The Versatile Blogger Award!

July 11, 2014 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

Try to picture me now, six foot three inches of hangdog pout, twisting the toes of one foot back and forth on the floor in shame at having let something sit for far too long. A month or so back I was nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award, and like a lazy farmer wondering why the crops aren’t doing anything when the seeds haven’t been planted yet, I let this sit, and sit, and recede into the shallows of memory, assuring myself that I would indeed get around to it. Terrible. Well, after a few other projects have been swept from the deck, here I am finally, getting around to said thing. Despite my drag-assedness, I’m deeply grateful to the four stellar talents who were kind enough to nominate this tiny corner of the Internets: Michelle Gordon, Jessica West, Nillu Stelter and Debbie Vega. Thank you so very much ladies! Keep being awesome, and more to the point, keep writing awesomely. And sorry I’ve taken so long to accept your generous nomination!

The rules for this particular honor are: thank the person(s) who nominated you (check!), disclose seven interesting factoids about yourself, and nominate fifteen more deserving winners. As regards the seven interesting facts about myself, well… I’m not really that interesting a person. I can string words together pretty well on paper and I’m okay at parties until my material runs out, but you’d probably brush past me on the street and not even realize I was there. I suppose I write fiction to make up for the tame trappings of an average, middle-class upbringing and ongoing life. But if you’re looking to be regaled by recollections of jaunts through the African savanna or the backstreet jazz clubs of New Orleans or rubbing elbows with the famous and the powerful, you’ve clicked on the wrong link. It’s why I have to try to captivate you with my words; the rest of me won’t do it. Regardless, here goes with a few things you might not otherwise know about me.

1. As noted above, I am six-foot-three, shuffling along in a world designed for the five-foot-six. This means a chronic case of slouching and a neck somewhat out of alignment from leaning forward to look down. It also means, for whatever reason, strangers predisposed to think you are athletic. I am incredibly not. I marvel at shorter folks who can run marathons – I’m wrecked after a half-walked 5K. At the risk of sounding a bit Dangerfield-esque about it, I was such a lousy athlete as a child that even the teachers picked me last. Can’t throw, can’t hit, can’t kick, can’t field. And to think that a childhood dream (swiftly extinguished by reality) was pitching in major league baseball. Nope – closest I’ll get is field level seats, and you know what? I’m totally okay with that.

2. When I was a teenager, I drew comic books. This is similar to #1 in that I cannot really draw, either. My character was an anthropomorphised simian version of James Bond (for the simple reason that monkeys were easier to draw than humans) and I did seven books with him, only four of which were finished. The last one, that part of me regrets not completing, was a James Bond-Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover, in which Bond fell for Dr. Crusher. And because I couldn’t draw, the story was a lot of dialogue and character development as opposed to splash pages of pencil-crayoned ass kicking. Doing these books did teach me a great deal about how to create character beats and arcs, how to plot, and how to sharpen the storytelling edge to finish within the number of pages left in the purloined school exercise book.

3. I usually wear at least one piece of Disney-related clothing on any given day. It started a few years ago with one solitary T-shirt; now the wardrobe has expanded considerably through ties, boxers and other apparel, and I’m writing this with a grinning Mickey Mouse displayed proudly on the left breast of my black golf shirt. We’ve added Olaf to our growing empire of stuffed animals; he’s on a shelf in our living room, enjoying the summer and peering down at the mischievous kittens who are plotting to knock him from his lofty perch.

4. Speaking of kittens, after we said goodbye to our beloved Muffins, we acquired two new furry friends to carry on her legacy: siblings Dudley and Daila. Dudley is an orange tabby while Daila is a tortoiseshell, and while they are both very sweet, Dudley is a master thief! He has stolen articles of clothing, stress balls, batteries and keys, but his favorite target is pieces of fruit, specifically, bananas. We have to hide any bananas we buy in the microwave, otherwise we’ll wake up in the morning with a banana in our bed. Last weekend Dudley figured out how to open the desk drawer in our kitchen, and pilfered a ball of string. Even though we were proud (and a tad terrified) of his ingenuity, we were somewhat disappointed at his descent into cliche. It’s all right, he’s young, he’ll grow up and be quoting Proust before you know it. (A la recherche du souris perdu, anyone?)

5. My wife and I are part of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, and we mentor a young boy we’ve known since he was nine. It was a year and a half after we met him that we were introduced to the then-11-year-old who would become our adopted son. So you don’t have to be a major in anything to connect those dots and realize that the experience of mentoring made us realize that we could parent an older child. A project still lingering on the backburner is a detailed article about being a mentor which I’m hoping to get finished in the next couple of weeks, so watch this space for updates on that.

