Alice, Part Five: The Analysis

As I'm feeling exceptionally nerdy today, I'm really, really tempted to do this as a series of Infocom InvisiClues (who here remembers InvisiClues? Ennis? Abi, did y'all play Zork in Bangalore in the early nineties?)... but perhaps that indulgence will be better saved for when computer screens contain the capacity to absorb those magical "invisible ink" highlighters.

Please refer to the original text and my adaptation for reference throughout this post (go ahead, bring them both up under "new window" or "new tab," whichever you prefer, so you can click-click-click back and forth... if you're one of those really cool people who has a computer with two monitors, well... this would be the time to put them to use).

Here we go!

The biggest issue when adapting Alice (either the Wonderland or Looking Glass half) is that neither book has a throughline. A throughline is best defined as "that necessary pull that forces the characters to complete their story." With LOTR, it's Frodo getting that fracking ring to Mt. Doom. With KHNH, it's Aman palming Naina off on Rohit before he dies. With "nearly every romantic story ever made," it's one character getting another character to love them (or two characters convincing sets of parents to let them marry, etc.).

Alice contains no such necessary pull. In Wonderland, she wanders, bucolic, through the forest until she happens to find the "beautiful garden" of the Queen of Hearts; but she was not searching for the garden (and in fact she only found it when she had forgotten she wanted to see it). In Looking Glass, there is the issue of Alice making it to the eighth square so that she may become a queen, but there's no sense of urgency; she's certainly not in any hurry. There's also no "if/then" syllogism set up -- that is, there's no real benefit to her becoming a queen (besides the fact that she wants to be one), and no major consequence if she doesn't.

All the Looking Glass film adaptations (with one exception, which I will note) force a throughline by setting up the idea that "once Alice becomes a queen, she will then have the power to go home." L. Frank Baum already wrote that story, and his version works better. Not to mention that there's nothing in Carroll's text to suggest Alice wants to go home; she seems to be perfectly happy wandering around in Looking-Glass Land, free of the adult-imposed rules and constraints that dictate her life in Victorian England (the book starts out with Alice wishing she could do as she pleases without receiving punishment from her parents and governess, and supposing that she must be able to do anything she wants in Looking-Glass Land, where all the rules are backwards).

The sole exception to this imposed "wanna go home" throughline is the 1966 Alan Handley film Through the Looking Glass, which uses as its throughline the idea that Alice must become a queen in order to have the power to drive the Jabberwock out of Looking-Glass Land (why the Red and White Queens do not have this power is never explained). The Jabberwock, need I mention, is never tormenting anyone in Carroll's book. It appears only in its eponymous poem, and never as an actual character. (The Irwin Allen film also features the Jabberwock as a character -- a hilariously grotesque monster which looks like a man dressed in Hefty garbage bags. He randomly appears throughout the movie and chases Alice around, and his purpose seems to be to drive her to the next interaction. There's also an After-School Special moment at the end where Alice "overcomes her fears" and stands up to the Jabberwock. But... I digress.)

When I sat down to work out my throughline, I thought "what's the real force driving Alice towards becoming a queen?" The answer came when examining Carroll's chess puzzle, and considering that pieces/characters were in fact captured in the game (and in the book). I thought "what happens to these pieces after they leave the board?" and supposed that they left the world of the game -- a synonym, of course, for death. Thus Alice now has a clear driving force to propel herself towards the eighth square; not only does she (like the puzzle suggests) have pieces chasing her every move and threatening to take her off the board, but becoming a queen will allow her greater mobility and power.

This also allowed me a few moments of philosophy, and the opportunity to write the following exchange (which deviates from Carroll's dialogue, but is perhaps in its spirit -- note the knight's description of his move):

ALICE: What happened to the Red Knight?

WHITE KNIGHT: I’m not sure. We don’t really know, do we, what happens to people after they leave this chessboard.

ALICE: I’m frightened.

WHITE KNIGHT: Why?

