Last, but not least Aja arrives, quick to remind everyone she is the premiere drag queen of Brooklyn! Trinity is quick to remark she does understand where Aja’s confidence comes from. Apples and oranges people!

FINALLY “Ronnie” aka Lady Gaga enters the workroom and they all have the gag of the millennium! (Shout Out to Newark, NJ!)

 “Mother Monster has arrived!” and they scream like it’s the second coming of Christ. Eureka tells Lady Gaga how much she really appreciates all she’s done. Lady Gaga comes off completely humbled and alacrative to the queens. It’s very refreshing. RuPaul comes down and sings and dances with Gaga and queens. Even bigger news is that no one is being eliminated from the premiere episode!

To commemorate this occasion, contestants will participate in the Miss Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve & Talent pageant. They will have to model two looks: one based their home city and the other as an homage to Lady Gaga.

Normally RPDR usually begins with the queens having a photoshoot and a sewing challenge, which I really enjoyed. You got to see their overall aesthetic AND their other skills. But since the show has grown in popularity, they have opted for more Extravaganza! Also, this season will DEFINITELY be the Year of the Clapback. From the first episode alone, everyone was ready with their quips and badinage.

Runway Over-Ru: 

This episode was a double style challenge, with hometown pride and Gaga-inspired looks. 

Starting the runway off was Peppermint, as Lady Liberty (we’ll talk about this in a bit) in an homage to 1940’s pageants

Valentina was flawless as a feminized version of a Mariachi in an homage to Mariachi Plaza in Los Angeles.

Eureka’s red-neck East Tennessee woman was non-descript but well-played. Charlie’s pilgrim tear away moment was Plymouth rocky at best, but still a great look (gotta practice those tearaways, girl!). 

Neither of the Vegas Queens wore anything remotely Las Vegas, as the judges said Farrah looked like “Anna Karenina meets Game of Thrones” while I was getting more Carol Channing’s ‘Hello Dolly’ collection. 

Kimora was just wearing a lace bodysuit and peacock feather headdress. Both she and Kimora could’ve gone full on showgirls. 

I preferred Alexis’ and Sasha’s NYC looks as they were less obvious-I would’ve preferred Alexis’ leotard had the causes and hashtags embroidered or more neatly painted on, I feel it would’ve looked cleaner. Shea’s Chicago look was all Oscar Myer. 

Trinity’s non-descript Orlando theme park look was a bummer…as was the “anal sun” on the back. Because of the airbrush it made the colors read muddy and dark.

 I was let down on how pedestrian Jaymes’ Milwaukee look was. I really like her and felt had she stretched the cow direction she was going for (a full sequined cow print gown, a giant jewelled cowbell necklace, a cheese shaped clutch even!) would’ve really made her stand out more.

 There were four queens representing New York City, two of which (Peppermint and Aja) did the Statue of Liberty. A city so full of different sights, sounds and subcultures and they decided to do a statue that’s technically in New Jersey?

 Nina Bo’nina Brown was my absolute favorite-she was quite literally a Georgia peach. I was so impressed by her makeup work and the fact that she makes her prosthetics out of paper.

For the Gaga looks, talk about diverse(Nary a kimono in sight!) I was glad everyone did something different. That being said some worked better than others. Loved Nina Bo’nina’s red lace Gaga, Charlie’s white BAFTA ensemble and Valentina’s CFDA look. 

Eureka wore the prison dress from the ‘Telephone’ MV which was great, but I’m hoping that the bald head/wig topiary is not going to be her go-to wig look, as I think it’ll get old…fast. Shea, Sasha, Aja and Farrah looked practically identical to the originals, although I was disappointed that Farrah doubted herself and didn’t tear away into that amazing armored breast latex bodysuit. 

If you were going to take a chance, now would’ve been the time to do it-as no one would be eliminated! Kimora wore a Versace inspired bondage number which was pretty boring. I can hear Michelle now telling her “stop relying on that body”! 

Jaymes’ Vogue look was okay, the dress was spot on, but the hair was messy looking and I felt like she was putting on “Gaga in Slumberland” because she felt uncomfortable being serious and felt safer with comedy. 

Trinity’s AHS Countess look was infinitely better than her hometown pride outfit.  But my number one Gaga? Alexis Michelle, who recreated Gaga’s Golden Globes gown. STUNNING. The dress (which she made!) paid attention to detail and fit like a glove.

This runway had hits and misses, but it’s clear these queens each have a strong sense of personal style and I’m looking forward to the season’s runway!

Jonny’s Favorite Moments:

NO KIMONOS!: Having Lady Gaga be a guest judge on the show was an amazing privilege. But with the ladies playing homage to some of Lady Gaga’s most iconic outfits had me excited….and slightly scared. Last season when the show paid tribute to Madonna, I was waiting to see some of the different outfits and looks that filled my childhood (her stigmata ��Like A Prayer” outfit, Golden Globe winning Evita Peron, her MTV Music Video Awards’ “Vogue” wherein she was Marie Antoinette to name a few…) But my heart sank when I just saw a just barrage of kimonos a la “Nothing Really Matters”. I never realized how much that look really resonated with people, but could you imagine Madonna being there and seeing just a sea of kimonos? And what does Aja want to wear to give tribute to Mother Monster….a kimono. After the whole Kimonogate from the season before, and #KimonoYouDidnt becoming a running joke since then I thought contestants would want to steer clear of them for a while. While I understand Aja did have the actual kimono that Lady Gaga wore, I’m so happy Aja opted for the Comme Des Garcons dress.

