Frozen Review: When Your Greatest Disability is Your Greatest Strength--Or Why Little Girls and Big Boys Love Disney's Frozen

Okay, I have a little one. And she wanted to be Elsa from Frozen for Halloween. Of course. Not that she's a sheep or a fool. When we went to a local production of Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, she chose to be the only glamorous witch, her black velvet standing out in a sea of pink sparkly princesses with tiaras.

So, when I told her, hey, every little kid will be Elsa this year, she asked for another, more feisty princess, and wound up wearing a generic, yet elegant number that we found on sale at a Thrift store after last Halloween.

Still, I don't think the reason for her interest in Elsa, is because Elsa is glamorous, though she is the only Disney heroine I have yet seen who gets to be overtly sensual--Note the way that Elsa, when she is freed, slinks along with the panther walk that they teach models for the runway. (Also note the bedroom hair, and the hip flung out a la bumps and grinds.)

No, I think the lure of Elsa is that she is different, even one would say disabled, and though she at first fights fiercely to fit in and be ordinary, she ultimately comes to embrace her disability with a "to hell with all of you ordinary folk," before she finally comes to a more mature and loving acceptance--even a celebration--of the fact that her worst limitations and her greatest gifts are the exact same thing.

Now, as a parent, I love the fact Frozen turns the idea of Instant True Love on it's head--the Love At First Sight Prince Charming turns out to be a manipulative bad guy, just like on all those adult TV shows where the spunky heroine is threatened with death by the man she thought she loved.

And as a parent, I also love that the biggest love story is between siblings, and that the young man Anna works well with turns out to be the young man she should and does truly love.

Of course, as a parent, I don't particularly like the fact that Anna and Else are orphaned, though I do appreciate that for once, Disney killed both parents, instead of just the mother. (Oh, all right, it was the father who dies in The Princess And The Frog, but that's one out of what, thirty films?)

But I not only saw Frozen with my little one, our party also included a teenaged boy with serious disabilities. As I watched the story unfold, I prayed that he would find in it a metaphor for himself and his limitations. And yes, he did--he saw himself in Elsa. In fact, she proved such a powerful metaphor that even when I, stupidly, made his subtext text, by pointing all this out, he still identified with this female character and this is a boy who is emphatically not gay.

Though the truth is, Elsa could also easily provide the same metaphor for a gay boy or girl growing up in a culture that says their sexuality is a disability.

Or for a child who is not disabled, who wants to be confident enough to wear a black witch's dress to Cinderella when literally every other little girl there is dressed in pink or powder blue, wearing sparkles and a tiara.

And that's the point of fairytales, isn't it? To provide children with the metaphors--the subtext they need to someday find a healthy way into the complicated world of adulthood.

I never thought I'd say it, but thanks, Disney. A powerful metaphor. Well done.

J. Edgar Hoover and the Black Panther Party--background for the life of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter

This is a photo of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, (1942-1969) who died at the age of 26 in a shoot out at UCLA. 

Yup. It was a shoot-out at Campbell Hall, in the Black Student Union, during a meeting to create a balanced faculty in the African-American studies department. 

I have looked hard for background on Alprentice. I know he was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and at some point, moved to Los Angeles, probably as a child. In the late fifties, he became a member of a Slauson street gang, then moved up to the Slauson Renegades, the inner circle of that gang. Ultimately, he was the leader of the Slausons, which had, at that time, over 5,000 members. He was known in those days as the Mayor of the Ghetto. 

Then, he was sentenced to four years for armed robbery. Sent to Soledad, he was exposed to the teachings of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and he converted, but after his release in 1963--he was twenty-one--he met Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panthers, left Islam, and instead joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

It's important here to try to lay some groundwork for inner city Northern blacks in the early sixties. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, (SCLC) the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC) etc., were still focused on the Jim Crow South, where blacks had been subjugated legally since the end of slavery, it was nearly impossible for them to vote, and lynchings were status quo. 

