Today I learned that this exists:
The Sleep No More Crossover Fanfiction Blog

Because Sleep No More is crossover fanfiction itself! Get it? Get it?

I think this is a tiny bit brilliant. Only a tiny bit, though.

Ahoy vey!

Ahoy Vey!

The story of Rosh Hashana / Talk Like A Pirate Day

(which, to clarify, fell on the same day in 2009)

There was once a tiny shtetl in the old country; so inconsequential that no one bothered to persecute it, so unremarkable that no one gave it a name. And anyway, the elders argued, how can you order a pogrom on a place when you don’t know what to call it? Sure, the mail was always lost, but who wrote to them anyway? Not their good for nothing sons, that’s for sure.

One Rosh Hashanah, the esteemed rabbi of the little town stood in front of the shul. The rabbi’s emotion on the holy days was greatly renowned, and the whole town – from Abram the mostly-honest butcher to Shlomo the skill-less liberal arts major (may your family be spared such indignity!) – packed the shul to witness the rabbi's single dramatic tear as he beseeched the Lord God to forgive his people for not setting foot in His house since the previous Yom Kippur, and would He remind them of the Sisterhood potluck next Shabbos as well?

As the rabbi finished a thinly veiled comparison of the binding of Isaac to the binding of his digestion – thanks to the prune rugelach offered by certain congregants in lieu of membership dues – a commotion was heard outside the shul. People were gathering at the door.

“Uch,” thought Abram, “the lazy-bones are only showing up in time for the Part With The Stuff They Know."

“Uch,” thought Shlomo, “I could have slept later after all.”

“Uch,” thought Carlos the shabbos goy, “I hope they don’t ask me to tear their toilet paper.”

A rough voice outside shouted “amen!,” and “amen,” the congregation hastily assented, with a caterwauled descant provided by Chandleh the thinks-she’s-a-soprano show-off. “Arrrr, men!” repeated the voice with clearer diction, and a strong scent of highly un-kosher grog filled the air as a crew of pirates shoved into the shul.

The pirates were ill-shaven and well-armed, apart from the hook-handed one who was well-shaven and ill-armed, and their captain tottered atop a wooden peg leg.

“Ahoy, me hearties!” said the pirate captain.

“Oy, my heart!” said Ephraim the kvetch.

“We be needin’ some assistence from ye landlubbers. We may be the meanest, dirtiest, ugliest blackguards ever to sail the seven seas,” the pirate said (“You should see my wife,” added Samuel who-thinks-he’s-funny), “but the scurvy czar (may he prosper on someone else’s back) be refusin’ to issue us a general pillaging license.”

He paused for a moment of general tutting and commisseration.

“So we be sailin’ under the radar, pillagin’ only that which the czar don’t bother to pillage himself." The pirate smiled with black teeth. "And we be noticin’ that this speck of barnacle is long overdue for a good pillage.”

There were cries and gasps, and a few of the women in the balcony took the opportunity to get better seats by fainting onto the lower level.

"On to the ship!" cried the pirate. The townsfolk were herded towards the door, though in a moment of highly uncharacteristic bravery, Tevye the milkman took a swing at the pirate, who tripped his attacker with a well-placed peg leg.

“You fight like a dairy farmer,” the pirate spat. “Now come along, so's I can make ye walk the plank.”

But at that moment Mordecai the whittler grabbed the pirate's peg leg.

“You have this peg long?”

“Arr. A mosquito bit me thigh." Mordecai looked up. "It was me first day with me hook."

“You think that’s bad? You should see my goiter,” said Ephraim.

“That peg’s not gonna last long, way it was constructed. Allow me.” And Mordecai grabbed the arm off the end of the pew, and quickly whittled it into a fine new peg leg.

“This be a fine new peg leg,” cried the pirate, dancing a little jig. “But don’t be expectin’ that will save ye from the plank.”

