Postcards from Cabot Cove

#35 What Did We Do to Deserve This?

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:20:00 -0500

I don't know why it is, but MSW fans can't catch a break from cable. Despite the fact that we constitute a wide and varied demographic, for the past several years now it has been a battle - usually a losing one - to get the series aired at predictable intervals and in reasonable time slots. Since the Hallmark Channel got hold of the syndication rights, things have not gotten any better.

Have you looked at the schedule on the Hallmark Channel's website lately? After not showing any MSW at all for pretty much the entire month of June, they have brought it back - but only once a week, and only at one and two o'clock in the morning. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm asleep at that time of night. The eleven o'clock and midnight airings they had before were irritating, but at least I could occasionally stay up to watch if I didn't have to work the next day. Now? The only way I'd ever catch these airings is if I TiVo-ed it - and I don't own TiVo.

And what, exactly, has taken MSW's place in Hallmark's line-up? Golden Girls, which now airs not only at 11 and 11:30 PM, but also runs in solid blocks from 12 to 2 AM and 8 to 11 in the morning. Now, ordinarily I'd say that Hallmark (or its advertisers) are afraid of the MSW demographic, which for some bizarre reason they sometimes feel isn't worth advertising to - this has been raised as an excuse for its cancellation on more than one occasion. But that argument falls flat when one considers that Golden Girls targets the exact same age groups. Actually, it probably has a more narrow audience than MSW enjoys - I'd be willing to bet that more teenagers and young adults have become fans of MSW since it went into syndication than have become ardent followers of the Golden Girls, Bea Arthur's wonderful portrayal of Dorothy notwithstanding.

I'm not sure what is to be done, or if anything can be done. The wails and protests on the Hallmark MSW messageboard has been significant, but the executives in the front office don't appear to be paying any attention. We could write to the advertisers directly ... but who's willing to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to find out who they are? Our only source of consolation may be the DVD sets (Season 10 is due to be released on July 7th). Once MCA/Universal finishes releasing all twelve seasons and the post-season movies on DVD (fingers crossed that they do), then we can watch episodes of MSW whenever we darn well please, and turn our backs on these fickle cable stations - a just reward for them turning their backs on us.

#34 Five Guys Named Tony

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:04:02 -0500

The 2009 Tony Awards were given out this past Sunday night, and amid all the hype and fanfare surrounding uberproduction Billy Elliot, the most wonderful moment came when Angela Lansbury won her fifth Tony - best featured actress - for her role as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. If the open emotion she displayed is any indication, Ms. Lansbury was not expecting this accolade, which ties the record for the most Tonys won set by Julie Harris. I missed the broadcast of the awards ceremony myself, but thanks to a YouTube poster going by the name Indy7888, I was able to find a video of her acceptance speech online. Here's what she said:

"This is amazing …who would have thought? Who knew, at this time in my life, that I should be presented with this lovely, lovely award. I feel deeply grateful. I can’t believe that I’m standing here. And because I am standing here and some of you are sitting there I must take this moment to send my love and my congratulations to the other nominees in this category. It wasn’t fair. Bless you all. Thank you to all of my costars in Blithe Spirit, our producer, Jeff Richards, everybody in concern. They said at the party before the Tonys, 'Don’t talk about anybody just say how you feel.' Well, you know how I feel – I am the essence of gratitude and happiness and joy, and being back on Broadway and being with all you Broadwayites is the greatest gift in my old age that I can possibly imagine. Thank you for having me back."

Afterwards, Ms. Lansbury took questions in the press room backstage; a video of her remarks was also posted online thanks to Tom O'Neil. This is what she had to say in the wake of the event:

In response to the inevitable question, "How do you feel?"

"How do I feel? About three feet off the ground at this point, really. ... It [Tony #5]'s going to be great on this little shelf that I have in my living room, because I needed that fifth to fill it out … I’m only kidding. I never believed in my wildest dreams that I’d have another opportunity to get another Tony, and therefore this is such a complete surprise and thrill for me, shall we say, allowed to come back to Broadway at this time of my life, and to have another opportunity to do a piece of good work. After all, you know, Blithe Spirit is an old-fashioned play, but it has a great role in it, which is Madame Arcati. And I just never envisioned myself doing it – it just fell into my lap, and this is how life is sometimes – you don’t always know where the good stuff is coming from. So I am very, deeply grateful."

