From the Home Front

Yesterday afternoon, my Ex finally put up drywall over the hole which has been in my wall since the repair of the flood leak (more than a year). Today he's going to putty around the edges. There is no longer gaping hole in my bedroom wall!

However, two nights ago, he sneaked up on our daughter as she stood on the stool to pull the cord to turn out the light over the bathroom sink. She screamed, jerked back -- still holding the cord -- and pulled the light fixture out of the wall. The frosted glass sleeve fell to the floor and shattered. The naked bulbs in the base still worked, but none of us liked the fact that they were hanging out of the wall.

So yesterday morning I bought a new light fixture, and Peter, a friend of the family, volunteered to install it for me. All was going well, until he realized that the circuit wasn't connected to the light switch on the wall -- and this fixture didn't have a pull cord to turn it off and on.

Ooops.

So he reinstalled the original base fixture, setting it back into the wall. And then he repaired the circuit in the main light, which has been out of order since the upstairs bathroom flood of a couple of months ago.

During this entire operation, the main circuit breaker was off. During the last stages of the repair, I was sitting in my living room conversing with another mutual friend. The lights were off, but enough light came through the window that it didn't matter. I took them both out to dinner, and when we came back it was beginning to get dark.

That's when we discovered that although the light in the bathroom now worked, I no longer had power in my living room or my yellow room -- the latter also being the place where the new on-demand hot water heater plugs into the wall.

Ooops.

Peter wanted to fix it, but wasn't sure how. It was also around 9pm by this time, and the last thing I wanted was for him to be trying to fix the new problem while he was tired and without good light to see by.

A household bonfire party originally scheduled for last night had been cancelled due to numerous declines and threatening inclement weather, but it turned out to be nice so we went ahead and threw wood on the pit and torched it. Very late, after attending a Seder put on by mutual friends, another good friend, Bill, came down, and we stayed up until well after 2am. During this time, he volunteered to come back late this afternoon and fix the electrical problem.

I hope he can.

But at least there is no standing water in my house.

Wicked Confession

I fell in love with the music of the musical Wicked before I had read the book. I had, in fact, picked up the book several times over the years and glanced through it, but nothing on the pages ever attracted me. When I heard the music to the Broadway show, I was bowled over. The emotion, the intriguing suggestions about the storyline, the power of the voices, were all overwhelming. I looked up some Wicked sites online and found a couple of synopses, and I liked what I read there.

So a couple of weeks ago, I ordered a used copy of the book from Amazon.
Three days ago, I finished reading it.

I didn't like it.

Thinking about it now, I think it's a similar reaction to the one I have to The Mists of Avalon: I don't really like any of the characters, I don't like the way the author has tried to make the world of the story more realistic by gutting it of beauty and magic (I do like a couple of more realistic versions of the Camelot story, and other legends, but not Mists. I am not so intrigued by his concept (which is much like the concept of Mists) that it makes the shortcomings of the plot and characters easier to take. But mostly it's an issue of not liking the characters, not being engaged or moved by them.

The written Elphaba does nothing for me. She is a person of strong feelings, but small effectiveness. She seems always blown by the winds, never really standing on her own. She never seemed to have any real power, personal or magical. I saw no reason for anyone in Oz to fear her or wish her dead. Her relationship with Glinda is under-written. I never really believed that there was a strong connection between them. It was stated a couple of times, but I didn't believe the way Maguire wrote it. She noticed the abuse of the Animals, but never seemed to demonstrate any particular insight beyond that. She didn't seem all that perceptive. In short, I never saw this Elphaba as a character who would ever express the feelings or ideas in such songs as "Defying Gravity" or "For Good."

The Wicked Witch of the West is a formidable character. She is, as someone else has observed, the ur-Witch of the American psyche. When we think "witch," most of us usually think of some varation on Margaret Hamilton in green make-up, shapeless black dress, and conical hat. Whatever the limitations of her magic, she has presence, and its easy to believe in her power, even if we don't get any really dramatic examples of it.

Maguire would have us believe that the Wicked Witch's "wickedness" is mostly bad press. I'd be willing to buy that if he had shown me an Elphaba capable of arousing more intense feelings in people. Or who made bigger, more dramatic mistakes that resulted in more people having grounds to hate and fear her, despite her good intentions.

I'll be interested in hearing from those of you who do like the book.

And I invite everyone to stop by my favorite place for an alternate look at the Wicked Witch of the West: http://www.geocities.com/almira_g/Almira.html