In Northern Cities, the issues were different. People of color were kept packed in isolated neighborhoods, by landlords who refused to rent to you, realtors who refused to sell homes in white neighborhoods and communities who might literally blow your house up or burn it down if you moved in. If you managed to buy a home you usually could not take out loans, as white residents of their town did, in order to improve that house, because banks had redlines drawn on their maps around Black neighborhood and refused to give loans. As for jobs--most unions were just beginning to let you be a member, which still put you in the last hired first fired role, and other than union jobs, you were often restricted to low-paying labor. 

Add to that the police department, which was staffed by people who had been raised to be racist, like most of the rest of the white population at the time. We've all been learning about how white people in general and police officers in particular frequently mis-read African-Americans as huge and impossibly dangerous (If you're interested in teasing out some of your own biases, you can take some interesting tests online at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/) That was obviously true in the past as well, and in Oakland and in Los Angeles, as in many other parts of the north, people in what were then called Negro neighborhoods were used to being roughed up by the police, if not killed by them. 

When we moved to South Central Los Angeles, we heard story after story from our neighbors about police brutality they had and continue to experience. This was eye-opening to me, who had been raised in white suburbia, at a time when Jews were beginning to be considered white. I had been taught that the police officer was my friend, someone to turn to if I were lost, someone who would probably give me ice-cream while I waited for my mama to come and rescue me. 

Then, I heard our neighborhood stories, and I witnessed it myself--a police officer harassing our neighbor who was walking the dogs with us one night after having us over for dinner, and multiple officers profoundly and repeatedly harassing a beloved teenaged neighbor in a way that frightened us so deeply that it was part of why we moved. I became deeply aware that my childhood ideas were not--and still are not--the usual experience for children of color, who often see the adults around them humiliated or handled brutally by police--much like Jews in Eastern Europe even before Hitler, where men were routinely humiliated in front of their families, with no kind of practical recourse, since resistance meant death, rape for their women folk, etc. (Although not resisting might lead to the same results.) 

Martin Luther King was a great leader. And he was pushed forward by impatient young men and women of SNNC. And he was both pushed and supported by an army of mostly unmentioned women who forced, organized and publicized on the ground the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The South's non-violent protests proved highly effective, largely because of this mountain of planning, the support of LBJ, who was a passionate racial activist president and consummate bully politician, and the aforementioned great inspiration of MLK's leadership--though none of that would have made a difference if not for the fact that television brought Southern Brutality into the homes of millions of white Americans, as it was their shamed awareness that allowed change to come. 

But members of SNNC, reeling from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, were already growing impatient with the slow pace of social change and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and the Black Panther party had already chosen a more in-your-face approach when Martin Luther King finally turned his eyes to the poverty of northern cities, just before he was assassinated. They founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and they scared the heck out of white America. Armed with Marxist rhetoric as well as bristling with guns, they told the world they were tired of being roughed up by the police, and would fight fire with fire to defend their own. The Panthers were rooted in Marxist ideology and inspired by the liberation theories of countries around the world, especially South and Central America and Africa. They studied law, started schools, free breakfasts for poor children, but they also "shadowed" police officers, carrying the California Penal code and toting shot guns. 

And that will have to be that, for today. Next time--I hope to get to Ronald Reagan throwing all his political weight--you won't believe this-- in support of gun control. 

Excavating the jumble of history--Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, the Black Panthers in Los Angeles in the 1960's, and J. Edgar Hoover.

There are plenty of places where history has gotten the truth very wrong. Fiction can help with that or hinder it. Shakespeare's deliciously villainous hunchback may have destroyed the reputation of Richard III for all time, while Josephine Tey's marvelous murder mystery, Daughter of Time, probably converted more people to Richard III the good king, Henry VII, the sidewise crab little prince murderer than anybody else, though versions are still being written that have our Dickon III plotting against one brother, drowning another and delighting in slaying his golden-haired nephews.

I fear that it will take a lot to undo the shabby history of The Other Boleyn Girl (sorry, Ms. Gregory, I have enjoyed reading your books, but your history is whacked on this one, and frankly, I have no idea how you created a timorous, trembling virgin out of the young woman whom the French King and his courtiers previously called "The English Mare," because she had been "ridden" so often.)