“Oh no,” said Mordecai. “For the Cossacks, sure, a leg will cost an arm and another leg. But for you? For you, I make a deal.” He gestured to the rabbi to come forward.

“This is our rabbi, the wisest scholar in our land. Pose him a riddle. If he cannot answer it to your satisfaction within three days, we will happily offer up our plunder to be pillaged. If the rabbi can solve the puzzle, then we request that you allow us to remain un-pillaged. I’ll even throw in an extra peg leg."

The pirate thought for a moment, but finding himself unaccustomed to such strain, he slapped his knee in consternation and cried "shiver me timbers!"

"We accept!" said Mordecai.

"Huh?" said the esteemed rabbi.

"Wait, that warn't any riddle" protested the pirate, but Mordecai put up a hand.

"Captain, let me offer you some counsel, free of charge. If even you don't know the answer to the "riddle," how can our rabbi hope to solve it?"

The pirate paused. "I accept! Rabbi, ye have three days to shiver me timbers." (The wife of Samuel-who-thinks-he's-funny pre-emptively smacked her husband) "I'll go ready me plank."

The pirate stomped off.

Mordecai turned to the rabbi with a smile, expecting praise for his quick wit and genre savvy. Instead, he was met with several dozen pieces of stale prune rugelach flying at his head.

For three days and three nights, the rabbi prayed. For three days and three nights, the rabbi studied. For three days and three nights, the rabbi fasted, not that his other options were much better. And after three days and three nights, the pirates met the townsfolk at the shul, and awaited the esteemed rabbi's solution.

The rabbi stepped up to the bimah, and began to speak. "The Rambam wrote of the many names of the Lord our God," he began, and proceeded to argue that if "shiver" is broken down into its numerological designation... but we’ll never hear the brilliant conclusion that proved "shiver me timbers" to be the lost fourteenth attribute of Hashem, for by that point all in attendance were fast asleep.

T'kiaaaaah! A loud horn bleat from outside woke congregants, pirate and Jew alike. T'kiaaaaaah!

"What fool is blowing the shofar three days late?" the rabbi muttered, throwing open the doors of the shul to chastise the tardy horn-blower. But when he looked out into the town square, he saw none other than the whittler Mordecai, cheeks blushed scarlet from blowing a strange-looking shofar.

"So this is your plan, Mordecai?" demanded the rabbi. "Lead us into the hands of the pirates while you sound the battle cry on your cheap knock-off shofar?"

"Actually, rabbi, I completely forgot about the riddle. But I was poking around the pirates' ship, looking for lost dubloons, when I saw a beautiful plank of wood just hanging off the edge of the deck."

"Me plank!" cried the pirate. "Me beautiful plank!"

"And I couldn't help myself - I had to whittle it. But look at this beautiful horn I made! It works, too!” T'kiaaaaaaaaaah!

The rabbi was all set to strangle Mordecai with his own payyis, but he was distracted by a strange wheezing sound. Coming from the pirate.

"Hee hee hee," said the pirate.

"Hee hee hee?" asked the rabbi.

"Your Mordecai - he took my plank and he... He shofar'd me timber!"

The resulting mass face-palm was so extraordinary that the descendents of the townfolk have had crooked noses ever since.

And the pirate was so taken by this extraordinarily clumsy and painstakingly set-up pun that he spared the village, asking only that Mordecai continue to entertain gentiles for the rest of his days. And so he and his descendents did, inventing musical theater and running Hollywood and generally ruining every nice social gathering, unto this very day.

The end.

[re-posts okay, with credit]

I made eye contact with Gerard Butler while doing the Chicken Dance

So there me and Candace were. Minding our own business. Doing the chicken dance in front of Penn Station. Because we had decided to walk from 23rd St. to Times Square by doing a different dance down each block. Naturally. And 34th St. was the chicken dance.

So we're minding our own business, doing the chicken dance, and the "clap clap clap clap!" part was getting a lot of attention. Not as much attention as our zombie walk got on 25th, but heads were turning. Including the head of Gerard Butler. And the rest of him. As well as his personal gentleman. He looked at us like we were crazy. With good reason. But he was dancing on the inside.

