Betsy Shebang - Column for 6/11
Potluck Musical
I hadn’t thrown a real party in years (at least not one for which anybody showed up) and I’ve been dreaming of a gathering where some or all of the guests show up and perform something. I didn’t want it to be a "talent show", with all the bland egomaniacs doing the same thing they (okay, we) did last time - something we’ve already gotten reasonably good at - and always with a surprise announcement that we hadn’t had time to practice, followed by a performance that proves it. I wanted it to be creative, involving, goofy dynamic fun and, while I too am an egomaniac, I didn’t want to risk taking the whole spotlight myself, since I have enough to be depressed about without every declined invitation becoming some kinda personal attack.
I thought we’d break a short, familiar story, like a fairy tale, into ten or twenty sentences and pass them out to several volunteers who would then write and perform songs to convey that part of the story. Ta-dah! Instant musical! I hoped that suggesting Tom Waits or Laurie Anderson as influences would get people to think "Well, I ain’t no Lorenz Hart, or even a Corey Hart, but I can sure ‘nuf bang kitchenware together and belch out rhymes about horrible things! COUNT ME IN!!" but it didn’t work that way. Some folks just like their Fiddler on the Roof, and that’s groovy.
A friend suggested "Potluck Musical" to describe what we’d come up with. It stuck.
I read through a pile of Fairy Tales, and was struck by the fact that they all SUCKED. "Of course the modern sanitized versions of the stories suck," you say (that’s what I’d have said)...but I was reading the older 19th- and even 17th-century versions of the stories, and they still sucked. Characters did horrible things for no reason ("Honey, let’s abandon the kids in the big dark forest today!" "Anything you say, Pookie!") or enter the story, rescue the heroine and disappear, all in two sentences; the prince would marry the princess at the end, but then they’d discover, in a tacked-on John-Woo-boat-chase ending, that the prince’s mother is an ogre and she’s gonna eat the kids next time they ask her to sit. I came to understand why Disney did what they did to the stories: they added character, personality, logic, and dramatic flow to stories that had been mostly lists of surreal events. The talking animal sidekicks were mostly already there.
I picked "Sleeping Beauty", since it didn’t suck any more than the rest, and everybody picked story elements to turn into songs. I encouraged the use of toy or homemade instruments, but after searching the house for gamelan-quality dinnerware and shopping for a decent toy accordion, I decided to go back to the electric guitar.
Meanwhile, I went through another cycle of my-life-sucks, when-am-I-gonna-grow-up-and-get-my-shit-together, mostly for unrelated reasons. And I was struck by the fact that Sleeping Beauty is mostly about that - the tragic, aggravating, and rapidly lengthening waiting period between childhood and adulthood, wherein the beauty and strength of one’s character is snoring away while the body navigates through acne, hygiene, responsibility, and the work involved in being "charming" and "intelligent" rather than just "cute". People psychologically retreat from the world for any number of reasons, yet we must always in some way remain in the world all the while. We cope by entering some kind of sleep, our creativity and passions unrecognizably dormant, with the hope that they’ll be awakened by the arrival of a lover or an adult life, or for the spell to somehow end on its own. Somehow, we suspect, these things will all arrive together, with no explanation...aside from the assurances of stories like this one.
One moment in the story symbolized for me this adolescent plunge into the struggles of youth, and it was not the worker’s-comp bit with the spinning wheel. The big moment for me was when the last of the fairy godmothers revises the curse set by the previous, wicked fairy, who had stated that the baby girl would grow to age 15 and prick her finger on a spindle. The good fairy has no power to undo the spell, but she could reduce it; instead of dying, the girl would merely fall asleep, for a hundred years. (If a parent had cast the spell, it would have been "or until you start behaving like a grownup!!")
I wrote my song about that moment, and stumbled onto some imagery I liked. The fairy godmother who cast that sleeping spell wasn’t simply blessing the child; she was setting a curse upon her, to save her life. Such curses are what life is made of, and the fairy godmothers, who had a reputation for being purely good and sweet in their pre-retirement years, were actually of much darker stuff; they were capable of horrendous things, and it was only at their mercy that their blessings would be bestowed. They would be spiders, spinning beautiful webs but always dangerous, always suspect, always threatening to take away everything they had given.
Anyway, I wrote a song with the following lyrics. MP3’s of the inevitably sloppy recordings (we only had two weeks to compose and practice; I played nervously and screwed up as I never had in rehearsal) will eventually be posted at www.templeofdominoes.com/music/events.
Girl In The Spiderweb
Little girl in the spiderweb, your ending has begun
So many things in life you know can never be undone
We’re all spiders on the riverbank
My sister’s webs are spun
Now I can only hide you where you can’t be hurt by anyone
You’ll never know who misses you
You’ll never feel the sun
Better sleep away a hundred years than slip away in one
Little boys and little girls
Slipping down a noisy river
Shaken through with all the cursed rage
The current can deliver
Little girl floating softly
‘Til the poison currents caught her
‘Til the waterfall would take
Every blessing life has brought her
Little girl, sleeping lifeless
Though I love you like a daughter
I can’t make the river stop
But I can lift you from the water
Little girl lying still
Beside the river never crossed
Now you’ll spend two lifetimes dreaming of the one you nearly lost
Don’t worry you’ll be helpless
Like a creature at the zoo
All the strangers in your world
They will all be sleeping too
I’ll hide you where you can’t be hurt by anyone
Not even you
Copyright 2002 Betsy Shebang
Columns by Betsy Shebang