I was going to write this as an email to Tom, but this message (seeing as this is a week's worth of hypergraphia exploding in a Saturday blast) is probably better living its life as a One Post Wonder post. So, if anything else amazing happens today, I'll add it at the end. 

Ever since the Dead Milkmen's album Beelzebubba came out, I have loved the (song?) piece of whimsy that is Stewart.  if you're not familiar with it, this is it.

I don't know why I love it. It's hilarious, contagious, and picturesque. Do I need another reason? It's a satirical exploration of narrowminded xenophobia, even more necessary today than it was when it was originally released in the era of George Bush I. 

When I went away to college, the Beelzebubba album made my homesickness for the Greater Philadelphia area easier to cope with. My friends and I used to sing "Punk Rock Girl" at the tops of our lungs, walking around the Frasier-Crane-esque Back Bay area, wrapping our lips and tongues around those South Street vowel roller coasters as a way of pushing off the stifling snobbery of cold, concrete Boston. 

Flash forward to a couple of years later when I worked at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. One of our dialect exercises was to take something we already knew by heart and "translate" it to Renfaire language and dialect (I say Renfaire because I'm 100% positive there are huge differences between 16th century English language and what gets used at faires, no matter how historically acurate they may try to be, I just can't cite those differences right now). One of the characters in the summer of 1991 was named Stuart, and my friend Gina and I used to rant a translated version of "Stewart" to him. he would look at us like we were completely insane. We asked him, "Have you e'er heard of those bards of the Shire of Brotherly Love, who name themselves after the ghosts of dairy farmers?" He said in that in sooth and faith, no tale of such bards had ever been introduced to him.

To this day, 25 years later, when I don't feel well, and especially if I'm nauseous, if I need to soothe my brain, I occupy myself by trying to remember the Renfaire translated version of "Stewart," that Gina and I would tell to this poor guy when we had gate duty together on hot summer afternoons.  We never made it much further than the burrow owl business. I seem to recall it was something like this:

Know ye, Stuart, well I love thee. Thou are unlike all others in this shire. 

Misunderstand me not, sir, they are fine people, good English stock, but they are content to recline, enjoy a Punch and Judy entertainment, quaff a mug of ale. But they do not know, Stuart, what the Spaniards will do to this shire! 

Know you young John of Wurster? He delivereth messages throughout the Shire and rings the town crier's bell. This youth hails from another land, and some say he inhaleth the smoke of the poppy, but this I believe not. When the day came that he had ten years passed, he begged old Wurster for the gift of a burrow owl. "Father," he said, "nothing more could my heart desire, for all the years I might live." 

Some nights past, I ventured out at half ten, to find young John of Wurster staring into the moonlit branches of the birch. "What brings you hence? " I asked, "No youth should be out this late, hath some madness gripped you?" thinking of the tales of the poppy that dog this lad's heels. "My burrow owl," he cried, "I seek it in the night."  "God's hairy butt," I cried, "know you not that a burrow owl liveth in a hole in the ground? For what reason else, in heaven, on earth, or in the fires below, would it be so named?"

And so, good Stuart friend, do you think such a lad would know what the Spaniards wil do to this shire? 

And, yeah, that's about as far as we got. Mostly because the poor guy would find a reason to run away from us. 

A few years ago, during a particularly bad bout with a virus, I started trying to translate it into actual Shakespearean sonnet form.  Iambic pentameter is hard. I had gotten up early feeling lousy, showed up for work on time, tried to hang in there for an hour, and made it to the toilet just in time to vomit up my entire viscera. They sent me home, but I had to take the train. The gentle swaying of the car and blur of the outside did not help things, so concentrating on translating Stewart into iambic pentameter gave me something to hang onto so I wouldn't become another SEPTA vomit statistic. I don't think I made it past the first two lines.  

Since then, if I feel sick or crappy, this is my thing to concentrate on. That and translating this into Spanish:

This is really hard, because the word for "female dog" in spanish is perra, which has two syllables, and "mom" is mamá, also two syllables. 

HEY, I DON'T TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK ABOUT WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO PASS OUT BECAUSE YOU FEEL LOUSY. 

When I'm tired and frustrated, Stewart pops up in my brain, as I'm sure Pavlov's dogs could hear phantom bells ringing when they were hungry.  It's not going away. When I have a long day of repeating the obvious to people who just don't get it, in the back of my mind, a voice is screaming, "THEY'RE GONNA BUILD LANDING STRIPS FOR GAY MARTIANS, I SWEAR TO GOD!!!" 

My point is, one of these days, I really want to sit down with Tom Boutell (for his experience with iambic pentameter), a copy of Charles' Onions' Shakespeare Glossary, 3rd Edition, and translate Stewart into the Shakespearean poetic saga that I've been craving since 1991. That is a bone my brain wants to chew on.

I wonder, if I wrote a really carefully-worded letter on letterhead in real ink to Rodney Anonymous, he'd read a proposal allowing me to adapt Stuart into a 45 minute Shakespearean play for Fringe production? 

Shit, he'd probably say yes if I tweeted it, but I don't tweet-propose.

(Why 45 minutes? Come on, there's no point in dragging that story out past 45 minutes.)

But it can't be Spaniards that the narrator is afraid of. It would have to be queers or whatever they would have been called in that time period. I think it has to be that the narrator is in love with Stewart, but can't deal with it because of his own internalized homophobia. 

OK, that's enough out of me for right now.