litlover12

. . . but how I wish I could go to this!

Comment on this post and I will choose six interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean/why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.

I got this from charleygirl a couple weeks ago, and am just now getting around to it. And I still have yet another meme I'm supposed to do, but I can't remember who gave it to me. I am the world's worst at keeping track of memes. But anyway, now for this one! Here are my interests that she chose.

( Read more... )

Swiped this from a Michael Crawford Facebook fan group. Wouldn't it be a trip if something like this came up on your screen?

Today is officially Phantom's 25th anniversary. I am wearing my Phantom T-shirt, and my Phantom bracelet, and of course I listened to the original cast album in the car this morning. Oh, and I'm using my lovely Phantom 25th anniversary icon (thank you, charleygirl!).

What can I say? When I celebrate, I like to go big!

1. Comment -- intelligently or in a nonsensical fashion, requesting to play. General comments are welcome too!
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Post the names of five fictional characters whose names begin with that letter, and your thoughts on each. The characters can be from books, movies, or TV shows.

2theriver2pray gave me the letter E.

( Enter here . . . )

New song meme from gioiello_icons :

Instructions:
1. write down every letter of your name.
2. then type a song that pops up in your mind in each letter of your name as the first letter.
count the letters of your name, and tag that many people.

G -- "Gettin' You Home," Chris Young  
I -- "I Wanna Talk about Me," Toby Keith
N -- "Need You Now," Lady Antebellum
A -- "All I Ask of You" from The Phantom of the Opera

Tagging mosinging1986 , valancy_s , tempestsarekind , and middlegirl . (And anyone else who wants to do it!)

This post is for Make Believe, Nina's Peter Pan blog event over at Wickfield. (Among the many things I love about Wickfield: There's a Peter Pan event at a blog named after a Dickens character with a Pocahontas banner on top. That's what I call being well-rounded! :-) )

Can a humorist and a horror writer come up with a children's book series about Peter Pan? Apparently, yes, because that's exactly what Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have done with their Peter and the Starcatchers series. I happen to own the second book in the series, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, solely because as a Barry fan, I attended one of his booksignings some time ago, and needed to buy a book for him to sign. But I hadn't got around to reading it until, in honor of Nina's event, I decided to pull it off the shelf and take a look. Despite not having read the first book, I was able to catch up pretty well with what was going on.

What Barry and Pearson have done here is to create a whole new mythology for Peter. You've got the same character, with some of the same supporting players (Tinkerbell, Hook, the crocodile, and others), but a different explanation of where he came from, how he got his power of flight and agelessness, how he got to the island, and so forth. And here he's going on adventures with two children named Molly Aster and George Darling . . . and if you guessed that these are the future parents of Wendy, Michael, and John, you're a good guesser! There's also an interesting twist on the old disappearing-shadow plot point (hence the title).

If I may use a Phantom of the Opera analogy -- and I must apologize to Nina here because she's not a Phantom fan, but this is the best analogy I could think of! -- the Peter of this series is something like the Kopit/Yeston Phantom. The character starts off in the same situation as in the original Leroux story -- living under the Opera House and falling for the young soprano whom he's training -- and yet his background is completely different, and the story takes him to some very different places. (Figuratively speaking. I don't mean he travels to Coney Island, ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER. AHEM.) So with Peter in this series.

I found the story a quick and enjoyable read. Had I read the original Barrie novel, I might not have liked it as much. But I can't say that for certain -- I do like the Kopit/Yeston Phantom pretty well, after all. When I was little, I used to make up stories for myself, and sometimes would end up with several different versions of the same story. Maybe that's why I don't always mind now when I encounter numerous mythologies for the same character!

Anyway, in this story there were brave heroes and heroines, sinister villains, acts of derring-do, mysterious clues to decipher, a good dollop of humor -- all the things that go into a fun fantasy/adventure. There's also a tragic death or two, so this isn't one of those children's books where the stakes aren't very high. Sometimes I prefer the kind where the stakes aren't very high, but death here was handled as well and as respectfully as could be expected, I think.

I had a bit of fun of my own trying to figure out where Dave Barry's voice came through, not a particularly easy task as I've never read any other Ridley Pearson books and don't know what his voice sounds like. And I don't know much about their writing process on this one, and the setting and tone here are quite a departure from Dave's usual fare. But if I know my Barry, and I think I do, the drunk that Peter runs into in an alley ("he tried another swig from the bottle, which, to his mild surprise and considerable disappointment, remained empty") and the pigeon who can't say anything but "Food? Food? Food?" to Tink, are all his.

Oh, and there's a cameo by J.M. Barrie. So that's pretty cool.

And it's a beauty!



It's Meryl Davis and Charlie White's free dance to Phantom of the Opera. And it looks gorgeous on my laptop screen -- sometimes I shove all the windows out of the way just to savor it. :-) A million thanks to wunderkind_lucy for making it for me!