I'll never, ever be able to express how fantastically awesome Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy is. I'd seen it years ago (the X-rated version) and recently got the R-rated (think "Skinemax"), which we finally got to watch last night. It's so ridiculously, amazingly funny.
Humpty Dumpty can't get it up until Alice comes along to help. There's a whole song-and-dance sequence about getting his "ding-a-ling up". It includes sing-a-long bouncing dots.
The 9 7/8 on the Mad Hatter's hat ain't his hat size.
This Red Queen might be the best one ever. "Give me her head!" takes on a whole new meaning.
It's definitely for adults. It's not for the faint of heart or anyone who will be offended by the considerable sexual license taken with Lewis Carroll's original stories. It was produced in 1976 by Bill Osco, who produced some of the first mainstream adult films, including Flesh Gordon. The music was actually done by Peter Matz, who was nominated for an Oscar for 1976's Funny Lady. Matz also won several Emmy awards, including music direction for The Carol Burnett Show.
It's a crazy, crazy little addition to the Alice universe. Music, sex, and Alice: what's not to love??
If you've been down the rabbit hole with me before, you know I love Alice. Quite often I will go back to the Lewis Carroll stories, because that is, of course, the origin of all things Alice. But it's the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland (2010) that is my true Alice inspiration. I know Carroll fans probably hate that, but I think it's a really spectacular film and an equally wonderful story. Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton did a masterful job of combining the two Carroll works,Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and finding the best parts to bring forward in an updated journey.
One of my favorite relationships in this version is between Alice and the Hatter, played by Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp. Alice is a burgeoning woman, and Hatter has been waiting for her to return to Underland for years. He recognizes her as the right Alice upon first sight, almost instinctively, when no one else seems to believe it, including Alice herself.
Adventure begins immediately for Alice and Hatter at the tea party. Stayne the Knave of Hearts shows up looking for the Alice rumored to have returned to Underland. Hatter does his best to protect her--hiding her shrunkenness in a teapot, making her a new dress, and transporting her in his beloved hat. Early in their travels together, Hatter reveals to Alice the reason he hates the Red Queen so much, how she destroyed his village and murdered his entire family. When he's captured and taken to the Red Queen's fortress, Alice is determined to rescue her friend.
Alice infiltrates the castle, posing as the overgrown, large girl Um from Umbridge, and comes face-to-face with a maddened Hatter, bruised and beaten and shackled and without his own hat. He begins to spiral into a bit of madness while talking to the Queen and is risking his own head. Alice sees the difficulty and is able to snap him back to reality with the drop of a word. (Okay, so it's a fake sneeze of "HATTER!")
Hatter is taken away to a work room, to begin creating hats for the Red Queen's enormous head, and Alice returns to the castle garden to find his beloved lost hat. Whatever it took to save the Hatter, she'd have his hat waiting for him at the end. She finds Hatter and returns the bedraggled top hat to its rightful head. Again, he has a moment of madness and Alice snaps him back to reality before leaving to execute her plan of rescue:
"We'll go to the White Queen together," she said, taking his other hand. They looked into each other's eyes for a long moment, and Alice found herself wishing she weren't quite so absurdly large.
The Hatter grinned ruefully, evidently having the same thought. "Why is it you're always too small or too tall?" he asked.
Eventually Hatter escapes captivity and meets up with Alice again at the castle of the White Queen:
Alice's eyes went straight to the Hatter. His clothes were bright and happy, reflecting the delight on his face. She ran up and threw her arms around him. "I'm so happy to see you!" she cried. "I thought they were going to--"
"So did I!" he interrupted her enthusiastically. "But they didn't." His voice started to speed up again, and he clutched her hands as if he might never let go. "And no, here I am...still in one piece...and I'm rather glad about that now that I'm seeing you again...I would have regretted not seeing you again...especially now that you're you and the proper size...and it's a good size...it's a great size...it's a right-proper Alice size..."
"Hatter," Alice said kindly. He snapped back into the moment.
"Size, Fez...I'm fine," he said, blinking strange eyes at her. And it was true, he was fine, even though Alice had been afraid she'd never seen him again. She felt too full of happiness to say what she really wanted to.
"Where's your hat?" she asked. She curiously touched his curly red hair.
[The Cheshire Cat returns the hat.]
As the Hatter replaced it in its rightful place on his head, he glanced at Alice again, and they shared a smile that said more than any words could have.
Of course Alice goes on to slay the Jabberwocky--you know, the metaphor for her own insecurities and self-achievement. The Red Queen is defeated and banished to the desert with Stayne. Hatter is ecstatic and breaks into song and dance. By this time, Alice remembers her original journeys to Underland/Wonderland, and recognizes that she has really been in this amazing place, not dreaming at all. She is given a vial of Jabberwocky blood, what she would need to return home.
Alice lifted the vial, but stopped as the Hatter put his hand on hers.
"You could stay," he said, his gaze warm and full of promise.
"What an idea," Alice said softly. "A crazy, mad, wonderful idea." She looked around at all the strange and wonderful beings she'd met in this wonderfully strange place. She imagined what it would be like to stay--to talk to animals every day, to ride the Bandersnatch and explore Underland, to dance the Futterwacken with the Hatter whenever she chose.
She explains that she has to return to her home, that she has things to do. She promises to never forget Hatter and to return. She drinks from the vial and is back in the meadow outside the garden party she originally fled.
That's all sweet and wonderful. But then she approaches the garden party to decline everyone's offers of how her life should be. Her adventures in Underland were gone from her memory, but the self-confidence remained.
WTF?! Seriously?
The thing about this Alice and Hatter story is that they could love each other. Personally, I think Hatter does love Alice, just a little bit, and that Alice knows she could probably love him, too, if her circumstances were different. It's something that happens quickly because they interact in these intensely intimate situations. It's something that happens because they just click and find an unexpected connection with each other.
I get why Alice would choose to go back to her real life. Living in Underland would make just about anyone a little nuts from time to time. And, okay, she has her family and her aspirations to attend to. It's the promise of returning, of remembering, that makes it okay that she leaves Hatter.
And then the bitch forgets anyway? Come on!
I know, at the end, she's sailing and Absolem appears to her. She recognizes him, and she's this amazing, confident thing who's off to conquer the world with the full support of her family and business associates. But what about Hatter?
We don't know if Alice goes back to Underland. I'm sure there will likely be a sequel at some point, so maybe we'll know how this plays out. Alice will be a little more wizened, and maybe Hatter will be a little less mad, now that he's had time to get his head on straight.
But what if Alice did go back and forth, regularly, between her world and Underland? What would that do to Hatter?