When I was researching the vast canvas of The Color of Safety, I found people who I felt had been neglected by history or where we have gotten things plain wrong, or where, as I find myself often saying these days, "It's complicated." Much mores than the current historical record--and even more, our collective memories-- would have us believe.

I was talking Tuesday with a gifted writer/film producer friend, Lorie Marsh (http://forward-marsh-go.tumblr.com). Lorie, who knows how to inspire, stared straight at me, called me an academic (which I am not) and said I should blog about my research for The Color of Safety.

I have to run right now, but next time, I will write more about a young man named Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, the head of the L.A. street gang, The Renegades, known as The Mayor of the Ghetto. Carter is complicated, woven in collective memory into the tangles of J. Edgar Hoover's misinformation and subversion campaign, "COINTELPRO." I am eager to begin to set the record straight about Bunchy Carter, a man who was murdered young, but not before trying to create positive change in South Central Los Angeles.

Personal Reactions to the Charlie Hebdo Shooting

A few years, when we visited family in Paris, we stayed for three weeks less than a block from the Charlie Hebdo offices, where the horrible shooting took place this past week. It was my first time to see my husband's extended family, many lovely people he had not seen since his family emigrated to the states. We got to stay for a month, mostly because we first slept in an aunt and uncle's guest room and then were able to borrow a friend of the family's apartment while they went on their vacation, a lovely apartment on Rue Pelee. 

I was very nervous about meeting all these elegant Parisian cousins, so I did a ton of research about the differences between French and American culture. I found these differences intriguing, because they indicated a subtly different outlook on life. For instance, the French considered most Americans to be false, or hypocritical, because we smile all the time, for no reason except that it's cultural to smile. (Think Mitt Romney, if you want an example--not that I'm saying he's a hypocrite, something I don't know, but that his default expression is a smile.) 

Also, the French consider certain ordinary everyday American actions to be quite rude. For instance, a French person would never walk into a store and say what they, "Give me one of those," or even, "Please give me one of those." A little courteous conversation is required first--"Good day, Madam, and how are you today? Oh, I'm glad to hear it. Yes, I'm fine. I'm so sorry to bother you, but could you please give me one of those?" A French person would never pick up the fruit at the fruit market to test for firmness, or fondle the fabric in a dress unless they were seriously interested in purchasing it. One day, we went into a little corner market, a tabac, as they call them, right by our borrowed apartment. When an elderly woman walked slowly into the store, the man behind the counter called out to her--"Pardon me, Madame. I don't mean to disturb you, but I have taken the liberty of setting aside those magazines I noticed you regularly take, and I have them here for you behind the counter." We were stunned. Clearly old women were not invisible in France. There were things in this culture that we very much liked. 

I was rebellious, for some reason, about sightseeing. I know that sounds silly, but what I wanted most was just to live there. To go to a hardware store. To grocery shop. To get my hair cut. To get to know the people who ran the little tabac. To spend time in the courtyard seeing how the people live, and to get to know the miserable (pronounced mizerabluh, just like in the musical). He was Polish, if I recall correctly. He lived in that courtyard inside a large cardboard box and was never without a thick novel in his hand. Neighbors gave him clothing and food, and money (and books.) He was *their* miserable. 

The apartment we stayed in had a balcony covered with plants. (Our rent was to make sure they were all watered.) This balcony overlooked a little street, or allee, which I believe was Rue Nicolas Appert, where the two murderers shoot a downed French policeman in cold blood.  We walked regularly walked through that allee, past the Volvo dealership, past the art store on Boulevard Richard Lenoir. Our oldest learned to walk four blocks away, where he was also taught to shriek very loudly by a great-aunt and uncle, who adored him. 

These eldest members of our family and their siblings and spouses survived the Holocaust in Paris, or came back from Auschwitz, or emigrated after the labor camps in Siberia and the salt mines of Kazakhstan, or were hidden as children in the forests of Poland.  Their parents starved to death in the Warsaw ghetto, or were beaten to death by Polish workers, or watched other children--siblings of our family--die of starvation or untreated illness--in the ghetto, in the forest, in the labor camps, under Hitler, or Stalin. Their brothers and sisters died in Auschwitz. Eight of the immediate family's children died in these ways. 