6. The infamous novel to which I have alluded from time to time is still working its way through the query trenches, now numbering 11 rejections all told. I refuse to accept that this is a trend, and I soldier on. One rather disappointing (yet interesting) tale from this process is having a Twitter pitch for it favorited by one particular agent after she had already rejected the query and sample chapters, which were sent to her because she favorited the same pitch in a prior Twitter contest. (She was great about it though.) With that sort of thing, you just have to laugh and keep going. There was another form rejection I received that was so apologetic I almost felt I should have responded, assuring the agent that I didn’t take it personally and that I wasn’t going to go fledermaus-scheise on her. Probably a result of too many wannabes doing just that. As an aside to any literary agent out there who might be reading this, I promise promise PROMISE that I won’t be a jerkwad if you say no to me. I’m taking a stand against that crap. I may even develop a variation of the Serenity Prayer for rejected writers, or something more basic, like “I will not break, I will not bend, I will not turn into a raging douche-a-holic.”

7. And lastly, I have struggled with my hair since as long as I can remember. The avatar I use for all my social media profiles is one of the rare few pictures in which I find it looks somewhat respectable, instead of like a wildebeest flayed by a helicopter rotor.

Ok then! Onwards to the third part of this here deal. Versatility to me suggests, at least by its dictionary definition, individuals with a wide range of skills. Applied to blogging it would therefore seem to mean people who write well about a lot of different subjects. This runs contrary to most blogging advice, which posits that in order to build an audience you should focus on one topic you know really well and then just write the bejeezus out of that, rather than trying to be good for all time zones. I suppose that when you become established as a “voice” that others seek out, you are then freer to weigh in on whatever you want, as opposed to trying to build a niche audience from nothing. Some blogs I follow are informative writing resources, others are pop culture treasure troves, others still are founts of creativity expressed through wildly imaginative fiction. What they share, however, are voices I look forward to hearing, and find myself missing when absent.

You’ve been bearing with me for this long, and I want to shake it up and end on something of a twist, so here it is: rather than list fifteen names and links you won’t click on, I’m going to do Q&A’s with each person I nominate. I enjoyed hosting Emmie Mears in June and it’s given me the itch to do some more of that there stuff. I just think you’ll get more of a sense of why I admire these writers, and it’ll give them a chance to talk about what drives them, what scares them, what they’re after and what they want their legacy to be. None of this fill-in-the-blank, true-or-false quick answer claptrap, we’re going to dive deep down, tug at the heart and probe the soul. I’m gonna be the Brian Linehan of the blogging world if it kills me. (I am aware that Brian Linehan is dead, so that could be taken the wrong way. I meant in the sense of his detailed interviewing style.) And each will of course be asked for their favorite swear word.

This might take a while so don’t expect all fifteen to show up in the next week, or even the next couple of months – it’ll be an ongoing feature here and I’ll categorize them so they’re easy for you to find. To my unwitting subjects: watch your Twitter DM’s and your email inboxes, like so many arrows loosed by an intrepid archer, or darts flung at a perforated cork board by a drunken punter round the pub, my questions will be coming for you. Mwa ha ha.

With a Song in My Heart: W is for…

April 26, 2014April 25, 2014 ~ Graham Milne ~ 8 Comments

“When You Wish Upon a Star” – Cliff Edwards (as Jiminy Cricket), 1940.

When I was putting the list of songs for this series together, this was one of the first, most obvious choices. It isn’t my intention, however, to spend these thousand-odd words talking about my life with Disney: that has been covered, I think, rather well, here, here, here, here and here. Rather, I want to talk about one particular wish upon a star that as of yesterday, roundabouts 2:00 in the afternoon (in a nice bit of serendipity with the timing of this particular song post) came true. Our adoption of our son was finalized. Though in our hearts he’s been part of our family since the moment we met him, in the eyes of the law he is now forever, irrevocably, ours. His life lies entirely within our hands; whatever may befall him going forward will be our responsibility and our fates will be forever intertwined. Till death us do part.

I haven’t talked much about him here for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it’s to preserve his privacy. You see enough stories about cyberbullying to make us very grateful that he hasn’t asked to be on Facebook or Instagram or anything else. My son has no digital footprint, and he doesn’t need one to grow up happy and healthy and with a rich experience of what young life has to offer him. The second reason is a bit selfish, and it’s that my wife and I have talked about adapting our experience of becoming adoptive parents of an older child into a book, so best to save the lion’s share of the stories for that eventual publication. Sitting in the courtroom yesterday, with this upcoming post looming, the words of this song flitted across my thoughts and it occurred to me that the path of wishes is often winding, with the realization of dreams seldom taking the shape of how they were initially conceived. In less pretentious English, that’s my way of saying how I never imagined I’d become a parent in this particular way. And yet, here I am. Dad, for good.