ALICE: Because I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know where I’m going, and any minute now a knight or a rook or a bishop could come right through here and…

WHITE KNIGHT: Yes, I suppose all those things are true. But that’s what life is, isn’t it? We never know what will come next. And, if you think about it, we never know where we are going! I, for example, always set off on a straight line, goal in sight… but life gets in the way, and I always find myself… oh, at least two squares downwind of where I meant to be! But do you know what the best part of it is?

ALICE: What?

WHITE KNIGHT: I get to meet people like you. Now – do you know where you are?

ALICE: No, I don’t think so, anymore.

WHITE KNIGHT: We’re at the border of the Seventh Square. I’ll see you through it safely. And then you’ll be at the Eighth Square, and –

ALICE: And I can be a Queen!

WHITE KNIGHT: Absolutely. Would you like that?

ALICE: Yes.

WHITE KNIGHT: Then I would be honored to help you get there.


(I love the White Knight. He... just gets me all verklempt, every time I read his chapter.)

The other alteration I made had to do with the element of design I mentioned in this post: the idea that I wanted to create opportunity for arresting visual choreography. There is always an issue, in Alice, of how to get the characters on and off the stage. As Alice continually travels, there are two basic ways to do it. Either she leaves the stage, there's a scene shift, and she re-enters, or all the other characters leave the stage and new characters come on.

I didn't like either of those ways. They're kind of boring. Irwin Allen uses the first method, and thus when I watch his DVD and use the "skip to next chapter" button, every chapter begins in the same way: Alice entering Stage Right and "discovering" a group of people. Boring, boring, boring. (BTW, for all my trashing of the Irwin Allen film, it's probably still my favorite because it not only has the best and cleverest songs, it has the best character cameos. Carol Channing, Steve and Eydie, Ringo Starr, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the one-and-only John Stamos.)

Then I noticed that nearly every square Alice visited (with the exception of the third, where she travels by railway) included a poem. I wanted to use these poems, but I didn't want the action of the scene to stop while an actor stood and recited. I decided that the method of transportation in my adaptation of Alice would be poetry -- that is, whenever a poem began, it would "come to life" and Alice would be swept into it; and when the poem ended, she would find herself in a different place. (Sashi, don't you agree that's one of the functions of poetry: to take a person to a different place?)

Here 's an example of how I did it.

ALICE finishes straightening the chess pieces and picks up the book.

ALICE: That’s strange – the pages are all in a language I don’t know. It wasn’t like that before.

ALICE looks at the looking-glass.

It did happen. I did get through. And this is a Looking-Glass chessboard, and this is a Looking-Glass book! And if I hold it up to the glass, the words will all go the right way again!

ALICE takes the book to the looking-glass.

ALICE: Twas brillig, and the slithy toves… no, it’s still in a language I don’t understand.

But suddenly the poem surrounds her, and the ensemble is there creating a forest and a Jabberwocky within a tangle of bodies and innumerable arms and legs while the little PAWN bravely steps forward to fight.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jujub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought –

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

‘And has thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’

He chortled in his joy.

The chair, table, chessboard, and looking-glass – all perhaps incorporated into this moment, i.e. the chessboard serving as the PAWN’s shield – are suddenly swept away; the ensemble is gone, and ALICE is left alone onstage with the RED QUEEN.

ALICE: What a strange poem. I felt as if I were actually in the forest –

RED QUEEN: Speak only when you are spoken to!

ALICE: I beg your pardon – oh! I am in the forest!

I was able to get it to work for every poem and every transition, of which (dare I say) I am infinitely proud. When the White King and Haigha begin reciting "The Lion and the Unicorn," for example, the Lion and the Unicorn appear and begin fighting for the crown; after the ensuing dialogue, when they recite the second couplet (which ends with them all being "drummed out of town"), the drums belong to the Red Knight, who is coming towards the square to capture all within but is driven away by the White Knight, who is then onstage to have his scene with Alice.