So--when we heard about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, we thought of the streets where we walked, baby on back. We thought of "our" miserable, and hoped he was all right. We thought of the kind people who allowed us to stay in their apartment for a rent of taking care of their plants. We thought of the Rue de Rosiers, where we walked past Judaica shops and Kosher restaurants, and the cousin we never met because he has become ultra-Orthodox and cut himself off from the less-observant family, and of the funny, warm, kind cousin who was four when he lost mother, sister and brother at the V'el D'hiver, and is now, seventy-one years later, leaving France because of the increasing anti-semitism. 

We especially thought of our now very elderly surviving great-aunt and uncle who went through impossibly horrible experiences with humor and unbelievable resilience, who still carried the gift of loving, laughter, joy, who make music and play ping pong and sing in choirs and raised fabulous children, and who are now facing a complex situation, where a fringe element of Muslims is creating a nightmare for Jews, Christians and other Muslims--remember, that police officer murdered in cold blood was a Muslim, too. 

I have dear friends who are Muslim. We have a large population of Muslims where we live. My children go to school with them. We are on committees together and talk as we pick up our children at the end of the day. Violence is no more inherent to their faith than all Christians are Crusaders, going off to free Jerusalem and burning up the Jews along the way--no more violent than Judaism, which in our time has spawned own violent fundamentalists after centuries of Jews being renowned for peaceful living. Crazy people, people who have no sense of the value of life, can come from any upbringing and use any religion as an excuse to kill. I pray that Europe and the United States are able to find a way to stand up to those who hate--a way to keep ourselves safe from them, and to make certain we don't become them. 

Personal Reactions to the Charlie Hebdo Shooting

A few years, when we visited family in Paris, we stayed for three weeks less than a block from the Charlie Hebdo offices, where the horrible shooting took place this past week. It was my first time to see my husband's extended family, many lovely people he had not seen since his family emigrated to the states. We got to stay for a month, mostly because we first stayed with relatives, and then, for three weeks, we were able to borrow a friend of the family's apartment while they went on their vacation, a lovely apartment on Rue Pelee. 

I was very nervous about meeting all these elegant Parisian cousins, so I did a ton of research about the differences between French and American culture. I found these differences intriguing, because they indicated a subtly different outlook on life. For instance, the French considered most Americans to be false, or hypocritical, because we smile all the time, for no reason except that it's cultural to smile. (Think Mitt Romney, if you want an example--not that I'm saying he's a hypocrite, something I don't know, but that his default expression is a smile.) 

Also, the French consider certain ordinary everyday American actions to be quite rude. For instance, a French person would never walk into a store and say what they, "Give me one of those," or even, "Please give me one of those." A little courteous conversation is required first--"Good day, Madam, and how are you today? Oh, I'm glad to hear it. Yes, I'm fine. I'm so sorry to bother you, but could you please give me one of those?" A French person would never pick up the fruit at the fruit market to test for firmness, or fondle the fabric in a dress unless they were seriously interested in purchasing it. One day, we went into a little corner market, a tabac, as they call them, right by our borrowed apartment. When an elderly woman walked slowly into the store, the man behind the counter called out to her--"Pardon me, Madame. I don't mean to disturb you, but I have taken the liberty of setting aside those magazines I noticed you regularly take, and I have them here for you behind the counter." We were stunned. Clearly old women were not invisible in France. There were things in this culture that we very much liked. 

I was rebellious, for some reason, about sightseeing. I know that sounds silly, but what I wanted most was just to live there. To go to a hardware store. To grocery shop. To get my hair cut. To get to know the people who ran the little tabac. To spend time in the courtyard seeing how the people live, and to get to know the miserable (pronounced mizerabluh, just like in the musical). He was Polish, if I recall correctly. He lived in that courtyard inside a large cardboard box and was never without a thick novel in his hand. Neighbors gave him clothing and food, and money (and books.) He was *their* miserable. 

