I just realized that Han never knew that Luke got his hand chopped off while he was in carbonite and I don’t know which path I want to follow with this information:
1. Han seeing Luke’s injured hand after the sail barge battle and thinking that Luke has been a robot the whole time
2. Luke shaking his hand with a super-firm grip and Han just thinking “Wow this kid has gotten…absurdly strong.”
3. Luke just pulls off his hand one day and throws it at Han.
4. Luke picks up a spacechicken carcass and crushes it with his bare hand and Han is intimidated
5. Han says “It’s good to see you’re all right” and then Luke says “well, actually…” and pulls off his hand and Han falls over the back of his chair
6. Han says “It’s good to see you’re all right” and everyone gasps and Leia says “Too soon!” and Han is confused and they all just rag on him
7. Han needs a battery and Luke just opens up his hand and pulls out a battery and gives it to him and Han just stares
8. Luke reappears after a mission with all the synthflesh off and Han says “I thought it was easy but you LOST YOUR HAND?” and Luke just says “Oh, no, I lost this before Endor” and Han is hurt and betrayed.
9. Luke keeps making hand puns and limb puns and raising his right hand to high-five Han and Han just never gets it
10. Luke excitedly tells Han as they’re waiting to be taken to the Sarlacc because it’s been a whole year that he’s wanted to tell the guy.
I’m getting a lot of requests for the Macbeth story, which I’m sure I’ve told before but an old classic never dies.
Welp, might as well do something while I’m on the bus. Excuse any typos, typing on mobile is hard.
In news that will surprise no one, I was a drama school kid. I didn’t so much like to perform, but I did enjoy writing scripts and being the occasional narrator or background person.
In 5th year English class we were assigned a group project of retelling Shakespeare in six minutes or less. I rewrote the entire of Macbeth in a series of rhyming couplets, which by happy happenstance, synced up perfectly with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (”yooooou’re so vain, I betcha think this throne is bound to you, don’t you, don’t you”) which is what the group sung it as, while my favorite English teacher (the one who did the Lord of the Flies experiment with us) sat with his head in his hands, occasionally making noises like he was crying.
If I ever find those notes I’ll let you know, but that’s not what this story is about, but it is where it started. Cause I won an award for that hot garbage, and found myself propelled into the actual drama class in sixth year because of it and that’s when shit got weird.
First of all, everyone knows you don’t call it Macbeth around actual drama people, you call it The Scottish Play because of the well established curse. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play)
Which is what we all being good Scottish superstitious kids did. We called it “The Scottish Play” and never spoke any lines unless we were rehearsing cause that’s just what you do. And when your school is built less than a mile away from an iron age fairy mound and was built on the site of what used to be an old laird’s house that mysteriously burned down in the late 1800s and was subsequently rumored to be haunted, ye dinnae fuck wi fate like that.
Unless of course, your name was Mister Hadley, and you were a) newly arrived from England and b) didn’t believe in superstition and c) took every opportunity possible to spit in the face of the gods and call it MACBETH like you had nothing left to lose.
And this is my stop so I’ll post more when I get home.
Okay home now, lets do this.
So Mister Hadley was a hip young thing, or at least he likely hoped he was. He would show up every day regardless of the weather wearing sandals under his dress trousers, and trying to hang out with us like we were his friends and not his students. He was, in hindsight, the exact type of smiling, friendly lech who thought Woody Allen was the pinnacle of genius and was likely writing a novel about a teacher who has a love affair with one of his students. And he hated superstition. Like, HATED. And he really hated that we kept correcting him whenever he called Macbeth, Macbeth while in the theater room. To the point where one day while standing on the stage, he got really exasperated and started yelling “MACBETH, MACBETH, MACBETH! There, see nothing bad happened! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
It’s subtle at first, like half the supporting cast coming down with mono the first month into rehearsals. Not an unusual thing of itself for a bunch of 17 year olds in close contact all the time.