The next question she took was about her reaction to tying Julie Harris's record for the most awards in Broadway history:

"Well, I had no desire to tie Julie because I have such great admiration for her. However, I feel I’m in the best company because she was and still is in all of our minds just the greatest actress in the world of theater in our time so I am very lucky and happy to be there along with her having five Tonys. Of course, four of them were for musicals and leading roles, and this was for a featured role – it doesn’t make any difference, it’s still silver, it’s still got my name on it – it’s okay, it’s big stuff."

Another questioner asked how the 2009 award ceremony differed from the other ones she had attended:

"Oh, it’s huge. I was enormously impressed with the numbers, with the musical numbers going back to the old numbers and showing pieces of the new. It’s really wonderful, and it’s so great for me to be on Broadway with so many of the new young stars who are just on their way up, you know, and they’re doing great work, and they’re so brilliant in every possible way. It’s great to have Elton John composing for us on Broadway in a show like Billy Elliot with those kids, it’s a thrilling show, and Hair, bring back Hair at this time and having it such a huge success is wonderful for Broadway."

And then someone asked, "What are you going to do next for your sixth one?" "Don’t count on that," she answered wryly, but continued,

"I really have no idea. You know, I go where the work is oftentimes, and I feel that there are some roles that I can still play, so I’m going to keep an open mind and ear, and hopefully be back on Broadway or off Broadway, just working and keeping at it because that’s the only thing I really know how to do."

The next question: "If you could work with anyone …"

"Who would it be? That’s a good question. I’d love to work with James Gandolfini – that would be very nice. I’m such an admirer … But there are so many people – goodness Jeffrey Rush - there are so many wonderful actors at this moment working on Broadway, and just being in that community is terrific, heady stuff for all of us. We all feel it and share it together, and talk about it. Broadway life is pretty special."

Indeed it is.

#33 Local Girl Goes to the City or, How I Came to See "Blithe Spirit"

Mon, 18 May 2009 13:58:16 -0500

On May 14th, I had the privilege of seeing Angela Lansbury in Blithe Spirit, the revival of the play by Noel Coward that made a big splash on both sides of the pond when it first debuted in 1941. It was an event a long time in the planning - since August of 2007, actually, when I realized that I had let the opportunity to see Ms. Lansbury in Deuce slip through my fingers. I kicked myself hard for that oversight, and vowed that I would not let another such opportunity pass me by. When my friend Sarah (fan fiction writer and author of the "Adventures in the Endless Pursuit of Entertainment" blog) notified me that tickets for Blithe Spirit were officially on sale, I wasted little time in purchasing a quartet of them for a performance in May - a nice time to visit New York City. My husband Bob, good sport that he is, elected to come along with me and even did most of the online research required for picking out a hotel. He selected an excellent one - the Washington-Jefferson on 51st Street, right in the heart of New York’s Theater District. Small rooms (if by "small" you mean "tiny"), but very nice contemporary en suite baths, reasonable rates, and a fabulous Japanese restaurant on site. We arrived on Wednesday, having successfully negotiated the subway from JFK (again, thanks to Bob’s thorough research).

I should note that aside from passing through during travel, I had only been to New York City once before in my life, back in the late eighties. My family had been visiting my aunt and uncle in Westchester County at the time - I think it was for a family reunion, but I’m hazy on the details now. Anyway, one morning we drove into Manhattan: we went to the World Trade Center, took the elevator to the top, took pictures of the city spread out below us beneath a hazy, overcast sky, went down again. Having done this, we drove back out of Manhattan, and that was pretty much it. Coming back now was essentially like visiting for the first time.

After taking it easy Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Bob and I set out to experience as much New York City as we could in essentially two days. Bob had managed to score reservations to the Late Show with David Letterman online, so after a late breakfast of bagels and lox we headed over to the Ed Sullivan Theater at the corner of 53rd and Broadway to pick up our tickets. 53rd Street bears the honorific “Jerry Orbach Way,” after the late actor who was a fixture on Broadway (and later well-known to MSW fans as Jessica’s Boston PI friend Harry McGraw). Mr. Orbach also has a theater named after him, as does the late Helen Hayes.