The apartment we stayed in had a balcony covered with plants. (Our rent was to make sure they were all watered.) This balcony overlooked a little street, or allee, which I believe was Rue Nicolas Appert, where the two murderers shoot a downed French policeman in cold blood.  We walked regularly walked through that allee, past the Volvo dealership, past the art store on Boulevard Richard Lenoir. Our oldest learned to walk four blocks away, where he was also taught to shriek very loudly by a great-aunt and uncle, who adored him. 

These eldest members of our family and their siblings and spouses survived the Holocaust in Paris, or came back from Auschwitz, or emigrated after the labor camps in Siberia and the salt mines of Kazakhstan, or were hidden as children in the forests of Poland.  Their parents starved to death in the Warsaw ghetto, or were beaten to death by Polish workers, or watched other children--siblings of our family--die of starvation or untreated illness--in the ghetto, in the forest, in the labor camps, under Hitler, or Stalin. Their brothers and sisters died in Auschwitz. Eight of the immediate family's children died in these ways. 

So--when we heard about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, we thought of the streets where we walked, baby on back. We thought of "our" miserable, and hoped he was all right. We thought of the kind people who allowed us to stay in their apartment for a rent of taking care of their plants. We thought of the Rue de Rosiers, where we walked past Judaica shops and Kosher restaurants, and the cousin we never met because he has become ultra-Orthodox and cut himself off from the less-observant family, and of the funny, warm, kind cousin who was four when he lost mother, sister and brother at the V'el D'hiver, and is now, seventy-one years later, leaving France because of the increasing anti-semitism. 

We especially thought of our now very elderly surviving great-aunt and uncle who went through impossibly horrible experiences with humor and unbelievable resilience, who still carried the gift of loving, laughter, joy, who make music and play ping pong and sing in choirs and raised fabulous children, and who are now facing a complex situation, where a fringe element of Muslims is creating a nightmare for Jews, Christians and other Muslims--remember, that police officer murdered in cold blood was a Muslim, too. 

I have dear friends who are Muslim. We have a large population of Muslims where we live. My children go to school with them. We are on committees together and talk as we pick up our children at the end of the day. Violence is no more inherent to their faith than all Christians are Crusaders, going off to free Jerusalem and burning up the Jews along the way--no more violent than Judaism, which in our time has spawned own violent fundamentalists after centuries of Jews being renowned for peaceful living. Crazy people, people who have no sense of the value of life, can come from any upbringing and use any religion as an excuse to kill. I pray that Europe and the United States are able to find a way to stand up to those who hate--a way to keep ourselves safe from them, and to make certain we don't become them. 

Chasing Publication Through An Industry in Flux

A few years ago, I wrote a Fanny Flaggish novel, The One And Holy Skillet. After a session at the San Diego State Writers' Conference--a terrific place to connect with editors and agents--I had several agents wanting to represent it. I chose one, highly reputable, who had almost signed a friend's literary-ish mystery novel. She loved it, asked for almost no changes, and began to submit it.

We were in the process of moving between states while she sent me email after email: editors who, with deep regret, had to turn the novel down. This one couldn't get collegial support, this one's executive editor said no.  Typical was the note from an editor at a hugely successful publisher who went bankrupt last January. "Alas, we have decided to pass on The One And Holy Skillet. I'm disappointed as I found it entertaining, smart, and well written . . . [But the Publisher says no.] I'm sure you will find just the right home for this refreshing book - the author handles the large cast of characters with finesse and nicely balances the more serious issues with humor and irony.”

I was excited when one--Lorna Landvik's acquiring editor--said she loved it, and wanted to work with me through minor changes, the kind of thing editors used to do, I gather, in the long ago days of publishing. She told us she was searching for her notes, which she had lost somewhere on her desk. And then, she died. (Kind of tough to find the appropriate reaction--you want to be swearing and irritated, but on the other hand--she's dead.)