It would have to be incredibly difficult to try to go about your dailiness and constantly have the tease of that potential love weaving its way in and out of the fabric of your life. Maybe Hatter goes back to making beautiful, exquisite, ornamental hats--expressing himself through his art--and then suddenly Alice appears, in all of her muchness. I imagine it would be a bit upending to have her constantly coming and going, a distraction no matter how enjoyable at the time. Would he stop everything to give her his full attention? Probably. But then what, when she goes back to her real life?
You know what? He'd probably go a little mad. And she probably doesn't even realize it, because apparently she's forgetting everything about her time in Underland, except that it makes her feel strong and confident.
I don't know that I like this, the more I think about it. I want Alice to remember, to fully recognize the bittersweetness of the choice she made. It's okay that she goes on to explore her world and herself, really, but I'd like to know that she's cognizant of the fact that her decision had this impact on Hatter. That way, if she goes back to Underland and sees him again, she does so fully aware of how that will affect him and act accordingly. She doesn't need to turn his word upside down before she leaves again. They should be perfectly capable of sharing a cup of tea and a walk through the hedge maze without her having to snap him back to reality. They should be able to Futterwacken wildly together and smile and be done when the music ends.
So I hope that, with a little time apart, Alice will drop back into Underland and seek out her friend. And I hope Hatter will have had some rest and spent some time finishing his hats. I bet he'll have made a few just for Alice, and I hope she takes the time to try them on and enjoy them. Because, after all, they were made out of love.
My very favorite movie, ever, is John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 masterpiece Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It's a really spectacular film about soul-searching and pain and love and identity. The main character is a slightly-but-justifiably crazy blonde with an overwhelming affinity for glitter and rock 'n roll. You can't get much muchier than that! How could I not love her?
I started thinking about this movie toward the end of Iceapalooza 2011. It's not kid-appropriate, so I had to wait until they weren't around to watch it for the hundred-dozenth time. Last night, in a fit of self-indulgent moroseness, I curled up on the couch to get my glam and drag on.
The first thing I'm always struck by is how gorgeous the film is; it is deliciously beautiful, cinemagraphically, even in its grittiest moments. It's visually clever in its economy of field; sets are often small and cramped, and Mitchell is astonishingly efficient as using the small areas to their fullest effect. (Hedwig's play area in the oven in East Berlin is my favorite.)
The second thing that always blows me away is Mitchell's performance as Hedwig. It's a character he created originally for the stage play of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, then translated it to screen as writer, director, and lead actor. He is remarkably talented as both actor and singer in the film, and his performance garnered a 2001 Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor. (He also won a Best Director award at Sundance, along with numerous other accolades.) I remember watching the Golden Globes that year, which I rarely do, and thinking, "Wow! That's fantastic that such a performance got the nomination, but there's no way in Hell he'll win." I was right, of course.
The third thing that always kicks my ass is the music. The music and lyrics were written by Stephen Trask after he and Mitchell met quite by accident on a plane. Trask received an Obie award for the play, as well as a Grammy nomination for the film. For the production of the film, the musicians prerecorded the music for the songs and synced along during filming. Vocals, however, were done almost entirely live on set, to create a true feel of live performance. I can listen to this soundtrack over and over and still get something new from it every time.
As so commonly happens these days, I'm always on the search for Alice-y things to write about. Watching the movie again, I was struck by how much Hedwig is like Alice. So I started looking for other similarities between the two stories. Turns out, there's a lot.
The story that's told in Hedwig doesn't unfold chronologically. A lot of what the audience sees happens somewhat in flashback, as Hedwig is telling her story during her performances. For the purposes of comparison, I'm breaking it down into a neater timeline. (I still suggest you go watch the movie. Duh!)
[The best way to view Hedwig and the Angry Inch is to watch the movie, about 90 minutes, then watch the documentary "Whether You Like It or Not: the Story of Hedwig", then watch the movie again. It's amazing to see what they did with a $6,000,000 budget and some divine inspiration.]
SPOILER ALERT!
Hedwig is born Hansel Schmidt in pre-Wall Germany. He's the "slip of a girly boy" son of an American GI and an overbearing German mother, who flees to East Berlin as the Wall goes up, because, she says, it's better to be forever powerless than to be corrupted by your own power. Hansel grows up as flamboyantly as possible in this dark, austere environment.
"Our apartment was so small, that mother made me play in the oven. Late at night I would listen to the voices of the American masters, Tony Tennille, Debby Boone, Anne Murray who was actually a Canadian working in the American idiom. And then there were the crypto-homo rockers: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie who was actually an idiom working in America and Canada. These artists, they left as deep an impression on me as that oven rack did on my face. To be an American in muskrat love, soft as an easy chair not even the chair, I am I said, have I never been mellow? And the colored girls sing... doo do doo do doo do doo... but never with the melody. How could I do it better than Tony or Lou... HEY BOY, TAKE A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE!"
At the ripe age of 26, Hansel is sunbathing nude, surrounded by barbed wire and debris, when Sergeant Luther Robinson, stumbles upon Hansel and tells him that he's so pretty he must be a girl. Sergeant Luther plies Hansel with Gummy Bears, the brightly-colored, sweeter versions of the German Gummi Bears, then with other candy. They fall in love, and Luther wants to marry Hansel. To be able to get him out of East Germany, Hansel will have to prove he's a woman. Luther and Hansel's mom, Hedwig, hatch a plan to get a sex-change operation for Hansel, then to give the new her Hedwig's passport. "To be free," Mom-Hedwig says, "one must give up a part of oneself."
The operation goes horribly wrong. Hedwig's incision closes up, and she's left with the angry inch. Luther takes her to Junction City, Kansas, where he leaves her for another man on their first anniversary. Hedwig takes on odd jobs ("mostly the jobs we call blow") and babysitting to make ends meet.
While babysitting the infant son of a General from the nearby Army base, she meets the General's 17-year-old son, Tommy Speck. Tommy is instantly drawn to Hedwig and goes to see her perform at a local shop with her band, comprised entirely of Korean-born Army wives. Tommy and Hedwig begin a mostly one-sided sexual affair, but they also begin writing songs together for Tommy's burgeoning music career. Hedwig gives Tommy his new identity of Tommy Gnosis. Just as Tommy is finally beginning to accept the reality of what Hedwig is, he panics and leaves her. He goes on to become an internationally famous rock star, performing the songs Hedwig wrote.