You will sometimes read stories about celebrities who talk about their single-minded pursuit of their goals, with a clear plan established from childhood and each step executed with undeviating precision, so that when success comes it’s less a surprise and more an inevitable conclusion. They know their future down to the minute. This kind of ordered life is not my experience. Nor, I suspect, do the majority of the world’s population find their existence unfolding like clockwork. When I was nine years old, I started writing a novel about a boy and his horse. I distinctly remember the day I had decided to do it, and I had not written more than the first paragraph before I ran into my parents asking if we could get it published. My father, wisely, suggested that I finish the book first and then we could see about it. At that point I had everything planned out: published at ten, a worldwide phenomenon at eleven, movie deal at twelve, retirement at thirteen. It needs not be stated, I suspect, that none of the aforementioned came to pass. (If I am fortunate enough to get a novel published at some point in the near future, it will certainly not be that one. I’m still slogging through the query process at present, and should those stars align I’ll wager it won’t be in any way how I imagined it.) In much the same way, every new year at school I imagined that this was the year I’d finally meet THE ONE. As dry times drifted by, I kept faith that I would someday meet the woman I’d marry, little realizing it wouldn’t be until I was thirty. But that dream came true. This summer we celebrate seven years of marriage.

The song promises that “Fate is kind, she brings to those who love the sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.” Even as I recited my marriage vows, I wasn’t certain I wanted to be a father. I felt too young, too inexperienced, too utterly lacking the qualities of patience and wisdom that seemed to exude from every parent I knew. Moreover, the idea of that responsibility was terrifying. I’d just come through some tremendous personal turmoil and taking on someone else’s burden was an impossible notion. So I went in to the pursuit of parenthood fairly half-heartedly. After struggling for several years with the frustration and heartbreak of futile fertility treatments, we eventually resigned ourselves to the idea that it would be just the two of us. At the time, I was okay with that, or at least, I put on a good show of being okay with it. Then against expectation, we found ourselves moving to a house within spitting distance of an elementary school. A man whom my wife has often consulted for spiritual advice suggested that this new home would be full of positive energy, and that a child would come into our lives in a most unexpected way. When we signed up to mentor a young boy through Big Brothers and Big Sisters, we thought maybe this was what he was referring to. And then one gray afternoon in late December, in a charged conversation we both arrived at the conclusion that something was still missing. Mentoring once a week wasn’t enough. We needed to be parents.

Two years and four months after that initial talk, with our families as witnesses we completed the final step. Any lingering questions were wiped away by the tears welling up as Madam Justice read out the adoption order and congratulated us. I’m still filled with doubt about the job I’m doing as a father, about whether I’m showing enough patience and whether or not I’m wrecking his self-esteem every time I lecture him about whatever he’s done that’s irked me today. What I don’t doubt anymore is whether or not I wanted this life. Fate, it seems, has indeed been kind, and fulfilled this particular secret longing. It knew what was meant for me better than I did. We have an amazing son, a bright, good-hearted boy whose future with us is far greater than the one that awaited him in foster care. I look forward to the day I can stand up at his wedding and tell all the embarrassing stories that I’m cataloguing for that very purpose, and when I can bounce that first grandchild on my knee. I have no idea what that will look like, but I know it will come. The star has been chosen and the wish has been made. And Jiminy Cricket told me so.

Long live the Queen

January 20, 2014January 23, 2014 ~ Graham Milne ~ 5 Comments

Amy Good kicks off today’s musings with her thoughtful post about the challenge in writing supernaturally empowered characters. While it’s important reading for anyone crafting a story that includes such elements (guilty), it got me thinking again about Frozen and what a pivotal moment for the cinematic portrayal of women the character of Queen Elsa actually is. You’ll forgive the inklings of hyperbole creeping into that statement, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. (For additional insightful reading on Frozen and its depiction of women, be sure to check out Emmie Mears’ take at Searching For Superwomen, Debbie Vega’s at Moon in Gemini and Liz Hawksworth’s at The Stretch for Something Beautiful.) I touched on this briefly in my original take on the movie, written the evening after I saw it, but as the movie has sloshed around my subconscious for the last several weeks, and I’ve listened to “Let It Go” more times than should be healthy, I’ve realized that there’s a lot more here worth exploring in greater detail, and some of these other great posts have crystallized – pardon the obvious pun – my thinking on the subject.

To delve more deeply into this character, we have to go back to her long-simmering genesis. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen has been around since 1845, and Walt Disney himself had long wanted to give the classic tale the animated treatment. The stumbling block was always the title character, how to create a compelling version of her that would give modern audiences something to sink their teeth into, and several attempts fell by the wayside and were abandoned. Even as the movie finally got underway in the latter half of the 2000’s, the story team still couldn’t crack the Queen. The first stroke of inspiration involved making her the sister of the protagonist, Anna. The second, and indeed the masterstroke, was in stripping Elsa of her villainy. If you look at some of the original character concepts (just Google it, there are too many hyperlinks in this post already), Elsa was going to be your tired and typical wicked witch, with Anna presumably forced to fight and ruefully defeat her. And then, so the legend has it, the songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez brought a draft of Elsa’s anthem “Let It Go” to the producers – planned originally as a “look how eeeeevil I am” strut in the vein of similar ditties belted out by Disney villains past. Of course, that’s not what the Lopezes delivered. “Let It Go” is a triumphant refrain of self-realization, not something you’d hear from the lips of Ursula, Gaston, Jafar, Scar or any of the Disney baddies that had come before. Surely, then, Elsa could remain a good person, grappling with her own fears of who she’s become, and figuring out a way to integrate all the parts of her soul into a complete and confident being. And to give that arc to a woman with magical powers is a blast of fresh Arctic air. Full marks to screenwriter/co-director Jennifer Lee.