The other changes were predominately surface-level; I removed, for example, the exchange about "ham sandwiches and hay" from the White King's scene because, after all, I'm going to a predominantly vegetarian location. I allowed the Sheep in the shop scene to haggle with Alice, taking my inspiration from this charming young man. I kept as much of Carroll's original dialogue in the play as I could possibly squeeze in, and the play stands at about 80% his writing (organized into script form) and 20% mine. This, of course, you saw with the way I handled Chapter Seven.

Looks like I've come to the end of this series, unless there are questions or concerns I can field from the audience. I'll keep you posted on what happens to the text, particularly as the translation process begins. That ought to be interesting.

'Till next time...

Alice, Part Four: The Adaptation

Here is the second half of this dual post: my adaptation of Chapter Seven. I'm putting my adaptation and the original text side-by-side so you all can see how I adapted it. The following post (which will probably come tomorrow, and should be the final post in this series) will analyze why I made the choices I did when writing the adaptation.

(For copyright purposes: the following text is under copyright, all rights are reserved, and I will hunt you down.)

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WHITE KING: Hello? Are you – are you part of my army?

ALICE: I’m a pawn, if it please Your Majesty.

WHITE KING: A pawn? Well, a pleasure to meet you! I’m the White King.

ALICE: Yes, thank you, Your Majesty.

WHITE KING: I need you to do something for me, little pawn. Look all down that road, and tell me who you see.

ALICE looks.

ALICE: I see nobody, Your Majesty.

WHITE KING: I only wish I had such eyes… to be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, in this light!

ALICE: Oh, but there’s somebody coming now! But he’s moving very slowly – and what curious attitudes he goes into!

WHITE KING: Oh, he’s an Anglo-Saxon messenger, and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes! His name is Haigha. My other messenger’s called Hatta. I have two, you know. To come and go. One to come, and one to go!

ALICE: I beg your pardon.

WHITE KING: It isn’t respectable to beg.

HAIGHA arrives. He carries a few bags slung over his shoulder.

HAIGHA: My lord!

WHITE KING: Tell me, who did you pass on the road?

HAIGHA: Well, I passed nobody.

WHITE KING: Quite right – this young lady saw him too. So that means Nobody walks slower than you.

HAIGHA: That’s not fair. I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do.

WHITE KING: He can’t do that, or else he’d have been here first. What news do you have for me?

HAIGHA: I’ll whisper it.

HAIGHA leans over to the WHITE KING and screams in his ear.

HAIGHA: They’re at it again!

WHITE KING: You call that a whisper? I feel faint.

HAIGHA: I’ll give you some hay, my lord.

HAIGHA takes hay from a bag and applies it to the WHITE KING’S forehead.

WHITE KING: There’s nothing like hay when one’s feeling faint.

ALICE: I would think that cold water to the forehead would be better – or perhaps some sal-volatile.

WHITE KING: I didn’t say there was nothing better, I said there was nothing like it!

ALICE: Who is at it again?

WHITE KING: The Lion and the Unicorn!

HAIGHA: They’re fighting for the crown!

WHITE KING: The Lion beat the Unicorn

HAIGHA: All around the town!

Alice, Part Three: The Text

I've decided, to help everybody out as I explain this next part, to place a short sample of the original text of Through The Looking Glass and my adaptation side-by-side.

Since they're both a little lengthy, I'm doing them as two separate posts.

First, your text sample -- from Chapter Seven: "The Lion and the Unicorn."

(For copyright purposes: Through the Looking Glass is very, very public domain.)

******************************************

The next moment soldiers cam running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by.

She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men.

Then came the horses. Having four feet, these managed rather better than the foot-soldiers: but even THEY stumbled now and then; and it seemed to be a regular rule that, whenever a horse stumbled the rider fell off instantly. The confusion got worse every moment, and Alice was very glad to get out of the wood into an open place, where she found the White King seated on the ground, busily writing in his memorandum-book.