Hedwig gets a new band, the Angry Inch, made up of Eastern European immigrants. She keeps all of their passports to keep them from leaving her. At some point she marries Yitzhak, played by Miriam Shore. (The juxtaposition of Shore soprano harmonies with Mitchell's tenor melodies is outstanding.) Yitzhak wants to be a woman, wants to be Hedwig in a lot of ways. He seems to love Hedwig even though he's scared of her, but he becomes more and more bitter about their relationship as the film progresses. He auditions for the part of Angel in a cruise ship performance of Rent, but Hedwig tears up his passport when he confronts her and tries to leave.
Hedwig hires a new manager, Phyllis Stein (Andrea Martin), and goes on a tour that shadows that of Tommy Gnosis. While Tommy plays huge arenas, Hedwig and the Angry Inch play at the neighboring Bilgewater's, a chain of family restaurants whose patrons are mostly offended and disgusted by Hedwig's show. She does develop a small following of loyal fans who surround her, wearing their own giant, yellow foam hair that mimics Hedwig's signature blond wig.
Hedwig has simultaneously filed a lawsuit against Tommy for stealing her songs. She tries to get close to Tommy ("You know how much I don't like that word, stalking"), to try to force him into admitting he stole her work. She becomes more and more irrational and bitter as her journey unfolds. One night, she reverts to working as a prostitute, and she is unexpectedly picked up in a limo by Tommy Gnosis. He eventually relents and apologizes for stealing her songs, which it turns out he never understood anyway. They argue and are in a car accident. The story becomes public, and the tables are turned.
Hedwig does her last real show, at the Times Square Bilgewater's, and goes fucking nuts. All the pressure and the drama and the strife culminate in this intense climactic performance where she violently rips off her drag while the crowd and the band are agape.
There's a sudden cut to an all-white room, everyone dressed in white, where Hedwig sings "Midnight Radio", a song of celebration of "all the misfits and the losers" of the world who are brought together by music through their own darknesses. Hedwig gives Yitzhak her wig, encouraging Yitzhak to go and be his dream. In the final moments, Hedwig is brought face-to-face with Tommy, alone on a dark stage, singing his version of "Wicked Little Town". Hedwig is now more Hansel in smeared make-up, having lost all of the female trappings. Hansel/Hedwig walks naked down a dark alley into the night. FADE OUT.
Okay, so back to this Alice analogy. We're working from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, being the original work from which all other Alices derive. The comparisons of Hedwig to Alice don't follow exactly in chronological order, either, between the movie and the book, so bear with me.
Hansel in East Berlin is a young Alice, playing in a world that bores her. He/she is distracted by the White Rabbit (Sergeant Luther) and follows him down the rabbit hole that is the crazy process of the sex change operation. Hansel is brave and reluctant about being with Luther, i.e. growing and shrinking, as he takes the brightly-colored Gummy Bears and the American candy bars. It's a total EAT ME/DRINK ME moment.
Hansel's mother Hedwig is the Mouse that Alice first encounters after she falls to the bottom of the hole. Alice has already been battling with the beginnings of the identity crisis, shrinking and growing to fit her round peg through the square door hole. She is huge and cries great, giant tears, then shrinks and is trapped in the pool.
"O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!" [snip] The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.
The elder Hedwig responds similarly to Hansel. She's never understood her son and why he can't just assimilate into the East German culture and relinquish his power to the forces that are greater than he. She seems to recognize that Hansel is drowning and helps push him to the dry banks, i.e. across the Wall to America.
The bands, both the one comprised of the Korean wives and the Angry Inch, are the birds on the bank and the other random, talking animals in the story. Their actions may have some momentary significance, but they mostly pass through the time as extraneous decoration to Hedwig's journey. She may interact with them, but it's often more to show dimensions of Hedwig than it is to illustrate anything about the musician. Much like the Dodo, the Dormouse, the Eaglet, etc.
Sergeant Luther (the White Rabbit) takes Hedwig (Alice) to Junction City, Kansas, and abandons her a year later in a trailer park. The trailer park is one of my favorite analogies in this whole comparison. I debated whether it was like the tea party (which is really Bilgewater's in all of its incarnations) or maybe the Queen of Hearts' croquet ground. But no! There's a not-so-well remembered scene in Alice where the white rabbit goes looking for the Duchess' gloves. He sees Alice and mistakes her for his maid servant, Mary Ann, and sends her into the house to get the gloves. She goes inside, but she starts to grow and gets so big that she's stuck in the house. A crowd outside the house throws rocks at her, which turn into little cakes that Alice eats and shrinks back to her normal size.
The trailer is the White Rabbit/Luther's house. Luther mistakes Hansel for a woman originally, and then still expects Hedwig to be a woman, even though the operation was botched. Hedwig gets stuck inside, trapped under the weight of her situation and her own identity. One of the best scenes in Hedwig happens here, the "Wig in a Box" performance. She sings about how she gets sad, not fitting in, and puts on different wigs to be different selves. The confident energy becomes so overwhelming that the sides of the trailer burst open to let her muchness out into the night.
Yitzhak is the Hatter. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Hatter explains to Alice that he and the March Hare are always stuck in time, having tea, because it's how he escapes decapitation by the Queen of Hearts for singing. Yitzhak often tries to sing his own song, in his own way, and is silenced by Hedwig. He is perpetually stuck in the maddening role of Hedwig's emotional punching bag. He is always seen wearing a bandana or a wig, never a bare head.
Phyllis Stein is the Cheshire Cat. She appears kind of randomly to tease and advise Hedwig. There's actually a deleted scene in which Phyllis has a cell phone switch installed into the roof of her mouth. To make her phone work, she has to click her tongue over and over. It's very reminiscent of the grin.
Hedwig's public crusade and attack against Tommy's plagiarism is very much like the trial in the King's court. The jury/public knows really very little about the actual facts and can only make judgments based on the absurdities they glimpse from time to time. There's a very large public gathering in the final Bilgewater's scene, which erupts into utter chaos, just like the Knave's trial.
Tommy Gnosis is certainly the Knave of Hearts. The Knave is put on trial for stealing the tarts. Tommy is accused of stealing Hedwig's tarts: her songs. Like the Knave, Tommy never really has a good explanation for what happens.
That covers most of the major characters, except my favorite: the Blue Caterpillar. Because I love the name Absolem that Tim Burton later gives the Caterpillar, I'm sticking with that for now. Absolem is a tiny, wiggling thing that obscures Alice's vision with his smoke screen. He taunts her and teases her, then tries to lead her toward the truth of her own identity. He builds and destroys her confidence and challenges her sexuality with his own phallic little body.
Do you get where I'm going with this??
Absolem, the Blue Caterpillar, is the Angry Inch. Not the band. The actual "one inch mound of flesh".