But after that things get progressively weirder and wilder. And perhaps you might argue it was something of the Salem witch trials hysteria effect taking hold, and maybe it was. But let me tell you, it’s hard not to start having hysterics when one day in the middle of rehearsing her “out damn spot!” soliloquy, Lady MacB almost gets taken out by a falling stage light that plummets out of the darkness of the ceiling and smashes through the floor like an acme anvil falling through thin ice. It was so loud several teachers came running down to the auditorium cause they thought something had exploded, but all they found was Lady MacB standing frozen in the center of the stage covered in dust, starting at her upraised hand where she’d felt the falling metal whistle past her fingertips, and all of us staring at her realizing we’d almost watched out friend get crushed to death by falling stage apparatus. The school had to call in a second councilor after that.
And I mean, you’d think after that the school would think better of hosting this end of year play. You’d think. But after the room was inspected and repaired and the falling light deemed a freak accident we went right back to it. Persevering through random fire sprinkler mishaps that soaked the stage and scenery (not to mention the electrics), my friend Mark who was Lord MacB getting thrown against a window in a fight and falling out of it when it shattered. And several other small mishaps which by themselves wouldn’t have mattered, but when you compiled them all into one stressed out space, became completely overwhelming to the point where people left.
The cast began dropping like flies, their final grades be damned. Some others who needed to complete the class for their chosen elective the following year stuck around out of desperation. And then there were the ones like me, just there for the shit-show and to see who would be left standing at the end up. We all used to huddle together in the drama room on the 2nd floor after rehearsals, survivors of this mutual train wreck of a monument to our teacher’s ego, carrying salt in our pockets and throwing it over our left shoulders whenever we talked about the play even though we never said its name.
Mister Hadley
did though. All the time. Repeatedly. Even when we begged him not to.
Cause you see guys, this is Mister Hadley’s vision and nothing
small like 15 kids coming down with mono or having near death experiences is going to stop him. So I get
moved from helping to rewrite lines of this Modern adaptation which is
shaping up like Trainspotting meets Willy Wonka down a dark alleyway,
and I wind up on the raised podium off at the side wearing a black hat
and holding a broom. The irony of which was not lost on me or half my
friends, but hey, it’s supposed to be good luck to have a “real” witch
acting as one of the witches, maybe that’ll save us.
You might be thinking at this point, “buy Joy, what did your parents have to say about any of this, why was no one doing anything?”
Have you ever tried to tell your parents “our drama teacher cursed us all by saying Macbeth instead of The Scottish Play and now we’re all going to die”? I have. My mother said “no you’re not, dear” while my dad said “that’s nice, dear” and carried on reading his book. They genuinely did not believe us, and attributed it to “high spirits” and general shenanigans.
Until opening night that is, when the curtains lifted, and Lord MacB is standing there with his shredded arm in a sling, (there are pictures of this and I have been facebooking friends all night trying to get hold of them)
Lady MacB keeps looking up at the ceiling like she has a nervous tick, and everyone else is just plain god damn miserable and more than a little wild around the eyes.
But we get through it. Nothing else bad happens and no one nearly dies. Right until the very end, when
Mister Hadley
gets up on the stage to address our horrified looking parents to thank them for coming, says “ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to tonight’s performance of Macb—” loses his footing, and promptly falls off the stage and breaks his leg.
And that’s the story of my schools first—and last—official performance of The Scottish Play.
i’m reading a very manly 1950s account of a hunt for el dorado but i’m thirty pages in and the narrator has already described his traveling companion as “handsome” 4 times, “extremely handsome” twice, “exceedingly handsome” once, his voice as “quietly husky” and “a husky whisper,” his fingers as long and deft, his body as “tall and cat-like,” and his eyes as some variation of ice-blue at least three times.
just men being dudes. dudes being pals. it’s great. this is great.
“Ever since he had aimed that gun at my throat, I had liked him immensely. And now I liked him even better.”
oh my god
“I awoke when a beam of light fell across my eyes. Jorge had come into my room carrying a lighted candle.
‘I’m going with you,’ he said quietly.
