Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

From my mom, no less...

Last night, during a discussion about, of all things, sexual harrassment laws in the workplace, my mom challenged me to write a sequel to "Black Swan", in which Thomas, the dance master, winds up getting what's coming to him for messing with his proteges. I said I'd consider it, but I had enough on my plate writing-wise right now, especially since there's another Lonely Prompt Challenge Weekend coming up on comment_fic this weekend, plus I just intro'ed Catherine Morland on carpe_ho_ras and it's shaped up into one of the biggest intros I've had since I intro'ed Ryuk.

But then this morning, as I was looking out the window at the fresh coat of snow that's falling, the idea came back to me, and the plot spread itself in front of me:

"Black Swan Continues: The Snow Queen". In which Nina is recovering from her horrible mental ordeal, a mysterious albino Japanese surgeon ("Hmmm... I wonder who that could be.") is treating the brain tumors that caused her madness, and Thomas is trying to launch a radical new production of "The Snow Queen". Mom wanted it to be more of a legal thriller, but I explained to her that the adult fairy tale gone horribly wrong in all the right ways is the way to go. Even if it means it includes slash (Muraki/Thomas and it's rather unsettling), which she isn't big on. I'm now researching the Snow Queen, looking to see if it's been done as a ballet and by whom, and if I can find the score on CD. I may fall back on the soundtrack from "Black Swan", which I utterly love anyway: too bad said score has been disqualified from the Academy Awards on the grounds of it being a heavy adaptation of Tschaikovsky's score for "Swan Lake".

Whoa... a good pick-me-up when I needed one!!

One of my dreams has been to see a performance of Karl Orff's cantata/ballet "Carmina Burana": I've even dreamed up choreography for it (It's one of my all time favorite classical works), and I can sing just about every part of it (even the countertenor solo and most of the soprano solos, though my voice tend to crack on the high notes in "Dulcissima". Drat those coloratura soprano parts!). Well, one of the local PBS stations just showed a student production of it. It wasn't how I'd have choreographed it -- If I had the Boston Ballet at my disposal, I'd have had a lot more big round-dance type numbers, incorporating some medieval-type dance styles -- but it was still *GOOD*. One of the male solo dancers reminded me oddly of Desire, from the "Sandman" comics: at first I wasn't even sure he was a guy!