Back to the Late Show: tickets are always free - now those comments Dave sometimes makes to the audience - “Yeah, well, how much did you pay for these tickets” - make perfect sense. You stand in a long line to get your tickets inside the theater, then they tell you when to come back and kick you out again. In our case we reported back at 3:30 for the 4:30 taping of the show. After a long pep talk by Late Show underlings they finally let us into the actual auditorium, which was much smaller than I expected it to be, considering that this was the place where the Beatles made their American debut. But the set is a sight to behold - there is no way you can grasp the complexity of it on television. The colors of the lights, the three-dimensional quality of the models of the New York skyline serving as a backdrop ... all of this is far more vivid in person. And Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra - wow.

But as cool as attending a taping of the Late Show was, that was not the main event of the evening. Blithe Spirit - and Ms. Lansbury’s performance in it - was the pinnacle of the evening. After dinner on 44th Street with Sarah and her friends Noah and Steve, we headed across the street to the Shubert Theater for the 8 o’clock curtain. The tickets I’d managed to land were fantastic - front row mezzanine, right in the center. Best seats in the house. Although two casting agents (acquaintances of Noah’s) that we ran into outside the theater dismissed it as a “big room with a tiny chandelier,” I thought the set was very beautiful and very realistic, right down to the uncannily natural-seeming lighting effects. I’m not sure what I expected – painted flats, I suppose – but the set positively took my breath away.

Sarah, having already seen Blithe Spirit once at the beginning of its run, said that since then the performance had become much more polished as the actors became more comfortable with their roles and started to have fun with them. She was right - all of the characters sparkled. But although I am admittedly biased, I thought that it was Ms. Lansbury’s performance that was particularly stand-out. It was my first chance ever to see her act in person, and the occasion did not disappoint. The New York Times summarized the challenges of playing Madame Arcati best: "She needs to be simultaneously preposterous and entirely serious, and Angela Lansbury in her Tony-nominated performance in the current revival at the Shubert Theater, is a whirlwind of dottiness with a ramrod spine of practicality." It is also a very different performance from what fans of MSW would be used to: aside from the fact that both characters prefer bicycling as their primary mode of transportation, there is very little, if anything, in common between Jessica Fletcher and Madame Arcati. Jessica is a grounded, practical character, not at all superstitious. Madame Arcati is the polar opposite, an eccentric with one foot planted firmly in both the physical and spiritual realms. She has been communicating with the dead since her childhood – she notes that her first ectoplasmic manifestation occurred when she was five – and uses a deceased fourteen year old girl with a head cold as her go-between with the spirits on the other side. She is very specific about what she is and what can and cannot do (no fortune-telling!) and at the same time is accepting of the fact that most people she encounters are skeptical of her skills. The rituals she engages in when holding a séance (including awkwardly dancing to music played on the gramophone) seem whimsical to the other characters, but she is entirely in earnest, and they take her lightly at their peril. Mystery writer Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett) discovers this the hard way: he invites Madame Arcati to his house to perform a séance simply to gather first-hand material about mediums upon which to base a character in a novel, but comes away with much more than he bargained for when the séance successfully summons his deceased, flighty first wife Elvira (Christine Ebersole) back from the other side of the Veil.

We didn’t linger after the performance was over; it was raining outside, which Sarah told us made it unlikely that Ms. Lansbury would linger to sign autographs outside the stage door. So Bob and I parted company with Sarah and Noah and headed back to the hotel, in time to see the broadcast of the Late Show we’d attended that afternoon. The camera panned over the audience too quickly for us to pick ourselves out of the crowd.

The next day, Friday, was devoted to seeing the sights. After a brief trip through Times Square - a place of such sensory overload that I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like on New Year’s Eve - Bob and I followed Sarah’s suggested walking tour of Lower Manhattan, starting with a free round trip on the Staten Island ferry for the close pass of Liberty Island. Upon disembarking back at the southernmost tip of Manhattan we walked up Broadway, passing by Bowling Green (oldest park in the city), Trinity Church, the Ground Zero construction site, Wall Street, finally ending up in Little Italy for lunch. We finished up the evening with drinks in an Irish pub and excellent shashimi in the Japanese restaurant back at the Washington-Jefferson.

If Angela opts to do another Broadway production, I will gladly make the trip to see her perform again.

#32 Murder, HE Wrote?

