AEG: Margaret

Roy C. Lackey · 26 Jan 2009, 05:14 · from 2009-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:14:33 -0600
Subject: (urth) AEG: Margaret
References: <003f01c97b96$a0259c20$26d34a0c@rclackey>
	<4976FED5.6080508 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <007301c97f74$fccb8520$f1d14a0c@rclackey>

Dave Tallman wrote:
> I think you're right that Vince was just an actor. But symbolically he
> was a representative of Reis in the play. Here are some things I deduce
> about the play:
>
> 1) The Volcano God was a dangerous villain in the play -- "I only hope I
> never meet Vince" (249).
>
> 2) "Remember the show? The banquet you made for me? The way you danced
> with Gil and me?" (285). It seems he was wooing Mariah in a love
> triangle with Mr. Sharpy. He offered her a banquet. This is a very close
> match to the Cassie/Gideon/Wally triangle, including dining out. The
> dance might have been a dream sequence, like the Laurey/Curly/Judd dance
> in "Oklahoma."
[snip]
>
> 7) As a musical, the play would normally have a happy ending of some
> sort. But there could be a twist. One would expect Mariah to end up with
> the sailor, but Reis named him "Mr. Sharpy" (a sharper, a confidence
> trickster). He was the parallel to Chase. Since the play was intended to
> send a message to Chase, Mariah probably ended up with the Volcano God.

The scene where Cassie is sitting in the back of Wally's car and he shows
her a vid image of her in the play may foreshadow the dance in the beach
scene near the end of the book. But I can't quite make sense of it and the
quoted lines from the song just makes it more confusing. (145) (The vid was
taken before Gid/Gil joined the cast.)

Right after the song quotes:
"She clasped hands with her soul, and the two began to dance.
"Her images vanished." [To be replaced by Reis's face.]

In that scene from the play, which character was she dancing with, and is
the real-life person that character represents somehow Mariah's (Cassie's)
"soul" mate? We know the main male dancer was Sharpy, but she (or they) also
danced with the play's Volcano God. So is there a scene in the play where
Mariah dances with just the Volcano God?

Or is there a scene where Mariah dances alone, and the audience is meant to
assume she is dancing with an unseen Volcano God? That vid bit is confusing,
but I don't think that any vid was actually used in the play's presentation,
such that Mariah is seen on the stage dancing with a hologram of herself.

Also, when Cassie asked the island Vince if he remembered the play's banquet
and all, he said no.

-Roy

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net