I smiled and waved at Mr. Butler. I didn't know who he was (of course). Candace informed me on the corner. And then we continued on our merry way, Macarena-ing down 35th.

The end.

"You're going to Cardiff? Why?"

The Doctor and Rose Tyler walk down a snowy Victorian street. Rose is gleeful, but the Doctor glances sullenly at a newspaper.

Doctor: I got the flight a bit wrong.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: It's not 1860, it's 1869.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: And we're not in Naples.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: We're in Cardiff.
Rose: ....right.

Caerdydd! Home of Doctor Who, the Millennium Centre, and, um, a castle. Rather lovely, rather dull. Perfect place for a day trip, if you do it right. Which I did not. I was in Cardiff for a total of 23 hours, but only eight of them were at all viable.

My train got in at 3 pm, and after checking in at the (really nice, highly recommended) NosDa hostel, I walked down the river to the bay. Predictably, I started at the Doctor Who exhibition, but... it was a bit unthrilling. Just costumes and flashing lights and the occasional panel with an episode summary - like anyone visiting a DW exhibit would need such a thing - and some animatronic Daleks. Even the gift shop was pretty lame. So the most obvious stage of my Doctor Who pilgrimage was a bust.

But outside was the Millennium Centre, which really is impressive in its own right. Welsh is a beautiful and absurd-looking language, so a massive carved wall of Welsh really does make for an interesting and worthy city icon. From there I started a walking tour I'd printed from the BBC website, which was theoretically supposed to take four hours. It actually took 20 minutes. There's just not all that much to see. Roald Dahl Pass is just some pass named after Roald Dahl. And there's, like, a church. Meh.

But I turned on the little boardwalk around the bay, and lo! There was the entrance to the Torchwood hub! I was very impressed to find that the geography of the hub's area, as shown both on Torchwood and the parent show, is consistent with the real world (ie, Jack was running from the right direction in LOTL, etc). The hub's door is covered by a rusty grille, with some old newspapers tacked up behind it. I took a closer look. "New Mayor, New Cardiff" announces a headline, under a photo of Margaret Blaine, nee Slitheen. Squee! Enormous squee! I guess it's just been chilling there since they filmed Boomtown in 2005. You can keep your animatronic Cybermen and life-size talking Daleks - this is the sort of thing that fills my heart with fannish glee. I was grinning like mad for a good ten minutes.

There was one other happy fan moment of note - spotting 10 and Captain Jack waiting for a bus. If you're gonna do cosplay, boy, wandering around Cardiff dressed like Jack Harkness is the way to do it. Plus there are few images more hilarious than the Doctor boarding a public bus.

Alas, after having exhausted all the outdoor sightseeing, I suddenly discovered that it was 5:30, and EVERYTHING had closed. The restaurants and bars were open, but that's of no use to a solo traveler. Also, everyone appeared to be in high school.

And so, at a loss for what else to do on a Tuesday night in Cardiff, I went to the movies. And by "went" I mean "accidentally snuck into." And by "accidentally snuck into," I really do mean "accidentally snuck into." I think they use an honor system or something? Whatever. I was on an escalator, and next thing I knew I was in a cinema, and a movie was about to start. So I sat down to watch it.

It was "Twilight."

Okay, so, I really enjoyed it! Which is to say, I really enjoyed it in the way that I didn't enjoy the Dirty Dancing musical. Here was some awfulness that you could really sink your teeth into! Fangs, rather. ::rimshot::

I'd sort of gathered from the zeitgeist of Twilight-hate that the most objectionable element was the pro-abstinence shilling, but that is so very much the least of its problems (and not at all present in the first movie). Rather, in the very established tradition of classic vampire stories (cf, Dracula), Twilight is a rape fantasy. And a stalking fantasy. That huge creeper in bio lab is not a huge creeper if he has dreamy eyebrows. Being stalked is not only okay, but desirable! As is ditching your friends, family, and life for a guy. And ignoring all warning signs, of the flashing neon variety as well as menacing folktales from your token Magic Red Man, that the guy is a huge creeper. Who watches you while you sleep. And follows you around town. Oh my god I feel dirty just thinking about it.