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:50:16 -0500

I often take the pulse of what my fellow MSW fans are thinking about by keeping a close eye on Donald Bain's website discussion page, and yesterday (happy Easter, by the way), a very interesting tidbit was dropped by Mr. Bain himself. Yet another debate has been stirring among readers about Mr. Bain's controversial (but apparently much-loved) character of George Sutherland, and the pros and cons of Jessica taking her arm's length involvement with him to another level. In response, Mr. Bain noted that

"... enthusiasm for George Sutherland as a recurring character in the series is shared by many readers. Even those who don't want to see Jessica become too romantically involved with him seem to like George as a character. There's even been talk of spinning off a new series featuring him."

Oh, really? It's an intriguing concept, to say the least. What would a book series based on George be like? And would it be worth reading?

The idea certainly has merit. But although George is a very interesting character, to me he is at his most interesting when he's interacting with Jessica. Any book featuring him alone would probably be more police procedural than lighthearted mystery since he is, after all, a policeman. Part of what makes Jessica's adventures so interesting is that as an amateur, she is not bound by the same rules, regulations, and protocols as the police - this gives her a lot more latitude when she investigates, and gets her into all kinds of trouble, which is why we love her. There's nothing wrong with the police procedural as a genre, but I think that by nature they're a little dryer, a little stiffer, than what I'm used to reading. That being said, as a fan of George myself I would certainly read anything that was put out there about him, no matter what form it took. But I don't think a novel featuring him would be as effective - or as popular - as a book about Jessica would be, at least not for the Murder, She Wrote crowd.

What do you think, Gentle Readers? Would you read books featuring George as the main character, even if Jessica never made an appearance? I'd love to hear your responses.

#31 Sometimes You CAN Please All the People ...

Wed, 1 Apr 2009 13:23:05 -0500

As of March 30th, Universal Studios announced what they planned to do with "Amsterdam Kill," the episode with an identity problem (produced in Season 10, aired in Season 11). According to an article written by David Lambert at TVShowsOnDVD.com, Universal received a lot of responses to their request for fans to weigh in, and the opinions were fairly evenly split between putting in on the 10th or 11th DVD sets. What they ended up doing surprised (and impressed) me: they put it in both seasons. Amazing! It's added as a bonus episode to the Season 10 set, so for folks who feel its place in the production order is important, there it is. It's also going to be the second episode of the Season 11 set, so for those folks who value air date order, there it is. In my wildest dreams I didn't expect them to do something that would make everybody happy, but they did.

Thanks to everyone who responded to Universal's request for feedback - now that they realize we're still out there (and we still care), hopefully our opinions will be sought for future enterprises as well.

Speaking of which ... I wonder if they've given any thought to re-issuing the four MSW movies on DVD?

#30 To Be or Not to Be ... on the 10th or 11th DVD Set

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 11:21:30 -0500

My friend Ryan, who keeps an eye on things and sends me alerts whenever there is news regarding upcoming release dates for the MSW DVD sets, ran across an interesting piece of news regarding the Complete Tenth Season. A debate is being waged in the hallowed halls of Universal, and the Powers That Be are actually asking for feedback from fans of the show (!) to help them make a decision.

He sent me a link to the story on the website TVShowsOnDVD.com. The problem is the episode "Amsterdam Kill," which was produced in Season 10 but didn’t air until the second episode of Season 11. Should it be included as part of the tenth season, as its production number (69532) would indicate? Or should the order in which it actually was aired be preserved, in which case the episode would wait for release with the rest of the eleventh season? The website includes a link to its Contact Us form so that fans can have their say.

As the story’s author, Gord Lacey, points out, since Murder, She Wrote was more episodic than serial in nature, whether “Amsterdam Kill” is included in Season 10 or 11 doesn’t make much difference as far as the arc of the series is concerned. The much more significant fact is that Universal is bothering to ask the fans which they prefer, acknowledging that where they place it may, after all, make a difference to us. I would encourage all of you to head over to the page on TVShowsOnDVD.com and cast your vote, if only to validate the fact that we matter.

#29 A Movable Feast - Updated!

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:30:24 -0500

Back in Post #26 I related some very interesting information passed on to me by astrology enthusiast David concerning the hypothetical date of Jessica’s birthday. He tried to reconcile the various hints dropped throughout the series (few of which consistently agree with each other) and concluded that she was, most likely, a Pisces as stated in the Season 2 episode “Dead Heat.”