The wicked witch is one of the most regrettable archetypes in literature, because it originates from a fundamental place of (male) discomfort with the idea of powerful women. We dudes have to face it and deal – women are always going to have powers that we don’t. They can bear children, i.e. create life; short of bad Arnold Schwarzenegger comedies we’re forever out of luck on that one. To be completely candid and even a little NC-17, women can arouse us physically in a way we can’t really reciprocate. And even more to the point, we will never figure them out, no matter how long we spend in their company, how many writings of theirs we read, how many times we beat our heads against the wall when they do something completely unexpected and seemingly out of character. They’re piercingly right with that old refrain – we just don’t understand. We won’t. And everyone knows what the typical human reaction is to something we don’t understand.

I recall reading once that the biggest driver of the persecution of witches in medieval Europe was that era’s version of the American Medical Association, that is, the assorted doctors of the time who were peeved that women were doing better at healing the sick with herbs and other natural lore than they were with the presumably university-endorsed “leech and bleed” treatment. Invoking a mistranslated Bible verse and calling every second woman a witch was, to them, simply an effective way of eliminating the competition in the medical field. To say nothing of how many other men probably hurled the charge when an innocent woman failed to return their romantic advances. The witch became a catchall for everything men didn’t like about the opposite gender, and slithered her way into the darkest pages of the fairy tales that endure to this day. Always out to cause mischief and throw up barriers to true love and occasionally eat a child or two.

To be fair, Disney’s earliest animated efforts did little to dispel this archetype. Snow White had the Evil Queen, Sleeping Beauty had Maleficent, both characters of tremendous power, beauty and irredeemable evil (noteworthy that Maleficent’s name comes from the Latin maleficium, which means “wrongdoing.”) We also had the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, and a long, verging on infinite line of fantasy films both sumptuous and cheap featuring scantily-clad and/or hideous magical ladies waylaying our heroes with a combination of spells and wiles and cackling laughter, leading up to Tilda Swinton’s White Witch in the Narnia series, Charlize Theron’s Queen Ravenna in Snow White and the Huntsman, and Mila Kunis’ Theodora and Rachel Weisz’s Evanora in Oz: The Great and Powerful. Such an easy path to tread for screenwriters half-assing their way through a script assignment. What is the usual fate of these legions of empowered women? Death. Depowering and humiliation from time to time, but usually death. It’s what they get for stepping outside the natural order, for interfering with the cause of love and freedom, baby. When it’s at the hands of a man with a sword, the metaphor becomes even more painfully obvious. Man conquering the unremitting darkness that is woman with his you-know-what. Cue the Viagra ads.

In Frozen, Elsa’s cryokinetic powers are vast, verging on goddess-level. We’re not just talking a blast of ice cubes here and there. She blankets an entire kingdom in an eternal winter. In the “Let It Go” sequence, she builds a stunning palace of ice with a few waves of her hand and stamps of her feet. She can defend herself easily against a squad of armed men, and most importantly, she can create life. With a mere flicker of her magic she conjures Olaf the snowman, an autonomous being with his own unique personality, and also her hulking hench-monster Marshmallow (who, if you stayed till the end of the credits, proves he has a softer side as well.) To my recollection, the last time a female character as powerful as Elsa appeared on screen was 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. Like Elsa, Jean Grey in that movie was a woman born with incredible abilities she couldn’t control, and also like Elsa, attempted to live within constraints placed upon her by men, until her powers eventually exploded and injured those she cared most about. Of course, how did that all work out? Predictably, Jean turned evil, disintegrated a bunch of people, and had to be put out of her misery by a man with metal claws (more below-the-belt symbolism), after she begged him to kill her. Impaled through the cold, dark heart just like the wicked witch deserves.

Frozen does not end with Elsa being saved or murdered by a man, or losing her powers. It ends, ironically, with Elsa becoming even more powerful – gaining strength from her sister’s love and learning to thaw what she has frozen. Achieving a balance and serenity within herself. One of the most delightful little moments from the end of the movie is watching Elsa create a skating rink for her subjects and them having fun with it, because it signifies that she hasn’t had to sacrifice what makes her special to find acceptance from the outside world. In her review, Debbie mentioned that some critics of the movie have suggested that Elsa should have had a love interest. I can’t think of anything that would have so wrecked the essential message. A woman’s journey to realizing her power is one she has to take on her own, without some barrel-chested dingus patting her hand and telling her “there, there.” Ultimately, Anna’s sacrifice was about showing Elsa she needed to love herself, and that she could, because her sister would always have her back. I can’t see that having worked as well or resonated as deeply if Anna was Andy.

