WHO INVENTED MELODRAMA?

Long time readers of this blog know how much I like melodrama. The time travel story I just posted was heavily influenced by it. For me it means creating stories out of elements that have sure-fire audience appeal. If people naturally like to see romance and swordfights, if they love to cheer on a hero and boo the villain, if they have a sentimental attachment to beloved pets...then the melodramatist tries to fit those elements in.

A story like that can be the cheesiest daytime soap opera or it can be Macbeth. It depends on the skill of the writer.

Anyway, if you like that medium you might be curious about how it started...or rather how the popular modern incarnation of it started. Here's how one internet source describes it.

The story begins in the 1780s with a young French aristocrat named Pixerecourt.

Pixerecourt was young and well off and his father had just bought an estate that would have qualified him as an aristocrat. The boy had no aspirations beyond chasing women and wearing nice clothes. Life was good and he hadn't a care in the world. Then came the French Revolution and he and his family were tossed out into the snowflakes.

I don't know what happened to his family, but Pixerecourt's life became a horror. With no money and no way to make a living he had to wander from town to town trying to pass himself off as a peasant. The police were on his trail, and anybody he met might have turned him in.

He had lots of adventures where he was hunted like an animal and nearly starved.  Finally he met an old friend who, at great risk to himself, got Pixerecourt a low level clerk's job under an assumed name. Desperate for money, Pixerecourt tried to pay back the friend by writing a play and selling it to one of the local theatres. Sell it he did, and to his surprise the public lined up around the block to see it. It was a hit. In order to explain why I have to digress for a moment.

After Shakespeare's time fictional villains had fallen into disrepute. The Baroque era was ushered in and with it the belief that a man becomes good by surrounding himself with with positive things like art (above) and finery. Dwelling on the dark thoughts of villains was considered morbid and perilous to virtue. Baroque drama centered around misunderstandings, not evil, and comedy became popular.

Back to Pixerecourt: he wasn't trying to innovate. He just wanted to write a popular drama. The problem was that he had seen nothing but the darkest side of life since he left home and was still living under the threat of discovery by murderous fanatics. He wrote about villains because that's all he knew. It evidently struck a chord with the audience, who'd had plenty of brushes with evil themselves.

I wish I could say that Pixerecourt had a life of ease afterward but that wasn't the case. His plays brought him to the attention of the authorities who did everything they could to capture him. Later he was drafted into the revolutionary army which apparently didn't know about his background. I don't know how his later life played out but one of his plays, The Dog of Montargis (usually spelled differently than it is on the poster), became a staple of theatre in the 19th Century and was a favorite of Charles Dickens.

 Here's (above) a statue that commemorates the play, and which still stands in the real-life town of Montargis.  In the play a popular nobleman is killed by a jealous courtier in the forest. The killer might have gotten away with it but the victim's dog recognizes him and attacks him at every opportunity. The killer pleads with the law to have the dog put down, but the king declares that justice would only be served by a Trial by Ordeal. The murderer must fight with the dog to the death. Needless to say, it's a melodrama so the murderer loses.

Incidentally, how did anyone ever stage this play? Even with a trained dog the actor playing the murderer must have gotten some serious bites. And what would happen if someone in the audience brought their cat to the play?  

So that's how modern melodrama began. Someone had to risk his life so that we could have soap operas and stories about faithful pets who rescue their masters from drowning in icy rivers.

Fascinating, eh?


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GETTING A HAIR CUT

Here I am (above), about to get my hair cut at the local beauty school.

Friends think I get my hair cut by students because I'm cheap. Let me answer that. See the guy above? That's your barber. 

See the student above? That's my barber. 'Need I say more?

Hmmm, maybe the average is a bit more like this (above), but you see my point.

There are male students too, but so far I haven't gotten one of them.

It's a school so the haircut doesn't always turn out. That's the risk you take. Most of the time it turns out okay. 

I imagine that cosmetology students must acquire a lot of equipment. A lot of what you see here (above) is for cutting women's hair. 

If you want to cut men's hair then you have to add even more (above) to your kit. If you want to cut black people's hair then there's still more products and accessories to buy. Geez, cutting hair isn't cheap!

 What's a beauty student's life like? I'm guessing that it's dominated by the hip girls in class. Other girls must be in awe of them.

I've only known one beauty school teacher. She was elegant and sophisticated and spoke with an aristocratic East European accent.  Outside of class, in the bright sunshine, she might appear to be normal. In the mysterious world of the beauty school she was Pharaonic royalty.

Okay, I'm no expert on what goes on in beauty schools, but I know an interesting atmosphere when I see it. It's bracing to be around people who are getting started in life and are full of hope and energy.

SOME RECENTLY POSTED ASTRONOMY PICTURES

Above, the Horsehead Nebula as seen recently by The Hubble space telescope. Actually, it's a composite of several pictures taken at different wavelengths.

For comparrison, here's the same nebula as it appeared in the years before we had The Hubble. A big difference, eh?



 Here's (above) a fragment of a recent episode of "Through the Wormhole." It makes the amazing claim that gravity may not exist. If it does exist then where are the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein? An elaborate, well-funded search just concluded and it turned up nothing. According to this show what we call gravity might just be the same thing as the Strong Force operating through gluon pairs rather than individual gluons.

That's an amazing thing to say. In order to explain why gravity is so weak compared to other forces, we've come up with other dimensions, endless bubble universes, and M Theory. What if none of that was necessary to explain what we see? The demotion of gravity from force to something less would simplify things and overturn a lot of currently believed ideas. Who's right?