This month David wrote to me again, with some new information he found: “Just some more fun with Jessica's birthday by the writers,” he said.

“In the episode “To The Last Will I Grapple With Thee” (the 17th episode of season 8, originally broadcast March 15, 1992), Jessica is invited by her friend, Sean Cullane, to Fenian’s Chase Irish Pub to celebrate her birthday that evening. Jessica has the Tuesday special for dinner.”

Why is this significant? Because in 1992 the Tuesday that fell closest to the March 15th air date was March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day. David concludes, “Although no one wishes anyone a Happy St. Patrick’s Day, and the leaves on the trees in New York are green, if Jessica’s birthday was March 17th, she would be a Pisces.”

After thinking about this I came up with a slightly different conclusion, which I ran by David to see if it still bore out his overall conclusion about Jessica’s birth sign:

“If the episode “To the Last Will ...” aired on 3/15/92, then the events taking place therein theoretically would have happened in the days leading up to March 15th, not afterwards (assuming that air dates bear any correlation to when the events in the episodes were happening)” - because if we’re watching the story on a given day, what we’re seeing must have already happened, unless we’re going to get all Star Trek with the fluidity of the space-time continuum and so on. “If this is so,” I went on to ask, “then would Jessica’s ordering the “Tuesday night special” in the pub not indicate that the date is March 10th, and not the 17th? It would explain why no one was wishing anyone a Happy St. Patrick’s Day (and why there was nary a drop of green beer in sight). Would March 10th still make her a Pisces?”

Indeed it would was David’s reply: “If JB’s birthday was March 10th, she would still be a Pisces.”

Sounds like case closed to me!

#28 Change We Can Believe In

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:30:29 -0500

Well, it’s been another longer-than-I-hoped for lapse in blog postings. The reason is that January has proved to be a month of monumental change - and no, I’m not talking about President Obama’s inauguration. I actually took the plunge and ... switched from PC to Mac.

I know what some of you may be thinking: what’s the big deal? They’re all computers in the end, aren’t they? The World Wide Web looks pretty much the same no matter what browser you’re looking at, right? Well, I’ll be the first to say that life would be much simpler if this were true, but it is not.

First of all, let me explain the reasons for my change in allegiances. I’ve been a loyal Dell laptop user for four years, and a PC user for nearly ten. I liked Windows for its versatility, the fact that just about every application ever created can be run on it. I liked the fact that you can get a loaded-up, customized Dell Latitude for a pretty reasonable price. The only thing I didn’t like was that my Dell laptops had a life expectancy of roughly two years. My first Latitude (“Icarus I”) ran smoothly for two years and then catastrophically self-imploded, taking many of my files down with it (and before you ask, yes, I had much of it backed up on CDs, but no, I didn’t have the whole thing safely reproduced on an external hard drive). I grieved, and moved on to another Latitude (“Icarus II”). After two years, it began to act a little ... weird. By then I had a Western Digital external hard drive backing up all the important stuff, but my frustration was growing with the two year lifespan trend. Granted, my laptops work hard - I’m working on them constantly, haul them back and forth between home and work, and I drag them everywhere with me when I travel. But still ...!

It was time to consider a change. I wanted something a little more durable. I was also desperate to avoid a mandatory “upgrade” to the “Vista Experience.” These two considerations (not the Mac vs. PC commercials featuring John Hodgman as the PC and Justin Long as the Mac, though I do find them clever) are what reluctantly drove me away from Dell and into the arms of Apple.

My new MacBook Pro (“Artemis”) has an aluminum unibody, is largely recyclable, extremely fast, and a track record of lasting for four or five years, maybe longer. The glass track pad is a dream to use and pleasant to the touch. It also has a back-lit keyboard, which I admit is one feature that honestly made me swoon. There are other bonuses as well: Macs are immune to most viruses, they don’t crash as frequently, and, if you want it to, they can run Microsoft Windows by, in essence, splitting their brain in half.