`I've sent them all!' the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing Alice. `Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?'

`Yes, I did,' said Alice: several thousand, I should think.'

`Four thousand two hundred and seven, that's the exact number,' the King said, referring to his book. `I couldn't send all the horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game. And I haven't sent the two Messengers, either. They're both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.'

`I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.

`I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!'

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. `I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. `But he's coming very slowly -- and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)

`Not at all,' said the King. `He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger -- and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy. His name ia Haigha.' (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with `mayor.'

`I love my love with an H,' Alice couldn't help beginning,' because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with -- with -- with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives -- '

`He lives on the Hill,' the King remarked simply, without the least idea that he was joining in the game, while Alice was still hesitating for the name of a town beginning with H. `The other Messenger's called Hatta. I must have TWO, you know -- to come and go. Once to come, and one to go.'

`I beg your pardon?' said Alice.

`It isn't respectable to beg,' said the King.

`I only meant that I didn't understand,' said Alice. `Why one to come and one to go?'

`Don't I tell you?' the King repeated impatiently. `I must have Two -- to fetch and carry. One to fetch, and one to carry.'

At this moment the Messenger arrived: he was far too much out of breath to say a word, and could only wave his hands about, and make the most fearful faces at the poor King.

`This young lady loves you with an H,' the King said, introducing Alice in the hope of turning off the Messenger's attention from himself -- but it was no use -- the Anglo-Saxon attitudes only got more extraordinary every moment, while the great eyes rolled wildly from side to side.

`You alarm me!' said the King. `I feel faint -- Give me a ham sandwich!'

On which the Messenger, to Alice's great amusement, opened a bag that hung round his neck, and handed a sandwich to the King, who devoured it greedily.

`Another sandwich!' said the King.

`There's nothing but hay left now,' the Messenger said, peeping into the bag.

`Hay, then,' the King murmured in a faint whisper.

Alice was glad to see that it revived him a good deal. `There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint,' he remarked to her, as he munched away.

`I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,' Alice suggested: `or some sal-volatile.'

`I didn't say there was nothing BETTER,' the King replied. `I said there was nothing LIKE it.' Which Alice did not venture to deny.

`Who did you pass on the road?' the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay.

`Nobody,' said the Messenger.

`Quite right,' said the King: `this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.

`I do my best,' the Messenger said in a sulky tone. `I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!'

`He can't do that,' said the King, `or else he'd have been here first. However, now you've got your breath, you may tell us what's happened in the town.'

`I'll whisper it,' said the Messenger, putting his hands to his mouth in the shape of a trumpet, and stooping so as to get close to the King's ear. Alice was sorry for this, as she wanted to hear the news too. However, instead of whispering, he simply shouted at the top of his voice `They're at it again!'

`Do you call THAT a whisper?' cried the poor King, jumping up and shaking himself. `If you do such a thing again, I'll have you buttered! It went through and through my head like an earthquake!'

`It would have to be a very tiny earthquake!' thought Alice. `Who are at it again?' she ventured to ask.

`Why the Lion and the Unicorn, of course,' said the King.

`Fighting for the crown?'

`Yes, to be sure,' said the King: `and the best of the joke is, that it's MY crown all the while! Let's run and see them.' And they trotted off, Alice repeating to herself, as she ran, the words of the old song: --

`The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:
The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town.
Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown;
Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town.'

Flowers In My Hair

Someone dear asked me recently to wear flowers in my hair.

Until they bloom fully, I'll send this instead.


(It's Maxfield Parrish's Reverie.)

Alice, Part Two: What I Learned From The Films

Sorry about the long delay (two days... an eternity in e-time... or should it be i-time... no, we don't want to put an "i" in front of anything else). I've been a little distracted as of late (all good things), not to mention that I just got pulled to be the musical director for Our Town and so I'm back, once again, in rehearsal.

What I Learned From The Films.

