A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

2 November 1997 - The Coolest Halloween Idea Ever and a Note on Cinderella

Halloween was, of course, one of the major events of the week. I called Elliot over the weekend to pass along a couple of things Mom wanted me to tell him and he told me what has got to be the coolest Halloween idea ever. He and Ramona did get candy for trick or treaters ... but they also gave out children's books! It wasn't too expensive since they got used books at the Friends of the Library sale. I was thoroughly impressed with the idea. Not that I get any trick or treaters, since I live in an apartment, and one in the back of the building at that. But I am going to do this if I ever live somewhere that I do get trick or treaters. And I am telling lots of people because it is just such a wonderful idea.

As for my Halloween, I have to admit I've never outgrown the pleasure of costume parties and I think it's rather a pity that people don't seem to have them other than for Halloween. So I had to take advantage of Leonard's party to come up with my annual bad pun costume. Past years have included a New York Yankees t-shirt with devil's horns and tail (a damned Yankee) and carrying around an empty corn flakes box with a plastic cleaver embedded in it and lots of stage blood smeared around (a cereal killer). This year I went for being both topical and tasteless and used posterboard to make a die (i.e. one of a pair of dice) and wore a crown. I proudly proclaimed that I was "Princess Die" to the assorted groans of the other party attendees.

One of the nice things about Leonard's parties is that one really can't get bored at them. All of the people he knows are creative in some way or other and the "sharing circle" is a finely honed tradition that lets us entertain one another effectively. Even with a relatively small crowd, there was still enough music and story to make a very enjoyable evening. I waffled in planning my contribution and changed my mind last minute, which was a bad idea as I had not really rehearsed "Ida Black" and I screwed up in telling it, leaving out the first mention of the witch's curse. I sort of recovered, but I was unhappy with my performance overall. Penny told "As the Fiddle Plays" and then commented that she had told an original piece because she was afraid that somebody would tell one of the other two Halloween stories she knew. And, sure enough, Joel told "The Monkey's Paw". Nobody had told "Mr. Fox" so I looked at Penny and said "Be bold, be bold." This is very much a storyteller's cue and Bill and Joel chimed in "But not too bold." The end result was that the four of us told an impromptu tandem version of the story. At the end, Ann's husband (whose name I never learned) commented with his interpretation that the women killed by Mr. Fox were the girlfriends of Lady Mary's brothers and that's why the brothers were so eager to help her get revenge. I expect that, with the folk process being what it is, sooner or later I will hear a storyteller in some other part of the country use that detail. Interestingly a couple of people said afterwards that they thought we had actually practiced doing the story together. Many of them also had not heard the story before. I think storytellers tend to assume everyone knows the classic fairy tales (in this case, Joseph Jacobs' collections of English Fairy Tales) and we're often surprised that someone might not have heard a story that we think has been done to death. There may be generational aspects to which stories people know, too since I remember being very surprised that the other Bards didn't know all the urban legends that I assumed were everyone had heard a million times. I may have had unusual childhood tastes for someone of my generation as I devoured the Grimms and Norse myth, while everyone else was being spoonfed children's books of sweetness and light. This is yet another reason I am grateful my parents never tried to censor my reading.

By the way, I hadn't met Ann before - but boy, can that woman sing! Her rendition of "Marie LeVeau" completely blew me away - definitely one of the highlights of the evening. The other highlights for me were the schottische Leonard played (one he had written for a fiddler from Seattle, I believe, but it had a nice spookyish tone to it) and Scott's description of making a science fiction movie in the Ukraine.

Since I mentioned people not knowing their folklore and having been fed Disneyfied versions, I should comment on Disney's remake of "Cinderella." What got a lot of attention, of course, was the multiracial cast. I'm not sure why this is such a big deal - colorblind casting has been the default in opera for some years (admittedly after a lot of battles on the part of some very talented singers). Why is it so much harder for other media to go by talent instead of appearance? What I found more interesting about the presentation is the mucking around they did with the score. "Falling in Love With Love" is a beautiful song, to be sure, but it's NOT from Cinderella. It's not even Rodgers and Hammerstein - it's Rodgers and Hart! (It's from The Boys From Syracuse.) It's not like they were taking random songs to insert into a nonmusical production, either; Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a perfectly good score for a television movie. As for the Disneyfication, Perrault's Cinderella is much tamer than most of the variants of the story to begin with so it isn't as horrible as it might be. But really the stepmother and stepsisters in this version just seemed silly, not evil. I like the gruesome touches of the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to try to get the shoe on (which works better in the original where it's a fur slipper, not a glass one, but that is mistranslation of long standing) and the stepsisters get their eyes pecked out. What the sweetness and light crowd misses is that the gruesome touches are good for kids, because they show evil being clearly punished. Another reason I prefer the Grimms is that their heroine is far less passive. I won't even comment on the fairy godmother as co-dependent!