The transition has not been universally smooth. For one thing, although Apple’s iWork suite of applications can seamlessly take up my documents originally created with Microsoft Office software, many of the other applications I purchased for use on my Dells do not translate to Apple. The realization that I could not take my Corel Paint Shop Pro drawing software with me (unless I want to split Artemis’s brain to run Windows) came as a heavy blow. I could not even buy a Mac OS version to download - Corel simply does not have a version of PSP for Macs. I’m trying out a similar offering from Adobe, but it means re-learning how to use a drawing program, something that takes considerable time to master. Another thing is that Safari, the Mac internet browser, is very picky about how it reads HTML code. I was shocked and dismayed when I opened up the Definitive Guide’s homepage - which always looked fine in Internet Explorer - to find that it looked terrible in Safari. It has taken much sifting through the code to find the little errors and variations that IE tolerated but Safari would not to make it presentable again. Having learned this lesson the hard way, I apologize profusely to anyone who has been trying to view my website in Safari or Mozilla FireFox right along and been confronted with a sloppy presentation. Honestly, I had no idea there was a problem.

But I think I have a handle on all of this now. It’s taken awhile, and I still have a lot to do (for instance, re-loading all my internet bookmarks), but at this point I think I can honestly say that I now count myself among other happy Mac converts. And that is change I can believe in.

#27 Zen and the Art of Literary Interpretation

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:26:55 -0500

After a long absence, the Blog is back. I’ll update you on "What I Did on My Summer (or rather, Autumn) Vacation" in a later post; for now may it suffice to say that I’ve been working on a very big project that I’ll tell you about as soon as it’s finished.

Anyway! An interesting piece was posted on Donald Bain’s homepage, written by Joella D. Hultgren of the The Illustrious Clients, a society of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts located in Indianapolis, Indiana (I’m not sure how it came to Mr. Bain’s attention; I suppose that is a mystery for another day). The title of the article, “Sailing Super Sleuths,” is a reference to Mr. Bain’s book Murder on the QEII; her thesis, that Jessica and a character she meets aboard the legendary cruise ship, Mary Ward, represent a Holmes-Watson relationship, though not a typical one. What is atypical, she argues, is that unlike most Holmes-Watson partnerships that remain stable and static, this one shifts over the course of the book as Jessica, initially in the lead role as Holmes, cedes her position to Mary Ward, eventually taking a step down to become Mary’s Watson. The correctness of Ms. Hultgren’s postulate is not in question – she has plenty of evidence from the book to back up her point. What is more debatable is whether it was Mr. Bain’s intention to turn this particular Holmes-Watson relationship on its head when he first set out to write it.

Ever since I was sitting in my English Lit classes in college, I have wondered how much authority a reader, critic, reviewer, or professor of English Literature can claim when reading subtle themes into a book without knowing the author’s intentions. One can observe a turn of plot, or a development of character – but if we then try to ascribe a larger intended meaning to these things, that is, I think, when we venture into dangerous waters. I suppose this makes me a much more literal interpretive than imaginative interpretive reader at heart. Making assumptions about the intentions of an author without the author’s input - reading more into a story than is actually there - is like the sound of one hand clapping. Or, to put it another way: if a literary reviewer claims there is an underlying theme to a book and the author is not around to hear it, does it make a sound? (Actually, it can make a very loud sound, heard by a great many people, depending on who the reviewer is and what book we are discussing.)

Ms. Hultgren does not presume to guess whether the changing status of Jessica and Mary Ward in their Holmes-Watson relationship was an intentional move on the author’s part or not; she makes her (very astute) observations, and leaves it at that. However, her article did raise an interesting opportunity to learn first-hand from the author himself whether what she observed was, in fact, the result of intention on Mr. Bain’s part. It was reader Kathleen W. who posted the question thusly:

“… When [Ms. Hultgren] demonstrates the reversal of Jessica and Mary Ward's roles in their archetypal Holmes/Watson relationship, was that a conscious goal that you set out to accomplish with your character development, or more of an unintended (though not uninteresting) consequence of the progression of the plot?”

Mr. Bain responded, “When I wrote Murder on the QE2 I never once thought of Holmes and Watson. I intended the character, Mary Ward, to play a minor role in the story, but as it developed I became more infatuated with and fond of her. That she ended up taking the lead in solving the murder was simply an example of how a novel, no matter how carefully plotted, can take on a life of its own along with its characters.”