What is Frozen telling us menfolk, then? That a powerful woman isn’t someone we should fear, or try to cage. That she isn’t someone we need to conquer or subdue in any way. That we do best to help her figure out who she is and the extent of what she can do by staying the @#$@ out of her way. And that the greatest thing we can do when she uses that power is cheer.

Save the father, save the world

January 6, 2014 ~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

“Winds in the east, mist coming in, like something is brewin’, about to begin… Can’t put me finger on what lies in store, but I fear what’s to happen, all happened before.”

First uttered on screen by Dick Van Dyke in 1964, those words are whispered again by the unlikely voice of Colin Farrell as Saving Mr. Banks begins, over vistas of turn-of-the-last-century Australia and the dream-lost face of the young Helen Goff, who will grow up to become author P.L. Travers and the creator of Mary Poppins. In short order we leap forward from the idyll to early 1960’s England, where the adult Travers (Emma Thompson) remains, after 20 years of attempts by Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) to purchase the film rights from her, stubborn in her determination to avoid having her beloved creation bowdlerized by uncouth Americans who don’t seem to understand what the story is about, or, more importantly, what it means to her. Drawn in for the moment by the allure of some much-needed funds, Travers agrees to fly to Los Angeles to work with the creative team on the screenplay for Mary Poppins – “work with” meaning shoot down almost every single idea – while resisting Disney’s personal charm offensive. The unstoppable force meets the immovable object, and as the movie proceeds along two time-separated narratives, we see the girl trying to save her treasured father from his deterioration, and the woman fighting to preserve his memory from people she thinks are only interested in exploiting it for the sake of a mediocre cartoon.

Much like the movie whose conception it depicts, there are no villains in Saving Mr. Banks; only goodhearted people attempting to do the right thing, whether it is Farrell as Travers’ father reacting to every setback with a twinkle in his eye and spring in his step, or the increasingly exasperated but always smiling screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and composers Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman) struggling to meet the impossible conditions put forth by the uncooperative Travers during interminable meetings. Particularly touching is the relationship that develops between Travers and her sunny limo driver Ralph (Paul Giamatti); while first treating him as an ill-informed Yankee, she comes to see him as a true friend, and is inspired to pass along to Ralph’s physically challenged daughter the proof that disabilities are not the same thing as limitations. But misunderstandings abound, naturally, and this is probably the first screenplay in the history of Hollywood where the crisis point at the end of the second act involves whether or not penguins are to be animated. (As an aside, it’s also the first screenplay to my knowledge where a character utters my last name: checking into her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel only to find it’s been filled with Disney stuffed animals as welcome gifts, Travers shoves aside a Winnie the Pooh and grumbles “Ugh, A.A. Milne.” I – what’s the expression – fangirl squeed?)

I’m a sucker for movies about Hollywood, particularly old Hollywood, and the attention to detail in recreating the feel of the Disney production offices (and Disneyland itself) of the early 60’s is impeccable. The performances, especially Thompson’s, are elegant, the cinematography is lush, and the score is full of life and hope. Magic exudes from each frame. But despite the central conflict between Travers’ obstinacy and Disney’s persistence that is the focus of the trailers, the movie is about fathers, and the complex relationships we continue to have with them long after they are gone. That is where Saving Mr. Banks packs its most powerful emotional punch. Like Hamlet, the ghost of the father looms in every scene – Travers Goff, the man who helped the young “Ginty” unlock her imagination and set her on the path to becoming a storyteller, honored posthumously in her choice of surname for her writing career. Befuddled by the author’s seemingly irrelevant demands on the script, articulated by frustrated Bob Sherman who pointedly queries, “What does it matter?”, Walt Disney initially misses the mark, thinking that Mary Poppins comes to save the children. We have the benefit of hindsight, having watched, dozens of times, David Tomlinson as George Banks evolve from curmudgeonly drone to a man full of life and wonder and joy. The children don’t even say goodbye to Mary Poppins when she leaves, but they don’t have to, as her spirit has found a new home in their own dear father. Late in Saving Mr. Banks, Disney relates to Travers a tale of his own upbringing in wintry Missouri and of his difficult relationship with his hard-driving father Elias, and the two creative forces finally find their connection – a shared desire to redeem the old man.

Being someone’s child is taking on the responsibility of their legacy, willing or not. In the movie, Ginty cannot understand why her beloved father is falling apart before her eyes, and she struggles to help him preserve his happiness and his dignity, even where her efforts are unintentionally harmful. In creating the character of George Banks, P.L. Travers wanted (the movie posits, at least) to give her father the happy ending he could never find for himself. When she sees him depicted on screen, and when she experiences the joy of the audience in watching him triumph, she weeps. My father died when I was 11, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a significant portion of why I do what I do is trying to ensure that his name is regarded in perpetuity as highly as I think it should be – the same name (though different family) P.L. Travers mouths onscreen. He was the person I experienced stories with. Reading to me, and with me, taking me to the movies, kindling a lifelong love of narrative and of imagination and promise lying within pages and celluloid. He used to let me borrow his handheld dictaphone so I could record my own imaginary episodes of The A-Team (don’t ask). He’d let me fill LP-sized floppy disks from his office computer full of chapters of an unfinished attempted novel about a boy and his racehorse. And though he died long before I ever began to take writing seriously, every time I sit down at the keyboard I’m hoping that it will turn out to be something he would have liked, that he would have boasted to his friends and colleagues about. (Knowing him, he’d boast about it even if it was an illiterate pile of tripe.) And perhaps, beneath the veil of different characters in settings far removed from that available to a small-town attorney, I’m trying to give him his happy ending too. In the theater, I felt in my soul that primal need of Travers to do right by her dad. To save him. And a tear escaped my eye as it did hers.