Twilight actually made me cry. I cried from frustration, and anger, and sadness that in 2009 I was watching this movie in a theater full of 10-year-olds and their mothers. It was the sexuality, gender, and genre issues that were tackled by Buffy, but with all the nuance, awareness, and problematizing thrown out the window. Poor, poor Joss. He tried, he really did.

After that exercise in frustration, I hung out at the hostel bar for a few hours with a sargeant in the American army who just finished a ten month tour in Afghanistan, and a street magician on his way to a magic convention in Blackpool who currently lives in Spain but migrates with the tourist season. I didn't tell them a thing about myself, because jeez did I lose on the interestingness count in this crowd.

In the morning I visited the Cardiff Castle, which despite being many centuries old was entirely gutted in the 1890s, so that was also a bit unimpressive. Mostly I liked the pen of falconry birds, who were there not to put on a show for the tourists, but to keep pigeons and squirrels out of the castle. I was particularly enthralled by the bold orange eyes of the eagle owl, though I don't know if I found him terrifying or wanted to give him a cuddle. And then I wandered through the very nice city center till my train back to London, and discovered that Cardiff has great shopping, if only you're there during daylight.


So for anyone planning a trip to Cardiff: Travel at night. Bring a friend for the bars. And dress like Captain Jack.

as Napoleon never said...

Jenny and I were having a very serious discussion about the class system in England and the USA… as relates to Bertie Wooster.

Jenny: I love that Bertie never has money problems. It just makes him so innocent and free to have relation-induced mishaps

Liz: I love that class of British people who just have income without doing anything, like the Darcys. We don't have that in America. Even the absurdly rich, their money comes from somewhere. Generally some scrappy great-grandfather who invested in trains or somesuch.

Jenny: Whereas in England, money coming from somewhere is a low-class idea.

Liz: Right.

Jenny: Money, like wine, gets better with age.

Well, that is a fine aphorism, is it not?

Liz: Did you just make that up?

Jenny: I think so

Liz: You should embroider it on something, or start using it as an aphorism and see if it gets picked up.

Jenny: You mean I should just drop it into conversations?

Liz: Yes.

Jenny: All those conversations I have about old versus new money?

Liz: No, just irrelevantly. And, introduce it with "as they say.”

Jenny: See if it gets picked up as conventional wisdom.

Liz: Or give a different citation every time! Like, “as the Good Book says, money like wine gets better with age.”

Jenny: Or "as the Bard tells us..."

And then we got a little carried away…

Liz: As we’ve seen with President Obama...

Jenny: As I learned from Sesame Street...

Liz: as my grand-pappy Old Reliable used to say...

Jenny: as the Eskimos teach us...

Liz: as can be inferred from a close reading of Durkheim...

Jenny: as it says on Mount Rushmore...

Liz: as Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and the Marquis de Sade all said at one point or another...

Jenny: as I learned on my first day at Hahvahd...

Liz: as my years in the circus taught me,

Jenny: according to the great clown himself...

Liz: as the prophet speaketh to me...

Jenny: as you yourself have noted...

Liz: as the ancient runes translate...

as is scribbled on this cocktail napkin that I'm waving in your face...

Jenny: as Dumbledore said to Harry on page 519 of the Half-Blood Prince, 12.2 lines from the top...

Liz: As Justice Brandeis noted in the fourth footnote of the Carolene decision...

Jenny: As Joan of Arc herself was about to say...

Liz: as Napoleon never said...

as was viciously mauled in the substandard translation of Hugo's Miserables...

Jenny: as Madame de Pompadour probably said, before everyone forgot why she was famous...