Shripriya mentioned that this would be a useful guide to aspiring filmmakers as well as aspiring theatre directors. I agree. I think that any filmmaker wanting to get started should find and view as many of these films as possible (a good compendium of titles, plus some mild analysis/criticism, can be found here). They're useful to compare and contrast shots and cuts as well as casting, design, style, and all of those wonderful things.

Anyway, here are some things I've noticed -- set up, rather arbitrarily, as "rules."

1. Do not presume yourself cleverer than the source. This does not work. Lewis Carroll was a very intelligent man. In addition to being an author and poet, he was a mathematical genius. Your jokes are never more funny than his jokes. This is a hard rule to follow when creating an adaptation, because one always wants to include a few wink-wink-nudge-nudge moments, but they must be very judicially employed or else they will end up like the Mad Hatter Tea Party scene in William Sterling's 1972 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He stays blindingly faithful to the text until he hits this scene, whereupon he suddenly allows the Mad Hatter and March Hare to start spouting his own jokes -- along the lines of "What did the father ghost say to the baby ghost? Spook only when you are spooken to!"

Was "why is a raven like a writing desk" not a good enough riddle?

2. Concepts will work, if they do not violate Rule Number One. One of my favorite Alice films is the Broadway Theatre Archive recording of Elizabeth Swados' Alice at the Palace. She remains faithful to the text and to the spirit of the story, but sets it in a meta-theatrical, presentational vaudeville milieu. In other words, Alice does not journey underground, but onto a stage; and the characters she meets are not only characters, but actors as well. Imagine yourself opening a strange door and finding yourself walking out onto a brightly lit stage in a darkened auditorium, with people coming towards you and singing. What would you do? That's the concept Swados sets forth, and it succeeds brilliantly. Perhaps it succeeds because it takes the foremost tenet of Carroll's book -- a person finds herself immersed in strange world -- and builds upon this theme while simply changing the setting of the strange world.

3. Be very careful when cutting the text. This is not just because there are book-lovers out there who will wail if you skip over the chapter where Alice meets the gnat. It's because the text -- any text -- is built upon a particular framework, and removing scenes or lines or even words is like pulling sticks out of a game of Pick-Up-Sticks (or Spillikans, since we're talking Brit-lit). Eventually, the tower of sticks will collapse.

Through the Looking Glass is even more crucial because Alice meets a different character on each square of the chessboard. If a character or scene is cut, she's lost an entire square and she'll go through the play (or film) making fewer stops than she should. Don't think your audience won't notice.

David Ball, in his book Backwards and Forwards (another must-read for filmmakers, Shripriya) gives a much better example even than Alice. He reminds us that, for the sake of length, most directors cut the Fortinbras plot from Hamlet, and make it a story about domestic rather than international revenge. Yet with the Fortinbras scenes gone, Hamlet makes fewer stops than he should, and the story we get isn't at all the story Shakespeare wrote. The audience usually doesn't notice because they haven't read or don't remember the original, but the addition of the scenes (go watch the Kenneth Branagh film) makes the story so much richer -- and it makes so much more sense.

4. Allow your audience the pleasure of contextualizing. In the 1985 Irwin Allen megahit T.V. miniseries Alice In Wonderland (which included Through The Looking Glass), he allows the Dormouse to begin his story about the three little sisters who live in the treacle well -- but then has the March Hare instantly interrupt with "that's the same thing as molasses!" Thanks for stopping the narrative flow, Mr. Allen. Not to mention that it deprives the audience of making the discovery of what treacle is on their own, and disrupts the otherwise pleasurable activity of having to pay very close attention to the Dormouse's story to discover what exactly is in this well along with the three little sisters.

5. Don't skimp on the rabbit suit -- or, Choose Your Design Well. Elizabeth Swados' "actor in rehearsal clothes" makes a much more convincing rabbit than the handful of poor men stuffed into fuzzy onesies who appear in other films, because he takes the time to move and sniff and thump like a rabbit. Likewise, certain visuals make much more of an impact than others. When writing an adaptation, have you set yourself scenes which can be staged in dramatically arresting ways? And when directing one, have you selected and refined those moments? Or have you stuffed the show in a onesie?