For too short a time, they’re our whole world. Eventually, our chances to talk with them are gone, to ask them questions that never would have occurred to us while they were alive, questions we thought we’d have time for someday. When we were sharing a beer after staining the back deck together on a hot Sunday afternoon. When we were tossing the football back and forth between three generations upon park grass touched with the first autumn frost. Those scenarios aren’t possible now, so we try to replicate them in fiction. We forge characters who ask the questions we can’t, and let them seek their answers, secure as we type that they will reach their destination and achieve the closure that eludes us. When the stake is so personal, we comprehend why P.L. Travers did not want to give Mary Poppins up. Mary wasn’t a character, she was a mission. So was Mickey Mouse for Walt Disney. It’s not easy to abdicate such a soulful responsibility, to hand over a legacy. I wouldn’t be the first to volunteer for that, would you? However, there may come a time when I’m willing to let go, to share the father I knew with a world that deserves to know him the way I did. I can only hope that it’s in a manner as befitting as Mary Poppins, or Saving Mr. Banks.

“Winds in the east, mist coming in, like something is brewin’, about to begin… Can’t put me finger on what lies in store, but I fear what’s to happen, all happened before.”

Unfreezing creativity

December 21, 2013January 2, 2014 ~ Graham Milne ~ 7 Comments

You can emerge from a great movie in any number of frames of mind: stirred to action, moved to tears, smiling ear to ear or even enraged beyond words. And then there are those movies that have a different and in some ways, more profound effect. They come along at just the right moment, when you’re a bit discouraged by a recent course of events, when the well is drying out and replenishing itself with doubt instead. Movies that embrace your simmering creativity and stoke your desire to tell stories, because they remind you of the possibilities inherent in the blank canvas by pushing the limits of what can be done with it. They disarm and enchant the cynic and turn him into a dreamer again, fingers twitching to fill hard drives with a wealth of new words. Frozen, Disney’s magnificent animated retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, did that for me.

The story of a bond of sisterhood tested by fate, magic, misunderstanding and a heck of a lot of snow and ice, Frozen is visually sumptuous, befitting the pedigree of its studio, and uncommonly emotionally profound. The two princesses of the vaguely Nordic realm of Arendelle are the playful young Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell) and her elder sister Elsa (Idina Menzel), who possesses the power to create ice and snow. They are inseparable until Elsa accidentally injures Anna with her magic, at which point their well-meaning royal parents decide that the two would be better off kept apart, for their own safety, and Anna’s memory altered to remove her awareness of her sister’s abilities. Years later, after the girls have been orphaned, Elsa is poised to be named Queen of Arendelle until a confrontation with Anna over a rash decision to marry a handsome prince she’s just met results in Elsa’s long-suppressed powers bursting forth and blanketing Arendelle in eternal winter. Shunned by her people, Elsa flees to the distant mountains, pursued by Anna who has faith that her sister can be convinced to bring summer back to the realm. I’d prefer not to say more at the risk of being spoilery, but despite some red herrings dropped early on that suggest you’re in for the typical schmaltz about princesses in towers and the conveniently available square-jaws they always fall for, and despite the prominence in advertising of the goofy living snowman Olaf (Josh Gad), the story goes in a much more mature and welcome direction, keeping the relationship between the sisters as the emotional linchpin – while dazzling your eyes with some breathtaking animation work, especially in any scene involving Elsa’s magic.

Given what I’ve discussed at length here before in terms of the onscreen portrayal of women, how refreshing indeed to find a story that both passes the Bechdel test and gives depth and complexity to a female character with supernatural powers! The clip I’ve linked above is my absolute favorite moment in the movie, because not only is it a terrific song belted out by a sublimely talented Broadway veteran at the top of her game (even calling back a little to her famous interpretation of Wicked‘s “Defying Gravity”), but it’s a scene of a young woman embracing everything about who she truly is and reveling in the wonders of what she can do with her amazing gifts. A triumphant coming out of a sorceress, if you will, and a scene of unbridled joy. We don’t get to see that very often, if ever. Women with powers in movies are usually punished for them – they have to give them up to attain the life they really want, or, they choose to use them for evil and must therefore be destroyed (usually by… sigh, a virtuous man). While Elsa does cause some inadvertent mayhem that must be undone, the resolution of the story thankfully doesn’t require her to abandon what makes her unique. She adds to her life instead of taking something away.

