What if the thing we call comedy is, "stories about the attempt to make love work?" 

Not always true, there's a lot of cruelty and anger in comedy. But even if you try to place Lenny Bruce on the spectrum of love vs hate, I think he might come out closer to the love end than the hate end, if only because "I HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS RIGHT NOW" is not unlike Cassandra's attempt to save the kingdom. 

But cruelty-anger comedy is generally less successful, feels less truthful or valid than make-love-work comedy. 

I'm still thinking about Silver Linings Playbook, about the non-romantic relationships. That's what spurred this thought process. So, okay, let's grab an example of something generally considered a good comedy, Monty Python & The Holy Grail. 

How is this about the attempt to make love work? 

King Arthur wants to get the Grail in order to sanctify his kingdom, but keeps running into his kingdom's idiocy (filth/disease/pestilence/The French/sexual repression/confusing thought processes about government, inheritance and marriage/etc.), and ends up arrested by contemporary police. 

Which really makes MP&THG a huge tragedy, because it basically says, "if such an idealistic crusade were to happen in England today, the perpetrators would be vilified and arrested." Maybe they should: we see the police covering one of the bodies Arthur dispatched, and questioning a contemporary witness. Maybe they shouldn't: we saw what happened when the person was killed.  

So, one could argue that Arthur's constant modus operandi of "I am doing this for your own good (trying to get the Grail to sanctify the nation and save it from itself)" is repressive and indicative of British imperialism, and not love, or we can let the text be a text unto itself, and say that Arthur wants to share the sanctifying experience he had when the Lady of the Lake gave him the sword and made him King, with the entire nation. he's coming from a place of pure, spiritual love. 

This blasted into my head between my first and second cup of coffee.  I wish I could control the blast stream so that I could use it more productively, but it is what it is. 

EDITED TO ADD: 

Mental overload. Too much Christmas, too much concrete jungle. I need someplace to chill for a few hours tomorrow. 

Likely candidates: Pendle Hill, Bartram's Gardens, The Michener Museum, Chanticleer. 

I Also just took something to make my brain shut down, preceded by chocolate. So maybe I can sleep this off tonight, go to the gym tomorrow and feel better. But holy cats, if anyone needed to "go on a sojourn," it's me. ​

But I managed to get one more submission in before the deadline. 

-----------

Last night I dreamt that I was working  in the production office of The Muppet Show, planning out their Holiday Special.

Kermit and Fozzie and I were going over set designs and planning out blocking and stage management, relative to how we had The Millennium Falcon on stage.

Because, you know, it takes up a lot of room. And Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca were going to be on The Muppet Holiday Special, as some way to make up for or distract from the Star Wars Holiday Special, lo those many years ago. 

Of course, being my brain, it was Luke with his pre-accident Star Wars nose & jaw, and Han Solo with his Empire swagger. 

So, I had to help the two of them carry the wooden components built to stand in for the Millennium Falcon in rehearsal. Just then, Ted started helping himself to the piles of cheddar cheese and ham slices meant to accompany the pizza Craft Services had provided for the cast and crew. I hissed at him to stop touching the cheese and ham, he said he was hungry, and the head Stage Manager from the PA RenFaire started giving him a lecture. I said I'd handle this, and while trying to carry the Millennium Falcon in order to impress Han Solo, I used my most patient tone to tell Ted it wasn't time to touch the cheese and ham, he needed to wash his hands, go around the corner, get a paper plate, and when it was lunch time he should wait his turn in line with the Muppets, because I needed to move the Millennium Falcon. 

I woke up to find Vince holding his phone over my face, trying to record the lecture I was giving in my sleep. 

Thank you. 

Good thing: wearing jeans fresh out of the dryer that feel a little bit loose. 

Something else: realizing that you've been walking around Target for the last half hour with your fly down. 

In other news: I saw this clip today, and it really makes me want to write a new play. (It feels a little like Traveling Light.) But, right now, I got NOTHIN'. 

Saw a truly good production of Hamlet today, at Hedgerow Theater. It made me have more sympathy for Laertes and Horatio than before. Horatio in this case is the deeply-friend-zoned would-be lover (played by a woman, an inspired choice).  And poor Laertes, the guy goes through all Hamlet's hell in less than an act. 

Got to see it with my favorite smart 12-year-old, and it was wonderful to experience it with him. 

I wish someone would make a cinematic first-person shooter of Hamlet. Seriously. 

I also wish (and I hate to say this, but I will) for a 25-year moratorium on Shakespeare.  I'd be willing to allow universities to do one Shakespeare play a season, but only if no white people are cast in the production. I love Shakespeare, but I think not enough other work gets a chance. I also think we need to let a generation roll over and see it with fresh eyes. 

that being said, it was a lovely show. 

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS

Somewhere in California, three women are memorizing* lines that I wrote. they're rehearsing and they're gonna act it out onstage. I have proof. 

Copyright Jules Dee Photography, this is Jeanette Godoy and Katie Ventura, rehearsing Pretty Petty Things.  

*I assume. we all know that off book is a lie. 

Vince got me a ticket to see this the other night for my birthday. 