‘I can’t pay you.’
He smiled. ‘I thought I was a partner?’”
OH MY GOD
according to apparently every adaptation of a search of el dorado, i think we can conclude that maybe the real el dorado was the homosexuality we found along the way
#i’m adopting this as a term for someone working to understand their sexual orientation #‘oh megan dated dudes exclusively in college but these days i hear she’s on the road to el dorado’ ( @buetterfliege )
From now on, every person figuring out their sexuality is on the road to el dorado
the real treasure was the gay we found along the way
I hope he found old timey holonet footage of Obi-Wan during the Clone Wars and modeled his own un-hooding after it.
Yeah I mean imagine poor Luke sifting through Ben’s little hermit hut, finding the package Ben left him alongside all these brown hooded robes. And Luke sort of ignores them because they’re just cloaks? Standard desert wear. And he’s never coming back here if he can help it so why does he feel like he HAS to take them?
And they sit in his belongings for so long, unused, until there’s this really sandy planet (not the same sand as Tatooine and Luke is strangely relieved by that) and he figures why not?
The cloak is warm.
And as he goes about his mission he notices people responding strangely, whispers following him, hushed movements whenever he enters a room.
“Jedi” they say.
He asks around afterwards, and it is Leia who smiles somewhat sadly. “I’m not surprised. My father sometimes mentioned it, the Jedi and their cloaks. You wouldn’t think a piece of cloth would be enough to hide their identity and yet then, when you least expected it, the hood would come down and suddenly they are Jedi.” She laughs. “I suppose this means you’re doing it right!”
Leia’s words encourage him to look through what little archive data they have on the Jedi, scattered news reports, public appearances and the like. He learns. He is a wanted man, and the cloak is sometimes more hindrance than help. But it makes him feel a little closer to Ben, to his father…
And then there is Bespin.
He cannot look at the cloak.
(the cloth is wool but feels like lies)
It sits unwanted in his footlocker until they get word from Lando about Han’s location. He’s going back to Tatooine.
Luke tells himself it’s just a cloak. He doesn’t really need it.
But their plans need him to be a Jedi.
So despite his doubts, despite his uncertainty, a Jedi he must be.
The cloak is warm.
And as he faces Jabba in his stronghold Luke swears he can almost feel it’s folds lending him strength.
Later as they pile back into the Falcon, Han demanding Chewie explain EVERYTHING they did to his ship, Luke realises the cloak is gone.
He puts it aside. There are far more important things to think about now.
It’s only as he basks in the warmth of the fire beneath towering trees, the glowing forms of his forebears watching over them that he turns to his teacher with an apologetic look.
“Oh, I just realised. I’m sorry Ben, I think I lost your cloak in the Rancor pit…”
He doesn’t know why that causes both his father and Master Yoda to break out in ghostly laughter, but it is good.
It’s all good.
🙂
😂
😭
😂
…Obi-Wan knows pride is unbecoming of a Jedi and all, but also he’s dead now and Sidious is dead and Anakin’s back and it’s a good day and so really, even though Yoda and Anakin are laughing their asses off at this, Obi-Wan can’t help but be a little bit flattered that his nephew has taken after him in this regard.
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
Merry: I mean you could do that but consider
Merry: you can only tell him ONCE
Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.
This has been bugging me for WEEKS GUYS OMG
Okay, we know hogwarts was founded sometime in the tenth century. The Harry Potter wiki gives the date as 990. So logically Slytherin must have left the school by, oh, say 1070 at the latest. Slytherin made the chamber of secrets before leaving. Tom Riddle came along and opened it in the 1940s, and as far as we’re aware no one else knew how to open it or where the entrance was for that ~900 year gap. Said entrance being through a sink in a girls’ bathroom.
MY QUESTION IS: did Slytherin himself carve a snake into the water pipe in said bathroom? Does this imply that wizards had functional plumbing a good 700+ years before everyone else and didn’t share it with anyone? Selfish bastards.
konekorambles 