As a man writing a novel in first-person from a woman’s point of view (a fantasy about a woman with magical powers, no less), those issues are always top of mind for me. It’s too easy to venture down the well-trodden, familiar path at the end of which lies the execrable Mary Sue; the collection of cliches guaranteed to please no one, least of all the author. Experiencing Frozen, though, shows me that it can be done, and done extremely well, and the positive response to the movie by both audiences and critics proves that these kinds of characters can touch hearts. Magic has always had a lingering visceral appeal, and too often literature and cinema adhere to the conservative religious view that there is something fundamentally wrong about it, forever at odds with how the world is supposed to function. Yet it’s something that we all still seem to want in our lives – in the first encounter with a new love, in the twinkle in the eye of a child waiting for Santa, in the wish made on the shooting star. Why can’t the world be magical? Why can’t we make it that way?

Writers have our own magic to offer. We have these crazy ideas and wild emotions that we are somehow able to transmogrify into a collection of permutations of 26 letters that cast spells upon those who read them, with the very effects I mentioned off the top. When we’ve suppressed that nature for too long, because day jobs and other obligations have gotten in the way, or we’ve just been too downright lazy to keep doing what we’re supposed to be doing, we risk not a catastrophic explosion like Elsa, but a gradual withering away of our spirit. We get mopey and find little to be happy about in what should be fulfilling lives. What we need to do is have a “Let It Go” moment instead and revel in what we love and what we know we’re meant to be. Sometimes it takes a reminder; a movie like Frozen that assures you that storytellers are capable of some wondrous things. And then you want to get back to your own fictional universes and start pushing your own limits again, typing until your fingers fall off and you’ve created magical palaces of skyscraping prose. Hoping somewhere in the back of your mind that one day your story will have the same impact on somebody else – and the cycle of creativity will continue, forever unfrozen.

A Writer’s Journey Through Disney World: Part V

October 10, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

Disney World has made the news a few times over the last few weeks, and not really in a good way. First up was the brief notoriety afforded to Escape From Tomorrow, an unlicensed movie shot guerrilla-style surreptitiously throughout the Disney parks, with a storyline suggesting malevolence lurking behind the facade (the movie’s regrettable tag line: “Bad things happen everywhere”). Then there was this item from the New York Post revealing that one-percenters have been gleefully paying intellectually or physically challenged people to escort their families through the parks so they can skip lines. It’s nearing two months since I last left the place that for me remains a reservoir of goodwill and good feeling in a world growing increasingly greedy and misanthropic. And while I am ever aware of the essential contradiction at the heart of Disney World’s existence – a theme park celebrating the innocence of childhood that is lorded over by a corporation – I push back hard against the tide of cynicism lapping at its shores. Reviews of Escape From Tomorrow are tainted by the writer’s opinion of the place; those who dream of kicking Mickey in “his pious balls,” as one sort put it, find their smugness vindicated by the movie’s skewering of the Disney tropes, where others who thrive on their positive memories struggle with the creep of darkness along the edges of the frame. (For the record, I haven’t seen the movie. With Escape From Tomorrow‘s official release looming in a few days, Disney has apparently chosen to simply ignore it, sidestepping the Streisand Effect. The chatter and the publicity have likewise diminished, so good call there, Mouse House.)

Disney's Boardwalk at sunset. — Disney’s Boardwalk at sunset.

We remarked upon returning from our voyage how much we in point of fact didn’t get to see; a great deal of Animal Kingdom, including the delightful Festival of the Lion King show and the serene Flights of Wonder bird exhibit, was left unexplored as it was the only park we weren’t able to repeat visit during our eight days. A healthy portion of Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom was either down for refurbishment, still under construction or hidden behind impenetrable wait times. I’ve long held the dream of dining at least once in each of the eleven different full service restaurants throughout Epcot’s World Showcase; a glimpse of the seating area in Mexico would be all we’d get on this occasion. Speaking of food, one can’t conduct a proper review of Disney World without mentioning the dining fare – while one might cringe at the sight of folks strolling through the parks gnawing maniacally on oversized turkey legs that clearly aren’t from any turkey that wouldn’t fail an Olympic drug test, Disney does in fact boast plenty of culinary experiences that manage to enchant both taste bud and heart. Our selections ran the gamut, from the ripped-from-Leave-It-To-Beaver meatloaf and pot pies of the Prime Time Diner in Hollywood Studios (where the waitresses yell at you if you put your elbows on the table or – horrors – use your walkie talkie – i.e. cell phone), to the finger-lickin’, artery-bustin’ ribs, cornbread and fried chicken of Mickey’s Backyard Barbeque (where the characters join you for an after-supper country dance party to burn all that stuff off), to even a messy yet tasty pizza delivered to our hotel room.