We had just moved, I was pregnant, and caring for a kid who has often been seven children wrapped in one, when my then-agent handed me back the manuscript, after having submitted it to three or four small presses. We got nos, or "I've lost the manuscript, send it again." And then, they lost it again. Although I now lived in a city with several fabulous small presses, I was overwhelmed with my life and chose to focus what little energy I had on writing The Color of Safety rather than selling Skillet. (See earlier post about The Color Of Safety.) 

Then, a couple of months ago, I found a copy of Skillet.  Enough time had passed that I could read it as though someone else and written it. It was a rip-roaringly good read. Funny and interesting, page-turning, and unexpected, but in a way that felt inevitable. There was real pain in the main characters, who felt like real people. I found rare insight and even wisdom in the pages and unexpected depths for a novel that is such a romp. (Yes, I know it's my novel, but I'm being honest here. Why not?)

I sent it to a dear and trusted writer friend, Cece Box, who read it right away before starting on a Fanny Flagg jag. "I can't tell you how good this is. I can't remember when I've hung on a story so intently, and I can't wait for the rest.  Amazing story telling, wonderful, wonderful characters.  I think it is a mark of good literature when the reader cannot predict which way each character is going to go. Found myself thinking: well, it's a comedy, deep down, so it has to be a "happy" ending.... But what will "happy" turn out to mean?"

So, I decided to find the small publisher I should have looked for seven years ago. I even tried to locate the editor who wrote the quote above, from that publishing house that went bankrupt. I think I have found her working on a low-residency MFA in poetry in Montana. I hope she's enjoying the process.

I have a dear friend, M. Louisa Locke,  who self-published her cozy historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, in 2009. (http://mlouisalocke.com/blog/) She hosts an extremely informative blog about self-publishing and has, with many a sigh, said to me, "When you are finally ready to self-publish, let me know and I'll help you through it."

Since her Maids, she has published two other novels in that San Francisco series, and several short stories. They are a delight, I know she is doing very well with her self-publishing.

And yet, I think that The One And Holy Skillet is, if not literary, then literate--think of Edna Ferber's delicious romp, Saratoga Trunk, or Cid Ricketts Sumner's more serious Pinky. At any rate, I think it has the potential to be seriously reviewed. And I want those reviews, because my next novel, Color of Safety, is going to fit squarely into the literary but accessible category, and self-publishing, at least for now, is not a real option.

And so, years after my agent handed the novel back, I have begun a quest to get this lovely book published. That's my current journey--to sell The One And Holy Skillet. Over the next weeks, I hope to write more about the joys and tribulations of connecting with small publishers.

Sakki

Into The Woods--When Subtext becomes Text

My dear friend and brilliant author, Cece Box, wrote a review of the recent film, Into the Woods. https://cecebox.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/into-the-woods-all-wet/

This inspired me to write my own review Into the Woods, going on a slightly different journey but arriving, more or less, at Cece's endpoint--that Into The Woods is an intellectual exercise on the part of its creators, with characters who never earn the spiritual growth that Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine wished for them. Thus, they never make it into our hearts or allow us to grow along with them.

Spoiler Alert--this review talks about late-plot-points. 

Here's a bit of history behind Into the Woods: In 1976, controversial psychologist and Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim published The Uses of Enchantment, a Freudian analysis of fairy tales in which he postulates that the gore and grief of these often wickedly violent stories allow children to grapple with issues of childhood and their lives to come via the metaphors of witches, wild forests, wicked step-mothers, fairy god-mothers and giants.

In 1986, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine took Bettelheim's work and threw it onstage for grownups, metaphorically using a large blackboard to point out what each subtext was.

This was intentional. For example, Bettelheim suggests that Little Red Riding Hood explores what young girls risk as they approach the mysteries and potential danger of the mysterious male; on stage, Sondheim and Lapine presents us with a human/wolf hybrid with a perpetual erection, singing paeans to Red's young flesh and the delight of  "talking with his meal," and in stage and film versions, the pre-pubescent victim remains perky and untouched by her violation--in fact, she discusses it as an edifying experience, which makes this truly a fairy-tale!

