After a year of cryptid hunting related to the forthcoming book, D.S. Barrick and I have a mostly-complete draft (and should be able to start pitching it in July).
Along the way, I found and photographed the Nith River Monster.
I will get to that.
This is "a prologue and some plays."
A couple of weeks ago we caught the opening of an excellent high school production of Hadestown. Fantastic, in both senses of the word. If you don't know the musical, it's a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a quasi-contemporary, anachronistic setting. I had to check the year that it launched. A song about building a wall, now often interpreted as an intentional attack on a certain Amerian president, predates his first term by a decade. This particular production featured an extraordinary student cast. I had no idea that the kid who played Hades could sing, and sing powerfully. Apparently, it was his first performance. He conveyed the arrogance of the Classical gods. The Fates, on the other hand, moved and sang with fluidity, unity, and the casual confidence of the only beings the gods feared.
It's a powerful piece. No epilogues: we do not get to see any version of Orpheus's final fate.
Emma Donoghue was in the house; her daughter was on stage. We would encounter them again a few days later.
By the way, what did happen to that wall? I seem to recall it being a cornerstone of a certain president's first term.
Schedules had conspired to put nearly everything this month, save monster hunting, on the same week. That Friday, Nancy sang as a part of a small cabaret sort of thing, which I enjoyed better than I thought I would. I want to support her, of course, but she had not been feeling well and I didn't know how wise it was to go ahead with this particular commitment. Every time I attend one of these, in some kind of ethnic club or church hall, I feel a little like we've stepped back in time to another era, one that didn’t know the internet was going to be a thing, threatening real-world communities, childhood, and the always-tenuous sanity of political thought.
The next day, we attended a tea in an historic house, a fundraiser set just before the production of Kate Hamill's iconoclastic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The rest of our table consisted of two costume designers and the physicist husband of one of them, so my thrown-together attempt at Regency garb was the least credible. My cravat was at least a generation out of date, but then, men tend to think that the march of fashion has ceased when we were thirty, so I could plausibly wear it. I have a proper cravat, but it was doing duty as a sash-belt.
A former colleague of mine joined the group in an outfit borrowed from one of the designers, and we were able to catch up. Only one other person in the room specifically dressed for the 1830s. Some friends of ours had another table; they arrived with two of their young granddaughters, dressed more like contemporary princesses. Donoghue's party was at the table next to us; I spoke to them briefly, mostly to compliment her daughter for her involvement in Hadestown.
The play itself was directed by Rebecca Northan, who most recently did the crazed Goblin Macbeth adaptation, in which a group of goblins (obviously) decide to stage a production of the Shakespearean tragedy. It adapts the classic novel into a deliberate farce, but maintains some respect for the source material. The beats of Austen's plot, let us say, lend themselves to such a reinterpretation.
It's not as though people cannot go and read the original book.
Yesterday, with the weather finally feeling like summer, I returned to New Hamburg, home of the Nith River Monster.