Liz: fanTAStic gardener.

(that will be funny after you watch Doctor Who)

as my alphabet soup spelled last night...

as Jim Marvin once said while demonstrating the proper distance between Mars and Spain...

Jenny: as it probably says in Doctor Who, but I couldn't tell you because I still haven't watched it even though I have this friend, see, who makes references to it all the time, and I think I'm going to have to watch it soon or she's going to come after me with a broadsword in my sleep, and maybe like cut off my ANKLES, or something, or possibly my entire lower half, and anyway, I think there was an aphorism in here somewhere...

Liz: as the negative infractions of the patient's pituitary gland suggest...

as it says on the manufacturer's label, which you really shouldn't have removed, really, that was a bad idea...

Jenny: as the surgeon general might warn you...

Liz: as she said....

You get the idea. And that’s right, folks - this is the duo that’s spending two weeks together in Europe. By the end of which we will either have begun speaking entirely in an incomprehensible invented language of inside jokes and Buffy references, or will have jumped off the train somewhere in Spain and run screaming in opposite directions across the plain. In the rain. Mainly.

Liz: Jenny, why are we SO AWESOME?

Jenny: I don't know, Liz, but I think we just can't help it. It is our burden to bear.

I learned stuff in college

From: Con

Date: Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 1:26 PM
Subject: Foucault and me.
To: Elizabeth

Dear Liz,

WHAT THE HELL?! Books are hard:

"In the era of post-aboutness in which 'I' is at the same time both dead and resurrected; it is here that we find society begins to question who or what is doing the 'talking'. Of course, what *is* doing the talking: that is, 'what' (or should I say watt?) the pancultural unit of the questioner's power over the questioned; for it is in asking 'What am I talking about?' that the questioner at once accuses himself of madness and compels the prostration of 'am' before the towering phallus of 'I'; thus he inverts the socially prescribed order with the syntactical seduction of questioning."
(Foucault 1980)

--


From: Elizabeth
Date: Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 1:52 PM

Subject: Re: Foucault and me.
To: Con

Here, let me parse it for you. Please read the following in the voice of the Movie Trailer Guy.


In the era of post-aboutness...

When 'I' is both dead and resurrected....

Society begins to ask: 'who is doing the 'talking'?

But is the question who... or WHAT.

[a light bulb sputters and dies]
[quick flash of a brightly lit interrogation room]
[close up of suspect's face, bruised and battered]

One man's question...

[the Questioner leaning over the suspect]
QUESTIONER: What am I talking about?!

One man's quest...

[the Questioner slumped against a wall, exhausted, with a female hand slinking over his shoulder]

Will lead him to the brink of madness...

[the Questioner locking himself into a straight jacket]
[in a padded room, the Questioner throws himself at the walls]
[the Suspect, manically, grins at the camera]

And through the seduction of questioning...

[against a cement wall, the Questioner violently kisses a woman in a red dress]

Begins the inversion of the socially prescribed order...

[dozens of identical prisoners march in step through a normal suburban street]
[close up on one of the prisoners - it is the Questioner]

To the compelling prostration....

[the rows of prisoners fall to their knees]
[the Questioner lies prostrate, but lifts his head]
[he sees before him an enormous, shining, dominating Letter I ]

[music: Also Sprach Zarathustra]

At the towering phallus of I.

[close-up on an eyeball. it blinks. when the lid re-opens, the eye is bloodied]

Text on screen:
THE TOWERING PHALLUS OF I
June 2009

Brought to you by the letter I and the number i.

RENT - A Tribute

Yesterday marked the last performance of the original production of RENT.

Cue a plethora of headlines – 948,600 minutes of RENT; twelve seasons of love; the RENT is past due, taking out a new lease on the Nederlander; RENT can't pay the… well you know.