Sondheim and Lapine boldly interweave the classic fairytales--Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and of course, Little Red Ridinghood --with a tale more or less of their own making, about a Baker and His Wife whose longing for a child leads them into conflict with the rest, especially Rapunzel's Witch, who here morphs into a creature devoid of her glamour by the same cruel spell that rendered the Baker and His Wife barren. 

Sondheim is notorious for the coolness of his work. Where his fellow Broadway composer William Finn writes emotional ambivalence as the emotional complexity of passionately feeling two things at the same time--"I never wanted, I wanted, I never never never never never never wanted to love you," sings one character in March of the Falsettos--Sondheim has spent his career writing ambivalence as the intellectual complexity of not wanting to feel--"You're always sorry, you're always grateful. You hold her thinking you're not alone. You're still alone," sings another in Company. 

Here, he adds Cinderella to his list of emotionally detached characters, presenting her as being unable to decide if she really wants the Prince she has longed so much to meet and win. And of course, he does his best to show us the Baker, after the death of his wife, as someone unwilling to commit to the care of his child.

Sondheim was raised in virtual abandonment by a wicked witch of a mother and father who basically abandoned him. Thus, it makes sense that every mother in the story has her evil twist except for Cinderella, whose mother is dead. We get: the mother of Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk, who whaps her son's head as often as she worries about him; the Evil Stepmother too bored to be truly cruel to her step-daughter; the Baker's Wife carelessly laying her infant on the ground where a giant may soon stomp, and hands him off without much thought to a Cinderella she barely knows; while the Witch from Rapunzel becomes both a clinging, lying, toxically punitive mother, (in the original Into the Woods, Rapunzel, banished to the desert for her disobedience goes mad) and a witch with her own evil, punitive witch mother, who destroys Rapunzel's witch--or in the film, turns her into a pit of tar.

We also get, in the original, the Baker's father/narrator who abandoned the Baker in his childhood, and in this version, a Baker who, after frantically struggling to conceive and birth his son, for barely reasons then struggles with the notion of being a father himself.

Jack and the Beanstalk is presented as a morally bankrupt tale, (Yes, we get it, Jack climbs the beanstalk and steals much more than he needs, including all the Giant's treasures.) This misses the point that Jack is one of many poor, supposedly stupid folk characters who steal or trick those who Have out of their wealth and get away with it through vigor and innate cleverness. (See, for instance, Puss In Boots and Thumpkin) Characters who are supposedly shattered by grief suddenly turn on one another with angry, comic blame, without much emotional linkage between the two.

The film version of the stage musical also cuts the Baker's Father as any kind of coherent character. When he turns up, at the very end, it's unclear if he is a living man, or a ghost, just as the Baker's Wife's death, presented off-screen, is so vague that we're not sure if, when she reappears, she's a ghost or her living self.

Look, it's great fun to tinker with classical fairy-tales, and I really enjoy that they have chosen to use the original, violent versions of those tales that they intertwine--(the blinding of the Step-sisters, etc.) Emily Blunt and Anna Kendrick give delicately shaded performances that are overshadowed by the indelible, pretentious, self-absorbed portrait Chris Pine creates as Prince Charming. And though I am immensely sorry that we lost the chance to see Robin Williams as the Baker, who can complain over an opportunity to watch Streep chew the scenery in her marvelous unexpected ways?

But when subtext becomes text, nobody is ultimately appealing, and when nobody grows, the supposed catharsis of "No One Is Alone," or "Children Will Listen," does not carry weight. The only character who really goes on a journey of growth is the Baker's Wife, who allowed herself to explore the wildness of the wood by dallying with a handsome prince.

And she, of course, got killed before she might take that journey to its final, painful ending--having to confront the husband she betrayed and the child she abandoned in order to fully experience the ways she could be "different in the woods."

Look, I get it, I do. It was far too tempting for Sondheim to have a way to legally kill his mother.

Still, it's a shame. Had they allowed the Baker's Wife to live on, it might at least have given us one real, emotionally resonant story to follow.