6. Leave space for music and dance. This, I think, applies to everything. Possibly to life as well.

That's all I have time for today... the next installment will tell how I wrote my adaptation, and which of these rules I chose to follow, and which I chose to break. ^__^

Alice, Part One: My Relationship with the Text

I teach an "introduction to directing" class as part of my graduate assistantship. At the beginning of the semester, I sat my students down and told them that everything I needed to learn about directing, I learned from Alice in Wonderland.

There's a picture, somewhere, of a three-year-old Blue in a polyester nightgown with Garfield printed across the front. It's Christmas morning in Tempe, Arizona. I had just received my first real copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass -- a blue paperback Puffin. Inside are not only the two novels, but a handful of essays, poems, author's notes, and the famous diagram in which Carroll explains how his chess problem works.

(I say "first real copy" because prior to that I had owned a "fake copy;" a picture book based on the Disney movie which came with an audio cassette that read the story aloud. I used to put on the cassette and run around the house in my own little blue dress and white pinafore, acting out the story as it played.)

Anyway. I still have the blue Puffin, although this past Christmas I received Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice to supplement it, and to serve as my go-to for this Hyderabad project, because I think if I opened the paperback copy one more time, the pages would crumble and fall to pieces. The back is already covered with tape, and new tape to hold down the yellowed tape, and my favorite chapters have long since peeled away from the book's spine.

I don't know why Alice -- that is, why I was so attracted to this book, more even than Peter Pan or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or any of the other books I loved as a child. Possibly because Alice was young and clever and a girl, like me; possibly because I was attracted to Carroll's sophistication even before I knew what it was (the book, after all, is not at all written "for children" and is a complicated network of puns and allusions); possibly because the book taught me things, like logic and poetry and chess.

Possibly because the unique magic of this book is that it can be read in two entirely different ways -- the completely literal way, as it would be read by a three-year-old who thinks "glory" does in fact mean "a nice knock-down argument" because that's what it says on the page, and the analytical way, as it would be read by someone who's solving for the chess puzzle and who understands the subtle references to Tennyson and Wordsworth and Disraeli. And the magic is that with every passing year and every rereading, one can make a new discovery and shift from the former to the latter interpretation.

It could also be because the director in me loved the film adaptations. There are currently more than twenty different films based on the Alice stories, and I've seen about half of them (the ones I haven't seen are out of print or too obscure to be found). I told my directing class that everything I needed to learn about being a director I learned from watching Alice, and it's (at least partially) true -- after sampling these films one learns a great deal about staging, action, mise-en-scene, tempo, rhythm, casting, literal-vs.-non-literal storytelling, etc. etc. etc.

One also learns -- and very quickly -- that there's no one way to tell a story, which I think is something that gets lost in current teachings about theatre and the focus on the "right" or "best" interpretation.

Prior to this project I've created three stage adaptations; a musical based on James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks, a play-with-music based on Choderlos De Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and a play-set-to-music based on Alice in Wonderland. The Thurber and the Alice adaptation were both given public performances; the De Laclos became an unstaged project, although some of the music was performed "in concert."

I've always kept the twenty Alice films close to mind when I've worked to adapt a piece of literature for the stage, and they were of course immediately present when I began to write the adaptation for Hyderabad...

(I'm going to leave that as a cliffhanger for you, as there is still other work for me to do tonight, but the rest of the story will follow shortly. ^__^)

Nickel and Dimed Photo-Style Dance Mix!

Well... looks like the next post will be on Alice. ^__^

But... later. Right now I have a few other things to do, and it will take some time.

Meanwhile, the Nickel and Dimed production photos have just come in, and I'm delighted. So I'll do a quick post on photos to tide you over until you get the longer post on Alice.

Enjoy!