Eccentric Flower:199904/two patricks two shrews
From Eccentric Flower
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april tenth two patricks, two shrews This is the second postcard in three hours after a four-day hiatus, so if you asked Heliotrope to hand you the latest, you should be aware that there are other new words to read besides these. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, the "not if they're white" comment in the previous postcard was sarcasm, meant to make fun of the way the industrialized nations collectively sat back and did nothing while the Hutus and Tutsis tried their best to destroy each other and a swath of central Africa. I forget that you have to be careful with making fun of racists; the whole dialogue is so overheated that at least one person will always suspect you of being racist yourself. And as an ex-Southerner I'm already touchy about kneejerk accusations of racism. Goodness, that was a tense paragraph. Let's see what else we've got in the news bin, quickly. The other reason I didn't write for a while was that I had an "I hate my body" fit again on Thursday and decided not to write about it until I sorted out what was prompting it. Lo, by the next day I was cheerful and bouncy again. Getting slightly spruced up to meet Patrick for lunch helped. (Yes, Patrick, I know I didn't seem spruced up to you, but I was clean-shaven and had my contacts in, two things which improve my overall Confidence Factor by at least fifty percent.) Patrick, of course, was quite charming, and we both left the table assured that at least one other online journaller was a real live human - although I'm sure I was so effusive that he'll never want to see me again; I talked his ears off. It's just me being starved for conversation again. After that, I went to dinner with Marc and Nonelvis, who both showed great restraint in not asking me how lunch had gone! But back to the fit - without going into details about what I think is wrong with my body, some of which is justified and some which isn't, I have uncovered the root problem: I am, at heart, a very sexual person - one might even say that I'm too much so. I think that life is a big sensory and hedonistic fun ride at least half the time, and I try to maximize that whenever possible. It seems unfair to me that I should be so sexual and not be the least bit sexy - that it doesn't show on the outside - you see what I mean? Anyway. I have more writing to do, so I had better go do it. I hope to have some other pieces up before the weekend is out, including a new Clio. (I was crushed, by the by, to find out that it's properly pronounced CLY-o. Ick! I am going to continue pronouncing it as if it's Cleo, at least until the Muse tells me otherwise. The other pronunciation is just too horrid to contemplate.) Oh, by the by, we saw Ten Things I Hate About You tonight. I was reluctant to see it because half the critics said it was insipid and the other half said it was fabulous. Go see it. It's fabulous. In fact, I concluded while driving home, I may even like it better than The Taming of the Shrew. Sacrilege! No, really - and I'll explain why. The Shakespeare version bothered me because it was so sexist. The message at the end of that play is that the right penis will get any woman to forget her independent ideals. To hell with that! Here, the Katharina character is not compromised in the same way. In fact, no one is quite what they seem. Bianca, despite her initial presentation, is not a ditz. Their father is not really a tyrant. The Petruchio character (Patrick - no relation to the Patrick above) is neither a buffoon nor a con man. Everyone develops, and that development alone makes it more interesting than the Shakespeare to me. Sorry. Since all of Shakespeare's plots are known by heart these days, I mostly see Shakespeare comedies to see how the characterizations are handled - but the Shrew has never had much of that to recommend it, only plot. Here they kept the plot and improved the characters, which was the correct thing to do. Furthermore, the explanation for why Bianca can't date until Kat does is made completely, utterly plausible by deft handling of the father character. Those scenes alone would make the movie by themselves. Oh, and helps that the Patrick character is so flat-out likable! (Tasty-looking, too.) Kat is likable too, which is less of a limitation than you think. At first we cheer for her - despite her nastiness - because she is pitting it against the teen-shallow culture some of us love to hate. We get drawn into her experiences. When she finally falls for Patrick, we are ready too, we want her to. Contrast that to most of the Shrew performances I've seen, where I wanted Katharina to slap his face and remain unrepentant to the end, to slam the door and walk out like Nora.
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