Like many of you, I adored RENT. And then I couldn't stand it. And then I learned to love it again. I memorized the La Vie Boheme litany when I had no idea who Sontag and Sondheim were, let alone Antonioni, Bertolluci, Kurosawa. (Bertolluci is the one with the free salad and breadsticks at lunch, right?) I haven't even listened to the soundtrack in years – don't need to, it's all still in my head, permanently imprinted with other unnecessary but irremovable information like X-Files episode titles and the first 50 places of pi.

There were other generation-defining rock musicals before RENT, and have been others since, but this one is ours. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to say our goodbyes.

For people of a certain age and inclination, the original Broadway cast album of RENT is indelibly wound up in the memories of middle school (or, if living more than an hour from Manhattan, high school). You knew every word of the score – five miso soup, four seaweed salad, three soy burger, two tofu dog platter, and a partridge in a pear tree. You filled bus trips with obnoxiously loud RENT shout-a-longs. The lyrics of No Day But Today adorned your agenda book, your cargo bag, your invitation to that one kid's Bar Mitzvah, and your profile for your first AOL screenname (MiMiLuv98 or ~RENT525600~). You probably didn't stand in line overnight to snag $20 front row seats on a biweekly basis, but that one girl from your high school did, and you would have joined her if you were cool enough and your parents allowed it.

And in the manner of adolescent fads, about a year after you discovered RENT you moved on, to Les Miz and Phantom and whatever show your school was doing that year, or perhaps to Aerosmith and 98 Degrees and the other favorites of the Z100 Morning Zoo, leaving RENT behind for the next class of 8th graders to discover.

Why did we love RENT so much? Surely we didn't identify with the characters. We were middle class white kids from the suburbs. They were, variably, HIV-positive queer minority druggies – but let's not forget that our p.o.v. character, Mark, was a straight Jewish boy from Scarsdale. They fought back against the encroaching front lines of East Village gentrification – we were just barely old enough to remember the death throes of old Times Square, to remember navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of 42nd street, the beggars and the garbage heaps.

The show itself was an instant period piece, dated the minute Larson set down his pen. The characters are hastily drawn – a stripper with a heart of gold, a drag queen with a heart of gold, a filmmaker with a heart of ice. The tacked-on happy ending is inauthentic and maudlin. A cynic could even trace the hype to the bottled lightning that accompanies a sudden and tragic death right before opening (see The Dark Knight, broken box office records of).

But it was also the first mainstream musical with queer principals that wasn't about queerness. Everyone wanted to do Take Me or Leave Me in the talent show with their best friend, and was surprised when the school objected because it's about lesbians. The characters may have been drag queens and coke fiends and performance artists, but all that meant was that they were outcasts, just like we were (what 8th grader isn't an outcast in some way?). And RENT is above all about outcasts building their own communities. About being an us, for once, instead of a them.

I don't think 7th graders are listening to RENT any more, not the way we did, but there are a number of other shows competing for their attention – courting those repeat audiences with rock songs and themes of social stigma and acceptance. Certainly Wicked, highly enjoyable if rather bloated, occupies the old RENT niche these days, particularly among sullen-faced adolescent girls who are not especially populer(lar). Spring Awakening draws fans with its excellent score and attractive production, though I shudder at the Very Special Episode book and the lyrics resembling the emo poetry of a Wicked fan. High School Musical likely belongs here as well, but because I still haven't seen it (I know, I know), you'll have to insert your own snarky dismissal here. Other current contenders include Legally Blonde, whose composer might get it right on his next try, and the upcoming Thirteen, about bar mitzvahs and indulging Jason Robert Brown's semi-pedophilia.

But I can judge these shows only as shows, and not as the catalysts of future middle school nostalgia – for me, that role was filled years ago.

The memory of RENT belongs to all of us former RENTheads, diverged as our paths and tastes may now be. We share the ghosts of lyrics half-remembered from another life, the astonishment at recit spoken as dialogue in the movie, the bond of singalongs and basement productions past. This family tree's got deep roots, and a little thing like a closing production can't touch them. We don't rent emotion – we own it.

Viva la vie boheme.