Hedwig is taunted and driven by the Inch, much as Alice is by Absolem. Both the Inch and Absolem control the relationship until the very end, when Hedwig and Alice respectively revolt against the madness surrounding them and wake from the crazy dreams they've been in.
And Hedwig certainly does wake. She becomes Hansel, reverting almost to his original form and state, though newly confident if unsteady.
Honestly, I was surprised by how many comparisons could be made between the two stories. Alice has been altered and changed and derived from so many times, that it's surprising when I see a new version of her. I have no idea if John Cameron Mitchell had any intention of having such parallels to Lewis Carroll. (I have searched online and found no reference to it anywhere.) Perhaps it works because Alice is so archetypical of the battle of the inner self with the outer perceptions.
No matter, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a masterful telling of one girl's struggle to really find herself in the midst of chaos and confusion and misunderstanding, all set to a kick-ass soundtrack. It's something every girl can relate to, as well as a few men I know. The added glittery glam and fanciness just make it that much better.
I had a conversation a few days ago with a great friend about my ass. Specifically, about how I hate my ass, along with a lot of other parts of my body. Too much of it, absolutely. I know in my head that I have battled hormonal imbalance and metabolic issues for years, that Hashimoto's thyroiditis did a number on me for nearly six years before it was gotten under control, and that I spent the summer of 2010 steroided-up and barely moving because of two ruptured lumbar discs.
Finally, by the first of October, I'd had enough of feeling like crap all the time. I realized that refined, added sugar was causing all kinds of problems for me. So I quit, cold turkey, just like when I quit smoking in 1999. It was hard as hell for the first few days, but eventually the sugar worked its way out of my system. I also started working out a lot. Not obsessively, mind you, but at least five days a week. For Christmas, I got a gym membership, and I started with a personal trainer two days a week. I've lost thirty pounds and feel unbelievably better, at least physically, than I did three months ago. I know I'm healthier and happier.
But I still hate my ass.
So, of course, I go looking to Alice for some explanation and inspiration. I love all different versions of Alice, but I went back to the 2010 Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland, which I think is a remarkably beautiful adaptation and extension of the Lewis Carroll stories. She's also the burgeoning adult Alice, and it creeps me out to think of a 7- or 9-year-old Alice in the same terms of body image consciousness, though I'm well aware that it's already an issue for some little girls of that age.
Burton's 19-year-old Alice is first seen in the carriage with her mother, on the way to Lady Ascot's garden party (where the unremarkable and boring Hamish will propose to her). Her mother is fussing at her because she isn't wearing a corset or stockings, because her hair won't stay pinned back. Helen Kingsleigh is appalled at what everyone else will think of Alice not being properly dressed.
"Who's to say what is proper?" Alice said, with that maddening streak of impossible logic she'd inherited from her father. "What if it was agreed that 'proper' was wearing a codfish on your head? Would you wear it?"
Helen closed her eyes. "Alice."
"To me a corset is like a codfish," Alice said.
At the garden party Lady Ascot immediately looks Alice up and down, noticing her fashion faux pas. Alice notices that everyone who is immaculately dressed looks horribly bored and acts generally bored, as well. Alice's sister, Margaret, reminds her that her pretty face won't last forever, that she needs a man to marry her to be fulfilled. (Unbeknownst to Margaret, of course, her own husband is kissing another woman in the bushes.) Alice panics at the thought of marrying Hamish, and she chases after the White Rabbit, right down the hole.
As soon as she lands, her issues with growing and shrinking begin. While she's trying to adjust her size to get through the door, she hears the Dormouse and the White Rabbit, watching her from the other side, discussing whether or not she looks like she's the right or wrong Alice. She manages to shrink herself to the proper size for the door and steps into Underland, dragging her skirts behind her.
The Dormouse, the White Rabbit, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and even the flowers with human faces argue over whether or not she's the right Alice. The White Rabbit insists he spent weeks looking for her and that this is the right one, but no one is convinced, even Absolem, until she gets to the tea party:
But the man, who was called the Mad Hatter, had another reaction entirely. At the sight of Alice, he bolted upright. His whole being seemed to brighten; even his clothes perked up. Transfixed, he moved toward her, stepping directly up onto and over the table, as that was the shortest route to reach her. Alice shiver a little as he came closer, staring at her intently. There was something in his face that made her anxious for him. She knew she couldn't possibly deserve the delighted look he was giving her.
"It's you," said the Mad Hatter. He reached toward her golden hair, then pulled his hand back before touching her.
"No, it's not," the Dormouse snapped. "McTwisp brought us the wrong Alice."
The Mad Hatter shook his head. "It's absolutely Alice! You're absolutely Alice! I'd know you anywhere. I'd know him anywhere."
When Stayne the Knave interrupts the party in search of the Alice who's rumored to be in Underland, the Mad Hatter quickly has her drink the tea to shrink herself. He hides her in a teapot until Stayne leaves. Before he releases her to a moment of safety, the Hatter makes a new dress, "a miniature ensemble for Alice out of the tea cozy, a doily, and a swatch of her old dress." Alice finds herself more comfortable in the dress made by a mad man from a land of strange impossibilities, than in the dress her mother had chosen for her to wear to her own surprise engagement party.
She eventually makes her way to the palace of Iracebeth, the Red Queen, who has an enormous head, both literally and figuratively. The Red Queen surrounds herself with courtiers who adorn themselves with falsely large ears and noses and stomachs so they will be admired and liked by the Queen. They do their best to be like her, although they (like everyone else) plainly loathe her. In her hurried attempt to grow to a normal size, Alice eats too much cake and is suddenly an enormous girl, naked before the court of the Red Queen--you know, the place where everyone is overly obsessed with how they look. The Red Queen immediately adores Alice, alias Um, because of her largeness, and tells her, "You'll be my new favorite."
Alice goes through some adventures, a bit of this and a lot of that, before getting back to her normal size at the castle of the White Queen, Mirana. Alice finally proves to herself and everyone else that she is the absolute right Alice when she dons the armor of the champion of the White Queen, to face her own doubts and slay the Jabberwocky. In the end, Alice chooses to return to her regular world, rather than stay in Underland.
Alice found herself clinging to the edge of a rabbit hole. She pulled herself up and out of the hole. Grass was tangled in her long hair, and her clothes were wrinkled and torn. She shook her head, trying to remember what had happened. How odd. Had she fallen asleep?
She stood and brushed off her skirts.
She returns to the garden party a disheveled mess, looking "as if she'd been through a great battle."
"You look a frightful mess," Lady Ascot sniffed.
