Month: April 2019

Tiamat the Destroyer

Tiamat is a dragon that’s from mythology so old she’s not really a dragon, but more of a slimy worm/reptile thing, very much like Grendel’s mother. A female, lizard-like, spawner of monsters. Her element is sludge and she will lick your ass, whether your name is Beowulf or Ahura Mazda. [edit: autocorrect changed “kick” to “lick” in that above sentence, and I have decided I will allow it.]

Of course, as anyone who knows anything about both things is well aware, when Gygax & crew constructed the elaborate role playing game known as Dungeons & Dragons in the ‘70s, t/he/y scooped up all kinds of creatures both to play as and to encounter, from ancient mythology and what I call Old Story. (And yes, of course Tolkien’s classic peoples of Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Halflings. And wizards. But where do you think the Good Don got them in the first place? Hm? Don’t @ me…)

Of course any game w dragons in the title needs must have plenty of them flying around in its world, and boy does it: Tiamat is one of the biggest baddies one can encounter in D&D. Her sex is the only thing she keeps from her ancient squidgy origins: a five headed dragon in the game, each of her heads is a different color and spews a different element, as though she’s five chromatic dragons in one. Which of course she is, kinda.

In popular play She Kills Monsters, Tiamat does indeed have five heads, but in this case it’s (SPOILERS: skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want SPOILERS) the embodiment of the five adventurers our protagonist has been journeying with.

The final fight is described by the playwright as “the most incredible fight scene in history ever to be put on a stage.” No pressure. But my work on this show over at RRCC culminates not as much with my choreography, but with an immense, phenomenal animatronic behemoth conceived & constructed by the college’s robotics department. Only two and a half of the heads, plus two wings, were complete when I trekked down there yesterday afternoon but boy did it look spectacular nonetheless. I tweaked the choreography and guided the girl who’d be fighting the thing, reassuring her the while that her assessment was correct: the audience would be looking at it, not really at her very much at all. So in this case the most epic dragon battle supposed-to-be ever is more about the machinery than the dance, and that’s just fine. It’s all art. Gorgeous art, at that.

I had a slight tangent planned about Game of Thrones and my history of watching it, not watching it, wanting to read the books and not bothering, etc. in the wake of the beginning of the end apparently broadcasting Sunday night, but ehhhh. Boobs and dragons are both things I enjoy, but wars of the roses meets soft core porn I’m just not willing to waste my all too short mortality on. I’ll get the best fight scenes shared with me, put in my two gold pieces’ worth, and that’ll be plenty. And my nerd cred remains intact, thankyouverymuchindeed…

There are a few more potent (and older) dragons I’d rather revisit. LeGuin’s intimidating dragons of Earthsea, Tolkien’s Smaug, and of course The Pearl Poet’s Mom o’ Grendel. Whoever s/t/he/y was/ere.

🐲🐉

Red

I’ve only had red hair once in my life; it was for a play I was a lead in: I had to look like the other lead’s sister, and she was a redhead. So I got a hold of a cheap box of bright orange, and did it. My hair was long then, too—about as long as it is again now—so it actually took two boxes of dye to get it all. This was the mid ’90s, just before the Band Of Young Men and just after college. O wait, actually—I think this must have been my last or penultimate semester still in college, because I remember having pissed off the school’s powers that be by getting this part in a community show and not a school one. I could tell, too, which part in the school play (a dreary Irish drama) they wanted me for. The one I got (a singing narrative lead in a surrealist and violent play) was so very much more challenging than the Irish matriarch the people who were supposed to be educating me wanted to typecast me in. So I made the right decision, and they went ahead and cast a junior instead, who was just fine. I also had an intense emotional (and very nearly a sexual) relationship with a young man in that cast who was far too young and gay for me, but that’s a story for another post. Or actually probably not.

The big three romantic/pivotal relationships in my life were all redheads, which meant that I was not allowed to go ginger any other time. Why? It’s my hair, right? Yeah, but natural redheads get pretty bent out of shape if someone not from that mothership does it artificially. Though it’s funny—I’ve had more than one person tell me they think of me as a natural redhead. My hair stylist is one of them. I’m not a redhead! I protested, gobsmacked, when she said so. Sure you are, the sweet little psychic born-again assured me. I shook my (brown-haired) head.

That time I went dark mahogany brown, it turned out with too much burgundy in the mix. This was in the early aughts, and my ginger husband kept looking at me sidelong, until he finally had to admit he didn’t like it, at all. Those colors went great with my complexion and my green eyes, but nope. Too red.