Above, a picture of gigantic spouting water ice geysers on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. It took a while to figure out that the water was coming from within the world and not from canyons on the moon's surface. Now it's widely believed that there is indeed a liquid ocean under the surface, and comparisons are being made to Jupiter's watery moon, Europa. Could this world be a candidate for life?

Don't get me wrong...there's no evidence that Earth life began there. It's all fun speculation. It's easy to imagine the early Solar System where ejecta from impacts brought about an exchange of materials between planets and moons. Maybe life began on Earth and was transferred to Europa or Enceladus.

That's Earth above, as it's thought to have looked 4 billion years ago in it's "Hadeon" period. I'm guessing that Hadeon is derived from "Hades."

Another picture of The Milky Way.

THE TIME TRAVEL STORY (PART 1)

EXT. NEW YORK CITY: THE GIRL TIME TRAVELERS EMERGE FROM MACY'S WEARING EXPENSIVE CLOTHES:

ISABEL (VO): "That was fun. Where's Tony?

CLARE: "He's coming! I see him. Hey, look at this...a satin and tulle swing dress for only 5 dollars! And gloves for two dollars! That cleaned me out!"

KATHY: "I got this round collar jacket for 4 dollars. Can you believe that? But that cleaned me out, too. How about you, Irene?"

IRENE: "Mine cost a little more than that, but I still have lots of money left."

ISABEL: "That's because you Xeroxed your money. We had to buy old dollar bills at collectors prices, the kind that are silver certificates."

TONY WALKS INTO SC.:

TONY: "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Irene, you Xeroxed your money!? I told you that everything we took back to 1952 had to be from that era. You said you understood that. If that fake money changes something in 2015, I could lose my job for taking you here. We could all be arrested!"

THEY CROSS THE STREET:

IRENE: "Calm down, Tony. Nobody said anything. They all took it and gave me change, so what's the harm? Even the gun store took it."

TONY: "Gun store? You bought a gun?"

IRENE: "Yeah, from that store. A cute little revolver. They're legal in 1952.

TONY: "Throw it away. Toss it in a trash can. Get rid of it. I could lose my job."

IRENE: "Stop with the job, already. Everything's fine. Don't be such a wimp."

THEY PASS A ROW OF PANHANDLERS:

TONY AND THE GIRLS WALK PAST THE PANHANDLERS, PRETENDING NOT TO SEE THEM. ONE OF THEM GETS UP AND CHASES IRENE. HE PASSES HER THEN BLOCKS HER WAY.

BUM: "'Just a dime. That's all I'm askin' for. Won't ya help a guy out?"

TONY: "Um...Irene, I have a dime. Here, take it."

IRENE: "I don't want your dime."

BUM: "C'mon, take it. Do a good deed."


.........CONTINUED IN PART 2  [this entire story and text (not photos) copyright Eddie Fitzgerald 7/30/2014]

THE TIME TRAVEL STORY (PART 2)

IRENE: "Why, you pathetic little fool. Get out of my way."

BUM: "Look, all I'm askin' for is a dime, lady. A pretty lady like you...it's not gonna break you."

KATHY: "Haw! It looks like you have an admirer, Irene."

IRENE: "Oh yeah? Well let him admire this."

BAM! BAM! SHE SHOOTS HIM, AND TOSSES THE GUN DOWN A SEWER.

WITNESS: "Oh, my God...she shot him!

A PASSING AMBULANCE STOPS:

AMBULANCE TEAM: "He's dead...a bullet through the forehead! 'Anybody see who did it?"

WOMAN: "I saw it! That lady over there did it. They argued about somethin' and she just took out a gun and shot him."

TONY (DISTRAUGHT): "Wh...why'd you do it Irene? You promised you'd be careful. YOU PROMISED! That's why I took you along. You promised you wouldn't speak to anyone in this time. You promised you wouldn't allow anything you do, no matter how insignificant, to influence anybody in any way. And now this."

IRENE: "Oh, there you go being a wimp again. Nobody cares about him. He was just a bum. And besides, most of these people lived their lives and died long before 2015. What you're seeing are just shades. It doesn't make any difference what you do to them. They're not real.

CLARE: "I don't know, Irene. They look pretty real to me."

 IRENE (CONT): "Anyway we'll be out of here in an hour."

IRENE (CONT) (VO): "There's our ride home now."

CROWD: "You ain't goin' anywhere, Lady! Somebody call a cop!"

IRENE: "Get your hands off me! Don't touch me!"

SHE TAKES SOMETHING FROM HER PURSE AND QUICKLY UNFOLDS IT.

IRENE: "Okay, people...let me introduce you to 2015!"

TONY: "IRENE! Where did you get...you weren't supposed to..."

ZZZZZRRMMM! A LASER BEAM THEN AN EXPLOSION THEN A SERIES OF NAPALM-LIKE PLUMES OF FIRE OBLITERATING HALF A CITY BLOCK: 

CROWD: (SCREAMS OF PANIC)

MORE DESTRUCTION AS THE BEAM SWEEPS ACROSS BUILDING TOPS:

CROWD: (MORE SCREAMS OF PANIC)

TONY DRIVES UP IN A CAR, SCREECHES TO A HALT, SHOUTS TO THE GIRLS:

TONY: "Get in! Get in! We've gotta get to the airport!"

This entire story and text (not photos) copyright Eddie Fitzgerald 7/30/2014)

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I'd need parts 3 & 4 to tell the whole story, where the "Cleaners" come in, but I think I'll end it here. Finding pictures to illustrate what I wanted to say took hours, and I still didn't get the photos I wanted. *SIGH*