Alice turned to Hamish. Her adventures in Underland were gone from her memory, but the self-confidence remained. And there was a lot she needed to say.
Alice goes on to tell everyone why she can't be who or what they demand that she be. She realizes that to be the right Alice doesn't mean she fulfill anyone else's expectations; she simply has look at her true, inner self and be that person on the outside.
I had a blogging rant just a few days ago about how I'm all about this Verisimilitude of Self. I really don't care if you like me or not, though of course it feels great to be liked. Even though I am confident in my talents and abilities, admittedly with days when I question myself, I am often plagued by self doubt surrounding my body images issues. How I see myself, my ass, will often change how I approach the world around me. More often than not, I assume that it affects how other people see me.
I try to remind myself of all the amazing things this body has done for me. It has brought me through thirty-eight years, all the good and bad. It has borne and nursed two amazing children and stayed strong enough to begin the process of raising those two amazing young men. It has laughed and loved and loathed and gone from point A to point ME, and I should be thankful for that.
Even when I'm told that I'm beautiful or fabulous or full of muchness, I can't help but doubt the veracity of those claims when I look in the mirror. I see so many flaws, a mountain of imperfections, that it can be staggering. If there is a niggling little fear that I have, it's that I'm not good enough because of my body. It's been an issue since my teens, certainly, though no one knew that metabolic issues were combined with my general Amazonian build until my mid-20's. By that point, I believed everything I'd heard from everyone else. That I just wasn't good enough because I had a big ass.
Then, sometimes, I see the Mad Hatter looking at me, and I get a little anxious. It seems impossible that he could be so delighted that I'm absolutely me. There is always, always the lingering doubt in my own mind that I am the right Alice, that I really do need the corset and the stockings to make people accept me.
It's times like this when I need Absolem to blow a little smoke in my face and remind me that I ought to know who I am.
In 2009, SyFy aired a two-part mini-series called Alice. It was a futuristic, sci-fi revisit of Alice to Wonderland, ahead of the highly-anticipated Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland. I remember TiVo'ing it and watching it at the time and thinking it was okay. Alice (Caterina Scorsone) wasn't blonde, but Hatter (Andrew Lee Potts) was hot. (I know a thing or two about liking people, and in time, after much chocolate and cream cake, "like" turns into "what was his name again?") The cast includes Kathy Bates as the Queen of Hearts, Tim Curry as Dodo, and Harry Dean Stanton as the Caterpillar.
DH got me a copy of the DVD for Christmas this year, and we watched it last night. It's an interesting take, not Victorian in the least, with some imaginative re-envisionings of the March Hare and the Dormouse. The basic plot is that the Looking Glass is a doorway between modern America and Wonderland, through which minions of the Queen of Hearts take humans to serve her nefarious purposes. Humans are called "oysters"--because of the great pearls they hide inside, explains Hatter to Alice--and they're kept mildly anesthetized in a high-rise casino built of cards. They're kept playing and winning at the tables, while the essence of their emotions are sucked out through their bare feet, via the really cool-looking tiled floor.
Carpenter, the evil scientist behind the oyster project, has devised a way to distill the pure emotions from the humans. They're traded like commodities at the Tea House, kind of a red market clearinghouse for such things. It's very modern speakeasy, reminding me of the Milk Bar. Dormouse is the trading master, setting prices for distilled emotions like Desire, Passion, and Joy. They even introduce a new product, Clear Conscience, which is an immediate success.
It's all thinly-metaphorical for the drug trade, of course, and later in the movie we see a hospital where Wonderlandians are treated after becoming addicted to feelings such as Sensation of Flying and Big Head. It's a little trite, certainly, but it's a SyFy movie; I wouldn't expect anything else.
But I was taken by this idea of distilling our emotions and choosing what we feel at a given time. How useful it could be to decide that you only wanted to feel happiness or lust in a moment, or that you needed to pad your life with a little innocence for a while. Sure, I see how the addiction to an emotion could happen, but that happens now. Almost anyone who's ever been through a bout of depression can tell you how it's a comforting, compelling feeling in its onset, how it feels good to feel so horrible, to wallow in the overwhelming emotion if for no other reason than it's something different than what you felt before. Lust and desire and hatred drive people to distraction every moment of every day.
It's the choosing that fascinates me, the temporary control of what you feel the most. Would you be able to take enough Love to override the Loathing you feel for someone? Could you temporarily forget your own Guilt by ingesting enough Contrition?
I had a conversation with Absolem once about the compartmentalizing of emotions. We agreed that, in general, men are much better able to separate their emotions from each other and from a specific situation, to tuck them away where they don't get in the way. Women, generally, have a much more difficult time with taking their feelings out of any equation for longer than a momentary respite. I'm sure there's something evolutionary about it, about having the woman care always for the child, whereas the man can discard the emotion and do what must be done to protect the offspring and its caregiver.
This is not to say that men are emotionless, heartless beings, no matter what my ex-boyfriend taught me. I absolutely recognize that they are capable of feeling the full depth and breadth of masculine emotion. But I still believe that men and women feel differently, perceive the world differently, based on their gender and hormonal make-up. There are always variances and exceptions, and I know men and women alike who seem much more like their traditional, gender counterparts than like their actual biological identities. Everyone is different, of course, varied and wonderful, which is what makes the huge canvas of human emotion so vividly dynamic. It's like a huge pointillism; if you're looking directly at it from almost no distance, you can see each individual dot, unique in its color and composition. You have to back up, gain a new perspective, to see the beauty in its entirety.
Sometimes I think I would most certainly like to be able to check-out of my own head and heart and ride a different emotional rollercoaster for a while. I guess any of us can do that at any time, really, by shaking up our life and seeing what happens. I've been known to thrive on that constant shaking, like a child with a snow globe, jostling it over and over in all different directions just to see where the plastic snow may fall. Ultimately, the shaking and upheaval become tiring, and it's nice to be able to sit back in your own little globe and let everything be just settled for a time--at least until someone (maybe you, maybe not) drinks a little Petulance and feels like shaking you up again.
Maybe 2011 is the year I shake it, and maybe it's the year I let it settle. As I said before, I'm neither a psychoanalyst nor a psychic. But my psycho senses are tingling a bit, and I have a feeling there may be a wild ride in store for me. Maybe I'll take a trip in the Hatter's hat and go sailing over the castle wall, or maybe I'll grow to my full muchness and forge my own path toward the Jabberwocky. Life is always a bunch of maybes, like brightly-colored, talking flowers giggling for you to pick them. I don't know if I want the red or the blue, or the pink or the purple, but I do know that I'll follow the SyFy Duchess's advice to Jack Heart and "have another little sip of honesty" before I choose.