In fact, the very first time I ever dyed my hair—I was 15—the only reason I got the balls to do it was that my best friend and bosom buddy, a bright orange redhead replete with freckles, threatened me. See, we were both in this mod-moving-into-proto-goth style, pretty hardcore. She said, “If you don’t dye your hair black? *I will!*”

The mod kids are mod. This would have been right before her threat and my subsequent first dye job.

Gaaaah okay okay!

Anyway, my hair loves dye: it soaks it right up and doesn’t grow back too awkwardly. That fateful day at age 15, it was a black and burgundy wedge cut. I’ve been going dark about yearly ever since (except that few months as a burnished ginger). And for goth prom a couple years ago, I’ve discovered my hair especially likes blue. Much to the trauma of my stylist. But I don’t mind. Not sure what I want to do for this year’s goth prom, except my dress is a sparkly charcoal gray. So? Dunno–maybe the copious gray growing back in is the best match.

Only a couple days after the boxes of orange met my tresses, I was standing at the bus stop on my way to rehearsal. A woman stopped me and exclaimed that I looked like a Celtic goddess with my height and my hair! I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t my natural color, or that Irish women of the time period she was talking about would’ve been half my size (let alone most likely black-haired). I just took the praise. And plugged my show.

Before you suggest it: I can’t go red for goth prom this year. The SO is a ginger.

Breakin’

Or maybe it’s Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. I couldn’t decide which. And now that I have, I must admit that I don’t remember if there were actual songs called that, within the soundtracks of those movies. Welp, too late—the title is chosen, and no I can’t be bothered to research those delightful pieces of ‘80s dross. Which are still so bad they’re gloriously good. Thanks anyway.

I was big into break dancing back in the day, being the daughter of a dancer, and wildly admired Michael Jackson’s incredible movement skills (it wasn’t break dancing, what he did—I’d call it a self-stylized form of jazz). One summer, at age 12 or 13, I took a break dancing class and concurrently, a jazz dance class that focused solely on the big dance number from Thriller. The album and subsequent music videos had just come out, and it was all the rage.

Still is, to an extent. Except. The recently released documentary on the horrifying activities that were regular occurrences at Neverland, plus #metoo, combine to make it not so easy to separate the artist from his art. The pedophile, I mean. From his art.

I have this discussion with most groups of my students: is it possible to appreciate and enjoy a work of art when the creator of same was a monster? I mean, beyond understanding the mental illnesses of some, like Van Gogh or Pollock. For example, can you enjoy Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, knowing its author photographed little girls in the nude? I happen to, but then I first fell in love with Lewis Carroll’s wonderful oeuvre of nonsense when I was myself a little girl of just the age he’d reportedly erotically fixate upon. I don’t have a correct answer to this issue, but as far as anyone knows, erotic obsessions aside, Dr. Dodgson never raped anybody. Not that that particularly helps.

There’s a mighty dance battle towards the end of She Kills Monsters, the play I’m helping RRCC with, and as I chose music clips and dances to include in the battle, of course I went right to including the iconic moves from Thriller. But then it hit me. Can I do this, anymore? Does this dance elicit joy? It used to—even as recently as last year, the Thriller dance was a go-to for iconic moves of the 1980s, and Halloween dance flash mobs were still joyfully doing it down the streets. But now?

I discussed it with the young students who would be performing the dance battle, and they concurred amongst themselves that the work is bigger than the man. But it bugged me, and when I brought it up later to the SO, he averred it was a bad idea. Putting that dance up on stage will not cause joy to an audience in late April 2019; it will cause discomfort at best, triggering at worst. Maybe in time we’ll be able to appreciate Michael Jackson’s art again, at a farther remove, but we really can’t now. Not anymore. So I removed the Thriller section from the dance battle.

And hey, maybe more time won’t heal those wounds Jackson caused. If they don’t, is that such a bad thing? Is the loss of a brilliant body of work worth the healing of the way too many survivors that are trying to live good lives in the aftermath of a nightmare? I’d say so.

Anyway, it’s high time we stopped praising the monsters for their art while waving away their wrongdoings. I’m looking at you, Woody Allen. Too long.

But that’s not why I titled this post Breakin’. It’s because I was breaking in these new boots at the time of this writing, and was feeling it a little, after a couple days straight of wearing them. I’m wearing them today again, to go teach the finished dance battle, sans Thriller, tonight.

Not nearly such an exciting topic, eh. Whatever. I’ll allow it.

P.S. Look at that photo. Talk about a Band of Young Men, amirite? And, yes, they’re about to enter into a dance battle. I mean, OBViously…