This proves my point. If, hypothetically, Murder on the QE2 were being discussed in an English Lit class, the students would even now be picking apart (or writing papers about) a Holmes-Watson relationship that was a) never an intended theme of the author’s, b) arose quite by accident, and c) didn’t even exist in the author’s mind until it was pointed out to him by an outside party, the author of the article. These three things being the case, does the Holmes-Watson relationship of which Ms. Hultgren writes legitimately exist at all?

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

#26 A Movable Feast

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:34:07 -0500

A little while ago a question came through the website regarding whether MSW canon ever established a date for Jessica’s birthday. David wrote:

"Just a quick question, hopefully. When is Jessica's birthday? The Wikipedia entry [on Jessica] says November 21, 1930, but the episode "Dead Heat" has Jessica herself saying that her astrological sign is Pisces, which would make her birthday sometime in between February 20 and March 21. Is this a continuity error?"

I had seen that little factoid on Wikipedia myself. For those that haven’t, here is the relevant paragraph, which asserts the November 21^st date but acknowledges the contradictory statements made over the course of the series:

Her birthday is November 21, which would make her birth sign probably Sagittarius, possibly Scorpio. However, at the end of the episode "Dead Heat", Jessica is asked what her astrological sign is, to which she answers that she is a "Pisces, the last time I looked,” which means that she had to be born sometime between February 19 and the vernal equinox around March 20. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Fletcher)

I’ve always wondered where the entry’s author got the notion that Jessica’s birthday was the 21^st of November. It’s possible that it is a bit of trivia from an episode that I haven’t seen in forever and simply don’t remember, or it could be a misinterpretation of some other significant date, but without a cited source I can’t say for sure.

But I digress. I wrote back to David, sharing what I have always figured to be true:

"Jessica's birthday is ambiguous. You are right that the Wikipedia entry conflicts with what she states to be her birth sign in "Dead Heat." The notion that she is a Pisces is supported (though not definitively proved) by the fact that the 8th season episode "To the Last Will I Grapple With Thee," in which she celebrates her birthday, first aired on March 15th. But I don't think there was ever a set date of birth for her character, so the writers made it a movable feast."

The fact that there was no canonical date was the reason I felt free to pick a date of my own choosing to use in my fan fiction, April 15^th, the day that MSW first began filming in 1984 and, conveniently enough, also the day it concluded filming twelve years later.

But I digress again. The conversation took an interesting turn when David responded to my response. Turns out that David has “been doing astrology charts and interpretations for years as a hobby,” and he had given considerable thought to what Jessica’s theoretical chart would look like. Here’s what he had to say:

"Astrologically, the Scorpio/Sagittarius cusp works really well, a detective who loves to travel around the world and is physically able, insightful, and probes mysteries, and constantly surrounded by death. It all fits, astrologically. But she did say she was a Pisces, and I would rather go with words straight from the mouth of JBF."

There’s problems with going with what Jessica said, however:

"It doesn't make sense that Jessica would be a sun sign Pisces. Pisces is a mutable water sign, which would make her a follower, uncertain, hesitant, sensitive, dreamy, intuitive, spiritual, imaginative, empathic, retiring, and forgiving. It is not that you couldn't have a detective with these qualities, but they certainly don't describe JB, especially if this was her sun sign. She would have to have some very strong mitigating influences in her chart, primarily with the placement of her moon and ascendant to give the qualities that we are familiar with. If her sun was in Pisces, I would expect her Mercury to be in Aquarius, and her Venus in Taurus, to begin to make sense of her Pisces sun sign, and then I would expect her Ascent and Moon to be in Scorpio or Sagittarius to help round out her character, and have strong 3rd (communication and education), 8th (mystery, sex, death), and 9th (travel and higher learning) house placements."

David then went on to draw up an astrological chart for Jessica, assuming a Pisces birth sign, 1930 for the year of her birth and somewhere in or around Portland, Maine for where she was born. It’s a very complicated chart, loaded with data and yet aesthetically beautiful; I’m not going to try and reproduce it here. But the long and the short of it, according to David, was that the chart not only validated that she could indeed be a Pisces, but also ...

"It explains her career as teacher, writer, fame and fortune, all of her many, many friends, extraordinary good luck for her, and bad luck for those who are around her, quick wits, undercover roles, and her sudden insights gleaned from innocent conversations."

Makes sense to me.

(Thanks, David, for all your work on this project and for letting me quote you from your e-mails.)