I get one shot at this, and I don't want to fuck it up.
The wonderful Jay A. Hansen posted a Jack Kerouac quote today, as his Facebook status:
The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars….
This started me thinking about madness. And if I start thinking about madness, I'm going to think of Alice in Wonderland. And if I think of Alice, I'm going to write a blog post....
Alice deals a lot with madness in Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010). She overhears Lord Ascot accuse her father, Charles of having lost his senses for wanting to open trade routes to the East. When Alice recounts her recurring dream of falling down a dark hole into a world filled with strange, unexpected creatures, she asks Charles Kingsleigh if he thinks she's "gone round the bend."
Her father felt her forehead, looking just like their family doctor when he was checking a fever. He made the doctor's "bad news" face and said, "I'm afraid so." Alice's eyes widened, but he went on. "You're mad. Bonkers. Off your head. But I'll tell you a secret...all the best people are."
Of course, Alice believes her own self to be mad when she first sees, and then chases after, the watch-checking White Rabbit at the garden party. But even as she falls down the rabbit hole, surrounded by strange and curious things, she doesn't question her own madness; she simply assumes it's another dream. Having dreamed of Wonderland/Underland for so long, much of what she perceives as being a dream state seems perfectly acceptable, almost reasonable, to Alice. She comments only that it is "curiouser and curiouser", and not quite as familiar as she had imagined.
The concept of madness, as such, doesn't come back into the story until the Cheshire Cat takes Alice to the home of the March Hare, for the tea party with the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter. The latter character, of course, is presumed to be "mad as a hatter" because of mercury poisoning common to his profession. While he's off-kilter, certainly, he is predominantly lucid in his actions and his interpretations of Alice and Underland.
When Stayne, the Knave of Hearts, intrudes on the tea party in search of Alice (conveniently shrunken and hidden on a teapot), he calls the Hare, the Dormouse, and the Hatter is favorite trio of lunatics. In an effort to protect the possibly-right-Alice, the threesome do their best to oblige the Knave's misconceptions, throwing teapots and singing ridiculous songs. The Knave growls at them that they're all mad and leaves. Alice is safe thanks to the feigned lunacy of her new friends. The Mad Hatter agrees to take tiny, apprehensive Alice to the White Queen, transporting her by way of his hat:
She couldn't help thinking the Knave was right about these three. They were all quite mad.
And yet...she had no one else. Mad or not, it seemed she was stuck with them.
The Mad Hatter is inadvertently captured by the Red Queen's minions, and Alice infiltrates the castle of Iracebeth to rescue her friend. Twice we see the Hatter maniacal and in a tizzy of self-recrimination at the thought of creating chapeaux for the horrid woman whose Jabberwocky wiped out his entire Hightopp clan of milliners. When he's at his seemingly maddest, it is inevitably Alice who recognizes it and pulls him back from the brink, usually to save him from a terrible fate.
Alice escapes, but the Hatter is once again imprisoned by the Red Queen, sentenced to beheading at dawn. The Hatter sits in his cell, unresponsive and staring "blindly into space." When the Knave and his guards taunt the Hatter and his accomplices, the Hatter is described as having madness in his eyes as he seizes Stayne, doing his best to choke the life out of him. The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter hatch a plan to fake the beheading and escape to join Alice at the White Queen's castle.
The Hatter looked bemused. "You still believe this is a dream? Do you?"
"Of course. This has all come from my own mind."
The Hatter thought about that for a moment. "Which would mean that I'm not real."
"I'm afraid so," said Alice, shaking her head. "You're just a figment of my imagination. I would dream up someone who's half mad."
"Yes, yes. But you would have to be half mad to dream me up," the Hatter observed.
"I must be, then," Alice said.
The maddest of characters in Alice in Wonderland are the ones who are most in touch with what really matters, while the truly foolish are the ones who make and enforce the rules. The Hatter is mad because of the horrible injustices perpetrated against himself and all of Underland. He often seems lost in lunacy when he's actually most rational, faking madness to save an ally from certain doom.
And if they are each half mad, does that make them whole?
In the end, Alice finds a way to mesh her dreams with her own, beautiful madness. She recognizes that there is wonder in being mad, in finding the driving force that ultimately fuels her dreams.
Maybe Kerouac had some of the same madness in mind when he wrote On the Road. The people he loves are the uninhibited, thoughtful risk-takers, who sublimate their own madness to create their own dreams. Kind of like Alice.
There's a thin line between creativity and madness, and it might just be found down the rabbit hole.
So I'm having a crisis of confidence today. I'm in the middle of writing a fiction piece that's been brewing for a long time. I'd let it sit for ages, busy with life, I guess. I was a productive member of society, but I wasn't really working on anything for me. Until this past October.
For my birthday (August 27th, for future reference), Dear Hubby bought me tickets to see the Gracious Few in Atlanta at the Masquerade. I have been a LIVE fan since 1994 and had seen them dozens and dozens of times, under all kinds of circumstances. The official announcement of their hiatus (read, "break-up") in 2009 wasn't surprising in the least, but it was painful. All those years of built-up groupie energy were just... gone. At the end of their time together, the Gracious Few was born, made up of Chad Gracey, Chad Taylor, and Patrick Dahlheimer of LIVE, plus Kevin Martin and Sean Hennesy of Candlebox. (I was also a Candlebox fan, though not nearly to the same extent. Kevin was too much of a pretty boy for me (in the 1990's anyway, compared to Ed Kowalczyk and his shaved head).
So, anyway, the Gracious Few CD came out September 14th, and it sat on my desk for nearly two weeks before I could bear to open it. It was like meeting Dad's new girlfriend for the first time. I wasn't really sure I would tolerate it, let alone like it. What if she was a total strumpet? Where would I be then? When I finally did give it a listen, I fell head-over-heels in love. It's a really fantastic rock album. It's not alternative, it's not adult contemporary, just balls-to-the-walls rock. And it's really good. (Try it! You'll like it!) It's one of a handful of albums I have ever immersed myself in for weeks on end. My poor boys were subjected to it three and four times a day. Three months later, it's still my favorite playlist for working out--it makes me want to sweat!
DH and I went to the Masquerade, sat in the will-call line, made it inside. Six Shot Revival was surprisingly good and had some hard core fans in the audience. American Bang was fun. Then the Gracious Few came on. There were maybe 150 people there (based on what I saw when I turned around from the
front), nothing like the thousands upon thousands both LIVE and Candlebox have traditionally entertained. (Interestingly, TGF was playing in the Hell theater. GWAR was upstairs in Heaven. Their fake blood ended up dripping through the ceiling in Hell before the show was over. It was fucking weird.) I could go on ad infinitum (read, "ad nauseum") about why I loved that show and that music and that band. That was the first night I got to sing with Kevin Martin from stage. (Though I haven't seen the video or pictures, I grasp desperately to the hope that it didn't suck like it did in Chicago in November.)