Five stars, highly recommended, would see again, would name my kid after it.  

And then there's the tech, which is its own 5-star event. 

Seriously, my capsule review is that the script is so tightly woven, the actors so genuine and the moments so heightened, that you really could have done this show with just "lights up, let 'em at it, lights down." and then Danny Boyle (who directed the London Summer Olympics opening ceremony, Slumdog Millionaire, etc. etc.), brings in his visual aesthetic, while being smart enough to stay out of the actors' way.  So you have what seems like an ocean of starlight descending from the heavens, and then you realize it's a million individual antique light bulbs, each on its own cord, each globe housing a visible glowing filament. 

Miller and Cumberbatch complement each other perfectly, and I wish I could have seen it twice. I saw it with Miller as the Creature, an incredibly physical, potentially exhausting role. Victor, comparatively speaking, is British and wears beautiful clothes.  So, seeing it with Cumberbatch as Victor was kind of like watching Sherlock with the volume turned up higher. Not bad, just not wildly different. 

If the Creature hasn't been on stage for a while and we get a little break from the absolute force of nature that he is, we can see Victor's brilliance, his drive for knowledge and desire to dissect the indefinable spark of life. Put them both on stage together, and it's like watching an orca meeting a seal; the seal's really pretty and wonderful in and of itself, but blink and you might miss it. Unless the orca's decided to let you see the seal.  

It gave me a ton of food for thought, which is why I'm digging into a Mary Shelley biography right now. 

It is still playing through the month of November, but hard to find. There are two screenings scheduled in Princeton in the next couple of weeks. I don't think I'm going to have time to see it again, but if you do, you should. ntlive.com. 

I had two similar ideas, but never followed up on it. Glad I didn't, because I like this metaphor much, much better. 

Girl You Know It's True.​

in in other news; minor rewrite to the ending & cleanup of Wreck Of The Alberta, two submissions. Took longer than I'd hoped. 

I want to write the Long Day's Journey Into Night version of The Munsters. 

I know NBC tried pushing a Munsters reboot with an addiction metaphor, and I suspect I might be the only person who saw it that way. 

Am I the only person who sees The Munsters as a metaphor for living with addiction? And, if Herman was created to be Lily's partner, what does this mean for that poor schmuck? I feel very sorry for him. Is he supposed to be her enabler, or to keep her from being an addict? 

Think about it. Of the entire family, you have three vampires, one, uh, re-animated corpse construction, and one family member who passes for human. This scares me the most. Marilyn says she's "the ugly one of the family," but she's the one who passes for normal in society. She's a niece of Lily and Herman's, and she's part of the family in a full and consistent way. So, I can see how the show creators see her as a bridge between the "normals" and the Munsters, but how does she fulfill the metaphor? 

As the NBC reboot pushed it, she's the lure for Grampa's addiction issues. which makes sense. But what does a woman who has nothing and everything in common with her family want for herself? She really could leave them, but there has to be something that she wants. which means that either she's a really functional addict, or she's never been addicted, but something else makes her want to be there. 

which would mean she's controlling the addicts for her own purposes. a family of pet vampires. jeez, who wouldn't want that? 

Herman's conflicts seem obvious. he's made to be a partner for Lily, someone who won't be afraid of her addiction but doesn't share it. Then they've got a child. If you go by traditional vampire canon, either he's a child from outside the biological family who was turned, or he's the biological product of Herman and Lily. which asks the question if vampires can reproduce. I will not use Twilight as a reference. 

I am, however, stuck on the notion of Herman and Eddie sitting in the living room quietly trying to function with the fact that Lily is addicted upstairs and Grampa is addicted in the basement. 

I actually liked the NBC reboot (even though I generally dislike reboots).  I saw a lot of potential for it as a metaphor for addiction. Since Grampa becomes younger, sexier, and stronger after he's fed, it brings up the really sad part of dysfunctional families. Sometimes things are better when they're at their worst. Sometimes the happy memories of a gleefully drunk parent or remembering the smoky smell of a loving grandparent can be the worst parts of dealing with addiction. But the episode ended with a dead body in the basement, who would certainly be missed by the outside community. 

Pretty heavy stuff for something that's trying to get PG-13 audience numbers. 

I thought about writing a story about a family with a vampire-like curse, but not actually bloodsucking, fanged creatures. Let's say they suck the breath out of you or something. and you have that happening in three direct generations of the family, plus two family members who are half outside, half in, who are either enablers or protectors, who are stuck half in and half out of the family. Maybe this is worth pursuing. 

I've been watching a lot of American Horror Story in the past week. Probably not a good idea. I'm colossally bored with everything and I seem to be able to parcel this out to myself as a cheap treat.  I watched the whole first season, most of it in one marathon on Saturday night. I started watching the second season, and I'm into it so far. I like horror as a metaphor for other things. The writing is compact and it moves fast. It's a good reminder of everything I learned in school about writing. 

Today I'm grateful that;

Smart people like the podcast so far

I had it together to write a new sample article and apply for two freelance writing jobs

Vince cooked us a delicious healthy dinner 

Bebe and I went for a good fast walk in the beautiful fall weather

we can go to bed early.