Princess Peach: Nina Bo’nina Banana Fofana Osama Bin Laden Brown’s peachy keen face left me GAGGING! I love when queens on the show push the limits of aesthetics. I have always been impressed with Ninia’s makeup skills and this look cemented her as a strong contender in the season. Out of everyone, she had the simplest garment, but the makeup was that much more memorable.

The Girl with the Gold Globe: Alexis Michelle on the Lady Gaga’s runway homage was EVERYTHING. I was especially impressed that Alexis made the dress herself. Lady Gaga was one of the most glamorous and subtly gorgeous without the need for accessories or gimmicks.    

Jonny’s Favorite Shadiest Moments:

Miss [Not So] Congeniality?: Eureka definitely seems like is out for blood against Trinity and I am definitely here for it!

Has the Dairy Queen Curdled?: Poor Jaymes Mansfield, she seemed to be a deer in headlights the entire episode. Maybe she’s overwhelmed? But every time I see her, I feel discomfort from her. I know people normally hide behind their jokes and comedy to alleviate stress and awkward situations. I just do not want to see her go home too early because of that. Even Lady Gaga had to tell her that she seems to be hiding behind her character.

Friday the 14?!: I heard through the grapevine that certain queen from a previous season would be returning for this new one. And the 14th contestant is NOT new, especially since RuPaul mentioned that this is a returning queen. I just rolled my eyes and hoped said rumor wasn’t true…but apparently, it was. It seems that Season 9 has been a Shangela, but if anyone starts screaming “Halleloo” I’ll be throwing my tv out of the window. My guttural reaction to this 14th Queen is..why? There really is no reason for this queen to be on this new season. The reason why Shangela came back, was because there was no All Stars at the time. Whoever this person is, if the producers thought they were so great and deserved to be on the show again, said queen should have just been on All Stars 2! As RuPaul said when she jokingly brought back Shangela for season 4, “It is time for new queens.”

Jonny’s Favorite Queen of the Episode:

Hands down it’s a tie between Alexis Michelle and Nina Bo’Nina Brown. They are both super strong and are forced to be reckoned with. Nina pretty much proved that less is completely more.

Jonny’s Least Queen of the Episode:

Trinity Taylor. She just reeks of entitlement. It’s one thing to be sure of yourself, it’s completely another act like you have already won the competition.

Predictions:

Will this 14th queen bring about the RuPocalypse?!…Also I’m guessing there will be a group challenge.

Anais’ Favorite Moments:

Season Nine, Baby!: A fresh start on a new channel will bring the show to another level-and the first episode did not disappoint. A first time non-elimination(see below), huge celebrity guest judge and “Contestant” (Ronnie is everything), two-look pageant challenge and surprise 14th Queen (It’s Ornacia, I just know it!) this season is gearing up to be a spectacular one.

Night of a Thousand Gaga’s: I really enjoy these interpreted looks, and allows us to see the queen’s craftiness and originality (well, most of the time anyway #KimonoYouBetterDont) I hope this is a runway challenge they will continue to have in other seasons.

Shantay you ALL stay: No one eliminated! The stigma (or astigmatism as Trinity would say,) with the first eliminated queens is that no one remembers them. Really and truly, I only remember two or three. Then when the finale/reunion rolls around we all find ourselves saying, “who’s that?” They’ve tried to break this in more recent seasons (the comeback queens on Season Seven, Naysha Lopez’s call in return on Season Eight) but it still remains. Thanks to a non elimination, it gives all the queens more screen time to shine and an extra episode to garner a larger fanbase.

Anais’ Favorite Shadiest Moments:

Whine and Cheese(cake): Farrah’s whining which has now garnered her the nickname “Blonde Bennett Glamsey” courtesy of Shea Coulee, and already circulating memes was equal parts adorable and annoying.

First Blood: Eureka’s shade sways in and out of charming and, well, mean. She’s gunning for Trinity, and tossing shade along the way is entertaining for sure.

Anais’ Favorite Queen of the Episode:

Nina Bo’Nina Banana Fofana Osama Bin Laden Brown. From the hilarious catchphrases, her vulnerability about her abilities and hopes that others believe in her and the slayed double runway, she’s definitely a frontrunner thus far.

Anais’ Least Favorite Queen of the Episode:

Kimora Blac, in addition to what comes across as a massive ego, her inability to be honest about her ahem, body of work, was an eye roller for sure. And it also looked like Michelle Visage wasn’t having it either during her declaration of being “Vegas’ hottest, thinnest Queen”.

Predictions:

Team challenge and first elimination time! The 14th Queen revealed! Next episode is going to be a bombshell!

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