A Rain of Frogs

Girls,

Think this through carefully. Ponder it while you sit in front of the mirror brushing your hair. It shouldn’t be stretch, since it seems to be what you’re pondering anyway. Discuss it during your next pillow-fight infested sleep-over.

Talk to your mom about it. She’ll have definite opinions.

What I’m asking you to think about is this whole wedding thing. Just about every girl I’ve ever known, upon the advent of her wedding day, has said something to the effect of “I’ve been dreaming of this day since I was a little girl!” It leaves me flabbergasted. Seriously? Since you were a little girl?

So, since like, what, four, you’ve dreamed of your wedding day. Of how a tall handsome prince with tight pants, a poofy shirt, somewhat queer boots and a sword will swoop you off your feet and onto the back of his magnificent white horse? How he’ll take you off to his castle in some green forested land to meet his dottering, short, bearded, but loving and twinkly-eyed father and his round but proud mother? How the peasants will all love you and you’ll have the most perfect wedding ever!

And everyone lives happily ever after, right?

See, the problem is that’s where the Disney movie ends. It doesn’t go on to explain how after the wedding, Snow White had a few good years of traveling through the kingdom, vacationing with her friends the dwarves at a sunny waterside villa. It doesn’t show her curled around the chamber pot puking up her breakfast while pregnant with her first child, or how homely that child is when she’s born, having inherited her paternal grandfathers squint.

It doesn’t show how running the kingdom has taken its toll on the prince’s sculpted figure. Instead of an adonis, he’s more of a pear. So is Snow, for that matter. Birthing royalty ain’t no picnic sweetheart.

Snow has also decided that she needs more of an education, and her new friends in the women’s group keep telling her the prince is keeping her down. By this point, the squinty little princess, who is showing strong signs if inheriting her grandfathers beard as well, has joined her mother at the group and is showing some strong lesbian tendencies, even if she’s only fourteen. Forget the stupid poofy-sleeved dresses, this one is all about leather pants.

Rest assured she’s planning her wedding already. The only detail unplanned is whether she will be the groom or the bride.

It’s probably a good thing Snow doesn’t know the King (her husband got the job when the old man died panting in the bed of his manservant) has been tagging washerwomen and barkeeps and that one girl out in the forest who lives with her three godmothers. Not that Snow has any claim to the moral high ground. Books could be written about how, and how often, the Black Knight is taking care of her needs.

The point is, girls, that you might spend your entire life dreaming of your wedding day, but did you ever, for just a second, consider what happens afterward?

It’s just a thought, but perhaps if more childhood time was spent dreaming of marriage instead of weddings, there’d be a whole lot fewer divorces in western society. If even half the planning involved in a traditional Italian wedding were instead spent on planning a successful marriage, I am willing to bet the world would be a whole different place.

For my part, I think I’ll offer my daughter money to elope. Forego the wedding and instead plan the marriage.

And make an actual effort at happily ever after.

Et tu, Brute?

Famous last words indeed. Today is the Ides of March, the day upon which Julius Caesar bit it, just as he was told he would. Ah well, small loss. As one of my favorite authors often notes, assassination is, in fact, natural causes for a king. I assume that applies to emperors as well.

That’s not the actual point here though. The point is that those famous last words were spoken in french by the emperor of Rome in a play written by an english playwright.

That crazy Shakespeare.

The Remains of the Day

I might have mentioned seeing The Corpse Bride recently. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, wondering what it was that made it something of a failure in comparison to A Nightmare Before Christmas. I might be a bit late to the game here, on account of being pretty late to the game, but that doesn’t make my observations any less accurate.

First and foremost, I’d like to point out that I also watched all the bonus material that came on the DVD. If you’re at all interested in how movies like this are made, you’d be wrong to miss these extras. There’s some amazing (and sometimes surprising) stuff going on behind the scenes of this movie.

The technological wizardry was amazing. The way the faces could be manipulated by sticking tiny screwdrivers in their ears and dialing up dimples, smiles, frowns and grimaces was light-years ahead of the hundreds of heads required to make Jack Skellington talk.

The use of relatively inexpensive digital SLRs to shoot the stop motion photography was equally light-years ahead of the film development required for Nightmare.

What wasn’t light-years ahead was the musical work. In general I really dig Danny Elfman’s work, but in this movie, I found myself distracted enough by poor decisions made in the musical aspect of the movie that it diminished the experience. What comes to mind is the musicial number “The Remains of the Day” in which the (very important) back-story of Emily, the Corpse Bride, is revealed. It is so poorly engineered that its almost impossible to understand. Muddy describes it. Muddy as my bass playing.

What wasn’t light-years ahead was character development. No empathy for Victoria’s plight of suddenly finding herself in love with someone she just met, only to find he’s married to a corpse. No empathy for Victor, suddenly finding himself married to a well-stacked and nicely corseted corpse, for that matter. No hatred for the venomous Lord Barkas. No life.

The story itself is pretty good, in fact. It was the lack of any identification with the characters and some poor production choices that made it so one dimensional and flat. And it’s too bad, because it would have been as wicked as Shakespeare’s sense of humor.

Shoes, redux

I cannot stress this enough. Bad shoes can ruin a good girl.

I see girls all the time when I’m gigging. Really interesting looking girls, that are very enjoyable to look at. And then I see their shoes. What the hell is with ugly shoes? I don’t know if I am alone in the male world thinking this, but bad shoes can turn me off a girl so fast its not funny. How hard is it to find good shoes?

Footwear notwithstanding, it is vitally important you all realize I don’t actually want to talk to these girls. I just want to look at them. When they start talking to me, some subtle magic is lost, and I lose interest in them altogether.

All the worlds a stage

In fact, according to one quantum mechanic, all the world’s a brain, and all of us are its thoughts.

While he freely admits that most of the universe concerns itself with vibrations and atomic level collisions, he does feel strongly that the entire universe is in fact information – more than just a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile (a la The Matrix), but information altogether. It’s a very trendy belief.

Quantum science comes closest of all sciences to confirming the existence of god. Maybe god is everywhere, because the universe is gods mind. Or maybe its all a bunch of convenient crap, something whacked out enough to get this guy his fifteen minutes of notoriety before he – and his ideas – go out of style faster than a pair of Uggs.

Often when I’m playing a gig, driving down the street, or shopping, I engage in people-watching. We all know what this is. We look at someone, and invent a story about them, based on how they look and how their presence impacted us.

But lately, more and more, I’ve been looking at people and finding them very familiar. I’ll play a gig, and see a blonde girl talking with her friends in the corner. She looks shy, slightly uneasy in her own skin. While she’s pretty, she seems to be trying to fade into the background – a welcome change from the high-powered barracuda’s I usually see when I’m playing. She looks and acts exactly like I imagine my 12 year old niece would, if she were 23.

Or I’ll watch television, and see an actress (is this still an acceptable term for a female actor?) in a bit role that reminds me a lot of my daughter, but all grown up. Or I’ll drive past the university, and see a student that reminds my of my oldest son, from glasses to untied shoelaces.

The Fed Ex guy dropped some stuff off at the office today. He reminded me so strongly of my nephew that I almost called him by the younger’s name. It was an almost disorienting experience.

Sometimes I wonder if this phenomenon is a blessing – me being given a glimpse of things yet to come, a way for me to see how the children that make my life brighter will turn out.

Other times it lends a tiny bit of credibility to my fathers insistence that there’s only a limited number of people in the world, and that we just keep meeting them over and over again.

I got two turntables and a microphone.

Happy birthday to me.