Something happened for me after that night, though, that kicked my ass into gear. I went home and started writing again, working on this story that had been stagnating for two or three years. This all happened to be timed with the realization that I'd lost my muchness. DH let me check out of my life for a couple of days, and I went to Birmingham to see TGF again. I had a remarkable time hanging out with them the night before the show, just talking about anything and nothing. I holed up in my hotel for most of my two days in Birmingham and wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote.
I realized I had some verisimilitude issues. I needed some details that I couldn't really research online, and I certainly didn't have the experiential knowledge to fill in the gaps I was finding. I took a shot in the dark and emailed Mr. Martin and asked if he would be willing to chat with me in Chicago, before yet another TGF show. I openly admitted that I didn't necessarily expect a response, let alone willing participation, but I was in a "nothing ventured, nothing gained" mood. To my delighted surprise, he agreed to meet with me. We met at the venue and talked for about an hour, the evening before the show. I had tons of questions, and he had unexpected answers for me. My brain churned for days, I emailed him more questions, and I was writing even more.
I was at less than 12,000 words at the first of October, leftovers from when this process had originally begun. As of yesterday, I'm up to 95,973, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through the story, I think. Here's the rub:
I can either continue on this path that I have laid out for myself and these characters, or I can backtrack and change direction all together. To go forward is new, but based on a concrete past determined by the choices I have already made, both in the story and in pre-production notes. The subject matter at this point is emotionally challenging and will continue to be so for a while. There will eventually be a good resolution; this is ultimately a love story. This path was planned long, long ago. The original snippets of story were written based on these ideas and this plan. But it's hard.
Or, I can go back and undo the harshest parts of the story and still continue on to the resolution. It would be easier, less likely to be judged harshly by the third-party eyes that will eventually be laid on it.
Do I want to paint the white roses red?
All day, I've been going back to the Jabberwocky. Tim Burton's version of the Jabberwocky, mind you, slain by Alice on Frabjous Day. The Jabberwocky is definitely the embodiment of my crisis of confidence, as it was for Alice. Her path to slaying the Red Queen's pet with the Vorpal Sword has been laid out in the Oraculum. Her path seems to have been decided by choices made in the concrete past.
Alice stared at the picture of the horrible monster that was winging its way toward them. She saw her golden hair flying as she wielded the Vorpal Sword, but she still couldn't imagine how it would feel--the thunk of the blade slicing into flesh, the scrape of its long sharp claws against her pale skin. She was not a killer. How could she kill anything...let alone Underland's most dreaded creature?
Overwhelmed, Alice turned and ran out of the courtyard. She bolted through the castle and out into the gardens until she found the hedge maze, where she threw herself onto a garden bench and wept.
"Nothing was ever accomplished with tears," observed a voice. Alice lifted her tear-streaked face and looked around.
"Absolem?"
Absolem, the Blue Caterpillar, is spinning himself a chrysalis to transform into a butterfly. Alice begs him not to go:
"I need your help. I don't know what to do!"
"I can't help you if you don't even know who you are, stupid girl."
But Alice does know. She tells Absolem, and reminds herself, of all the wonderful ways in which she is Alice Kingsleigh. She draws upon the power of that epiphany and straps on the armor and sword of the White Queen's champion. Alice steps up to slay the Jabberwocky. She comments to the Mad Hatter that it's an impossible task, but then she reminds herself that she sometimes believes "as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
The Jabberwocky doesn't see Alice as his enemy, though; that's the Vorpal Sword. Absolem tells Alice, "Remember, the Vorpal Sword knows what it wants. All you have to do is hold on to it." As Alice fights, she remembers the six impossible things she has learned while in Underland. And while she's working through her own issues of self-confidence, the Vorpal Sword continues to battle the Jabberwocky, seemingly of its own accord. Alice jumps in the air and slices the Jabberwocky's head off.
Alice was too exhausted to speak, but the dead creature's head seemed to say everything.
Alice always had the choice to not fight. The events detailed in the Oraculum weren't guaranteed to come true until they had actually happened. Even though she had the support of her talking animal friends, ultimately it was Alice's decision, as she learns before her battle:
"Alice," said the White Queen, "you cannot live your life to please others. The choice must be yours because when you step out to face that creature, you will step out alone."
I have the choice to not follow the illustrations of my Oraculum, to ignore the character sketches and story outlines that were decided so long ago, based on some inspiration that I may or may not remember. I don't have someone else to be my champion now. Perhaps I let my Vorpal Sword, my thoughts and words, run of their own volition and finish this battle. Can I believe my own impossibilities and let myself slay these misgivings?
This choice is solely and squarely on my shoulders. How I wish I could run to a hedge maze and cry! I'm sure my Absolem would remind me to not be stupid and to know who I am, were he not tangled in his own gilded chrysalis.
In the 2010 Alice in Wonderland film, Tim Burton introduces a small but wonderful character, Aunt Imogene, played by the incomparable Frances de la Tour, best known for her role as Madame Olympe Maxime in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Imogene is Alice and Margaret Kingsleigh's aunt, an old maid whose manner of dress is both inappropriately young and far too dated. We see Imogene early in the film (and its novelization), just after Alice has seen the White Rabbit and is trying desperately to flee Hamish's public proposal in the gazebo. Alice bumps into Imogene, quite literally, and complains of seeing a rabbit in a waistcoat.
"I can't be bothered with your fancy rabbit now," Imogene said, patting her ridiculous curls. "I'm waiting for my fiancé."
This was strange enough to distract Alice from the rabbit for a moment. "You have a fiancé?"
A sudden flash of white darted past her and she whirled around. "There! Did you see it?" she cried. Her gaze searched the tangled shrubbery frantically, but everything was still again.
"He's a prince," Imogene simpered, ignoring Alice's last question to go back to the story of her fiancé. "But, alas, he cannot marry me unless he renounces the throne. It's tragic, isn't it?"
Alice gave her a skeptical look. "Very." Perhaps Imogene had lost her mind. She certainly sounded madder than Alice right now. Alice smiled and nodded politely, backing away from her aunt. Imogene had her hands clasped under her chin and was gazing off into the distance, waiting for her imaginary fiancé to appear.