Of the more upscale options, we have two favorites in particular. First is Sanaa, the African restaurant at Animal Kingdom Lodge’s Kidani Village. The food at Sanaa is exotic and flavorful, replete with a wide array of tongue-tickling spices and compelling textures, but what truly sells it is the incomparable view. Animal Kingdom Lodge wraps around an open area that is accessible to the animals of the Harambe Wildlife Reserve, so it’s typical to have giraffes and zebras wander by the windows of Sanaa as you’re sitting there enjoying your appetizer. The first time we went, my wife uploaded a photo of the view to her Facebook page and one of her friends thought we were in Africa. After dinner you can wander out to the central firepit and use night vision goggles to see if you can spot a wildebeest sneaking in for a bedtime snack. There’s a guide on hand to assist with the goggles and answer questions (and presumably ensure that no one jumps the fence), and in one of the most serendipitous examples of small world I’ve ever encountered, I and the Namibian gentleman on duty that evening turned out to have mutual friends – these folks.

Our other favorite is Cat Cora’s Kouzzina, on Disney’s BoardWalk. This Greek-themed restaurant, nestled comfortably amidst the old-timey seaside architecture and only minutes by foot from Epcot’s rear World Showcase entrance, is not somewhere I’d recommend if you’re looking to count your calories, not when the signature appetizer is the Saganaki, or flamed and decadently rich Greek cheese. Another standout is the Pastitsio, a Greek take on lasagna with cinnamon-infused meat sauce and bechamel, which no one in our family has ever been able to finish in one sitting. I opted for the braised short ribs this time, but even they come with potatoes mashed with smoked feta so alas, no room for dessert.

One surprise last-minute addition was Ohana, the immensely popular Hawaiian family service restaurant at Disney’s Polynesian Resort. We’ve wanted to try it for years but have repeatedly been thwarted by its tendency to book up months in advance. It was a fellow countryman, one of the cast members at Epcot’s Canada pavilion, who alerted us to a new app that tracked up-to-the-minute dining availability. Spotting a convenient cancellation, we leaped at it. The equivalent of an indoor luau, Ohana is probably the friendliest restaurant we sampled this time, with staff calling you “cousin” and a ukulele-strumming entertainer leading the junior diners in hula lessons, Hawaiian karaoke and coconut races between courses, while you wait to be served beef, pork and chicken that’s been marinating for three days straight. I can’t say it ranked quite as highly as Kouzzina or Sanaa with me, but I’m still glad random fortune allowed us to fit it in. One more item scratched off the Disney Bucket List, as it were, a document that seems to get longer with each trip rather than shorter, and will probably never be satisfied. There’s just too much, and Disney World is too far from home, and finances aren’t infinite.

It’s doubly ironic, because as I draw to the close of this series, I find myself reflecting on all the things I didn’t find space to include: the Wishes fireworks show over Cinderella Castle, the five-floor DisneyQuest arcade and the rest of Downtown Disney, the quirks and quibbles about FastPasses, character encounters and LeFou’s brew. But there’s an incident that occurred a few weeks after we got back that I think helps to put things into context and provide a sense of unity and completion to this quintet of ramblings.

My wife was in line to renew her driver’s license. She was wearing the black Minnie hoodie she’d acquired on our trip, which sports ears and a bow on the head. It’s really cute. Thinking she couldn’t hear them, the couple behind her in line openly sneered at her, and the dude boasted to his charmless companion that he was proud that she would never wear something like that. Apart from wishing I’d been there to deck this smarmy douchebag, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him and his undoubtedly equally hipster-esque friends. They do themselves no favors by pretending they’re above embracing Disney. Sure, you can climb onto a soapbox and lecture the world about capitalism-run-amok under a layer of artificial pixie dust, but isn’t that the obvious argument? Doesn’t it require more sophistication and a greater capacity to seek truth to look beyond these tedious trappings and find something of value that you can carry with you? I am reminded so much of the late George Harrison, who while dedicated to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and musical achievement could still laugh at Monty Python’s jokes about cannibalism. And I would not even suggest that Disney is somehow lowbrow, or lowest common denominator. Yes, sometimes their attempts are clumsy, some of the movies aren’t great, we all wait with bated breath to see what they do with Star Wars and they’ve been accused of complacency as Universal Studios Florida nips at their aging heels. But there is so much that should be celebrated rather than scorned.

Like the character in the U2 song “The Wanderer,” sung by Johnny Cash, I went this time in search of experience that would challenge me as a writer and enrich me as a person. In each park, I discovered a fundamental lesson. Belief. Being. Connection. Communication. Four simple concepts that should be obvious but often get buried under layers of irrelevant complication, and form the very heart of the art of placing one word after another. And isn’t it wonderful that these lessons didn’t have to be learned at the bottom of a whiskey bottle or in the depths of personal crisis. They were plain to see and framed with Mickey ear ice cream – the literal spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. I departed after eight days, feeling my sense of storytelling renewed and a certitude about continuing to share my words with the world. The writer journeying through Disney World is a wandering bard stopping for a drink at a wellspring from which imagination flows, and eventually he moves on, his thirst quenched, carrying that inspiration onward to wonderful parts unknown. With a stuffed Winnie the Pooh under his arm.

So long, Disney World. And see ya real soon.