Under "interlude"

Back when I first wrote the monologue of "interlude," I had recently shaved my head, so no wonder Pompo would do so. I initially scrapped this consideration of hair as too specific for Pompo's introduction into the play and rewrote the initial interlude, always knowing I would return to this one. That's why now, as I've posted it, my hair has grown back considerably. A co-worker asked me one day this week if her memory was right and I had all my hair cut off in May--when I replied in the affirmative, she said "Your hair grows fast!" I'm still processing that comment. I guess some or most people can tell if hair grows fast, but the awareness, day in and day out, that such an observation requires is beyond me. It's like someone saying "that paint dries fast!" and thinking, did they sit there and watch it dry? Or I could say the same with the grass growing. Let's get to the jump here...

After writing "interlude," I returned to Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which is as much an inspiration for writing this play as anything else. She makes the occasional reference to Greta Garbo in connection with Wonder Woman--Garbo was, I think I've picked up from my studies, the idealized image of woman at the time. She isn't, though, Wonder Woman. I can't really seem to have nailed down her natural hair color, but I think she is often a blonde, which makes one think: What of a blonde Wonder Woman?

I have a preoccupation with the way that comics characters change from artist to artist or long term characters in film series change as actors shift in and out. That's part of what I'm trying to get across in Pompo's monologue: think about Daniel Craig and, let's say, Pierce Brosnan as Bond. There's something so bold about casting Craig. I'm sure almost everyone's initially reaction was like mine: "That's not Bond!" But it makes you think about what and who Bond is. Is there a female character that moves through different canon series while being played by different actresses that we can compare here?* A friend and I joked about how Donna Hayward could return as a character in Twin Peaks season 3, after having been played by Lara Flynn Boyle in the original show and then replaced by Moira Kelly in the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, played now by a third different woman. This transition from one actor or actress to another finds its expression in the actual plot of the long-running show Dr. Who where the eponymous doctor regenerates in a new body whenever the character has been recast. (There's another thing that happened between my return to Waiting for Gadot and the original scene and interlude--the new doctor was announced as a woman, which will certainly be something interesting to see!) It will be interesting to see how this might be done in superhero film franchises over the next twenty years as well. We've already seen a long progression of Batman actors, but the future seems ripe for this to occur with any number of DC, Marvel, or other characters in the genre.

I have this image of Wonder Woman as being a champion of being free to be yourself, yet when people dress up as Wonder Woman they obviously often try to look a certain way to reflect the character. This is simply rational--how else can they be recognized as the character? But at what point, at any point, does this stand in contrast to the character herself? There's something beautiful about the character being all these different people who look so very different. It seems to capture something about the character. Or not! I could be completely wrong here.

When Pompo makes the reference to Kurt Vonnegut about informing the reader when one's joking, he's referring to A Man Without a Country, the author's last book published while alive. I think Vonnegut uses the distinction in some ways to separate Vonnegut the writer into Vonnegut the artist and Vonnegut the political thinker. (Though I haven't read it, I'm certainly not surprised to hear the Vonnegut is a political figure in the alternate history novel Back in the USSA.) When he's joking, he might be speaking more as an artist and even political statements in this mode are not necessarily to be debated or presented as particularly convincing. When he's not joking, he's really trying to give us his truth as best as he can provide it. Though his last book would seem a weird place to start with Vonnegut, this was one of his first that I read (maybe it was the first I read! Hard to remember for sure), and it's an easy read that's also quite insightful and helps set a path for reading his work. I recommend it highly.

I don't think the pun on "hair" and "hare" when it comes to the tortoise and the hare was immediate, but perhaps it was. I actually think I brought up the folktale, because it is a common one that I think about, and then realized I could make that joke. It's always interesting when that happens. There's a lot of connections and echoes throughout Waiting for Gadot that are largely happy accidents. When I read about writers who return to a work to edit it in order to help make the theme more explicit or to emphasize certain images I am struck by how in control of it all that seems. Maybe I can get there one day, but I can tell you now that that is very far from my writing practice.

Since I wrote this interlude quite a while back, I think it has led to me having a bit less to say in this review of it, but I will end by reflecting on Jill Lepore's book once again. When she discusses H. G. Peter, Wonder Woman's initial artist, whom Pompo mentions briefly in the monologue, she traces his history as an artist, reflecting in fact on his drawing of women, head shots, and, yes, hair. Not being an artist and thus not designing characters, I can't really speak to how much attention at artist might spend on a character's hair (A friend of mine said that Jamie McKelvie's changes to Captain Marvel's hair supposedly threw a number of artists for a loop, as they tried to draw her new 'do and have it look fresh and fierce as intended and not just a bunch of hair piled up on her head, but I don't know how much difficulty it actually caused.), but for me I think hair is particularly important. I've often joked that I have face blindness, because I frequently think people look alike when others do not see the connection at all. I've taken a few rudimentary tests for face blindness that has shown me I almost certainly do not have it, but, for some reason, I do make see resemblances largely based on a person's hair.

Let me leave you with an image: Last year I went to my boss's office and saw a woman that I did not recognize facing away from me and towards her computer. I'd been at my job for a few months and asked this woman where I might go to see my boss. The woman replied that she was her! Of course, a recent change in her hairstyle had thoroughly confused me. That was certainly an embarrassing moment. Pompo would wonder if anyone ever had similar confusion over Wonder Woman.

A final thought: It's quite funny that I started this play in connection with the then upcoming film Wonder Woman and checked The Secret History of Wonder Woman out of the library around the same time as well. I'm sure I had heard about it before, but I recently saw (perhaps again) that a film is being released this year about the creation of Wonder Woman as well. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women doesn't seem to be based on Lepore's book, but it's certainly a film I plan to see when it comes out to compare it with the latter.


*Perhaps we could talk about the X-Men movies where the prequel/revamp X-Men: First Class opened the doors for having two actors and actresses for a number of important roles. I'll have to think about this for a bit longer, but for some reason that splitting of characters hasn't captured my imagination in quite the same way.