It's interesting to me that Aunt Imogene can take on such a grand role in such a short amount of time. She is the embodiment of the decaying dream, a recurring theme throughout this version of the story; Alice's father's dreams of eastward expansion of trade routes, her sister's ideal marriage that's really not, and Victorian society's expectations that Alice marry up to be successful in life, are all crumbling at the onset of the story.
We don't know if Imogene ever really loved a prince, and it's ultimately irrelevant. Her prince is the last remaining hope she has for fulfilling the expectations of others. She is trying desperately to hang on to the lucid dreams of her youth, now yellowed and faded but dressed up in garish blush.
Alice, of course, escapes her own potential fiancé by falling down the rabbit hole on her return visit to Underland. She has her adventure with the Mad Hatter, her strange and sexually-charged encounters with Stayne the Knave of Hearts, and the battles of ego with both the Red Queen and the White Queen. After Alice slays the Jabberwocky on Frabjous Day and bids her farewells to her friends, she returns to the garden party at the Ascot estate.
One by one, she gives her youthful, unabashed truths to the party-goers of note. She declines Hamish's proposal, she tells her sister to butt out of her life, and she warns her brother-in-law against infidelitous behavior. She rids herself of Lady Ascot's judgments of her, she establishes herself as an adult (and as her father's daughter) to her own mother, and she engages Lord Ascot in a continuation of her late father's business dealings, defining herself as confident, competent, and capable.
In the midst of her parade of proclamations, Alice pauses to address her aunt a final time:
"There is no prince, Aunt Imogene. You need to talk to someone about these delusions."
The irony, of course, is that Alice has just come back again from a world of delusions that have shaped her since her childhood. Alice is able to let the delusory events happen and wash over her and pass away without being caught up in them day after day. Aunt Imogene, however, has been mired in her dream for so long that she can't see how her life has become stuck in her own psychic muck.
One of my favorite songs ever is "The Side of the Road" by Concrete Blonde. Johnette Napolitano sings over her banjo, "It's hard recognizing a dream that's gone dead." That's exactly what's happened to poor Imogene. She has never been able to wake from her dream and either carry it forward to fruition, or to let it fade into the twilight.
I'm not one to advocate giving up on a dream, certainly; sometimes your dreams just have to be delayed until a more appropriate time. But then there are the dreams that you have to look at in the harshest of lights, to see that they will never come to pass, no matter how much you doll yourself up for them. When that time comes, you just have to put your party dress away, take down your pin curls, and wash the bright pink muck off your face, ready to face a new day and grab a new dream.
A friend of mine, Amanda, recently commented that she has moments of being small and petty. Another friend, Jason, retorted that it was okay to have moments of being small and petty, as long as you have days of being tall and pretty. (I hope the day comes when his daughter knows how lucky she is to have him for a father!)
It seems I have no middle ground as of late. I'm bouncing wildly between the tea and the cake. That's a central theme to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, her constant shrinking and growth, metaphorical for her identity crisis, of course.
Weeks ago, after Jason's profound comment, I decided to make a concerted effort to be tall and pretty, as often as possible. Like everyone, I have the baggage of my lifetime that can drag me down into the dredges of my own mind--sometimes, seemingly, in a matter of moments. I decided to reexamine the contents of that baggage, to unpack and repack those years and throw out the ones I didn't need any more.
I reshuffled and reorganized and faced a few things. I made a conscious decision to address some things from my past and to let them go. I was in a brilliant place of peace and happiness. I could have taught the world to sing! Tall, not small!
I was full of cake, to say the least, but got a little thirsty. I drank the tea. A lot of tea.
I had a series of intensely intimate conversations recently with a friend, my hookah-smoking Blue Caterpillar, Absolem, in part discussing some of the baggage that needed to be tossed. It was cathartic and gratifying to finally gain control of some of the things that had felt out of my reach for a very long time. I took a little too much of the mushroom offered by the Caterpillar, just like Alice, and became small with a long, serpentine neck that was craning to stay eye-to-eye with the Caterpillar. In my search for my own identity, I was completely ungrateful for the Caterpillar's gracious wisdom and concern. When I had eaten all of the proffered mushroom, I stomped my foot like an ugly, little girl and demanded more. Petty, not pretty.
Sometimes Alice would be small or tall because she chose the cake or the tea, and sometimes it would happen because others threw the cakes at her. Eventually she gives up the cake and the tea and recognizes that growth is just something that happens, to each at her own pace.
I can put on my best blue dress and go to the tea party. I can share riddles with my friends. I can even visit the Blue Caterpillar from time to time and partake of his hookah, assuming he still invites me. It doesn't mean I have to eat or drink.
And when the Caterpillar challenges me and asks me what size I want to be, I will reply like Alice, "Oh, I'm not particular as to size, only one doesn't like changing so often, you know."
In Tim Burton's amazing and beautiful Alice in Wonderland (2010), Alice returns to a Wonderland she barely remembers having ever known, while attempting to escape from an impending adulthood she doesn't want to know. Appalled that she can't remember where she came from, the Mad Hatter says to Alice, "You used to be much more... 'muchier'. You've lost your muchness."
I know how she feels. So many wonderful things happened when I became mom in 2001. I learned to love in entirely new ways. I learned to slow down and see life a little closer to the ground. I learned to make two different versions of the same meal at the same time, because there was no way in hell the baby was going to eat that.
What I didn't learn was how to keep in touch with myself. I know this is a common problem with mothers, perhaps with women in general, who are suddenly defined in new and exciting ways. But underneath the nursing bras and spit-up stains, there's still the 'muchier' versions of our old selves, trying desperately not to get lost in the shuffle.
I was married at the very tender age of 21 to a man I have loved my entire waking life. We spent a few years together, on our own, before deciding to have the first of the babies. Medical issues flared, eighteen months of shots and pills and craziness, and then we had the first boy. He was beautiful and difficult. He was perfectly flawed and wonderful. He was an extension of me, and vice versa. His younger brother came almost four years later. Same spit-up, different day.
Let me be very, very clear: I love my children. I have never once regretted having them. I chose to commit myselves to them from the time of their difficult and expensive conceptions and cannot imagine ever not living up to that obligation. What I could never have anticipated was that I would forget my own tea parties and talking animal friends. Or even how I used to order heads to be off.
As the Absolem the Blue Caterpillar said, "I can't help you if you don't even know who you are, stupid girl."
I know, I know. You can't swing a dead Cheshire Cat without hitting a blog. My hope is that you will be intrigued and want to remember your own youth, that you will join me as I journey back down the rabbit hole. Because as even the sometimes-insipid Alice learns, the journey is so much better with friends.
