Halloween Fiction--Mutton Dressed as Lamb

A short little Halloween story:

MUTTON DRESSED AS LAMB

By Katherine Tomlinson

Vannetti sighed when Bruce knocked on the door of his study. He could tell from the sheepish look on Bruce's face that the reason for his unannounced visit was not anything good.

It was Bruce's first Halloween after his second birth and Vannetti had hoped he was out on the town, making the most of his new status and moving about freely, his pale skin and red-rimmed eyes dismissed as just another costume by the human revelers.

"Yes Bruce?" he asked, irritated by his passive body-language he displayed, more appropriate to prey than to his position as an alpha predator.

"Um," Bruce said, which annoyed Vannetti even more. He hated indecision of any sort and verbal hesitancy drove him mad. He'd been born into an aristocratic Venetian family that had valued intellectual rigor. He'd been thoroughly trained in the art of conversation by his father's courtesans and his mother's priests. Of all the changes that had occurred in the long years since he'd been born into the blood, Vannetti mourned the decline of meaningful discourse the most.

"I have a problem," Bruce said and Vannetti sighed again, which is actually not that easy for someone who doesn't need to breathe but a useful trick he'd found to communicate his emotions noverbally.

"I need to show you," Bruce said as he retreated from the doorway in the direction of the Grand Hall.

Vannetti wanted nothing more than to return to the book he was reading, but he knew Bruce would give him no peace until he attended to whatever drama had been created.

There was a masked woman standing in the Grand Hall.

Her figure was sublime, enhanced by a tight, long-sleeved gown of peacock silk that was wrapped around her like a present.

Eye of the beholder

Water Lilies by Monet

I don't much like hospitals. My father was a chronic invalid whose health problems required frequent hospitilization and my sister continued that tradition. I would be really happy if I never had to go into a hospital again. But  what with one thing and another, hospitals happen.  I spent eight hours at the Jules Stein Eye Clinic in LA yesterday, watching over a friend who needed eye surgery and then needed significant aftercare for pain management and blood oxygen levels.  Around one I wandered out of the recovery room looking for someplace to grab a bite.  I noticed the corridors were lined with cheery posters, including a version of Monet's "Water lilies" I'd never seen before. I stepped closer to the "poster" and discovered ... it was an original painting.  I went back and looked at the other "posters" I'd bypassed.  A Picasso. Another Monet. A Raoul Dufy.  There was a Van Gogh.  A treasure of art just hanging on the walls in an otherwise featureless corridor in a maze of featureless corridors. 
Wow.

My vote is my own....

There are a lot of benefits to working as a freelancer. You can wear bike shorts or jammie pants all day. You never have to deal with office politics unless it's negotiating with your cat over who gets to sit in the big comfy desk chair. You don't have to listen to anyone else's choice of a radio station. You can sneak out to a movie whenever you want because as long as you get your work done it doesn't matter when you do the work.
I love being a freelancer.
And now it turns out there's another great benefit of being a freelancer. No one thinks they have the right to tell me how to vote.  (Half my clients are in Europe or Australia, and they especially couldn't care less how I vote, although they do have opinions about who should be the next President.) 
I cannot imagine getting an email like this one Mike White sent out to his employees at Rite-Hite suggesting they consider the "personal consequences" of voting for Barack Obama.
People who work for Rite-Hite can't just thumb their nose at their boss.  And of course, they can vote their consciences, because how would White know how they voted? But the kind of not-so-subtle intimidation this email carried is outrageous.
I am grateful that my livelihood does not depend on my political convictions or on how I vote.
This election cycle has brought out some of the most extreme rhetoric and outrageous behavior I can remember.  And it's not just the ridiculous and demeaning remarks about rape and abortion. It's the demands for birth certificates and tax returns and passport applications.
The most important election of my lifetime will be over in less than two weeks.
I've already voted.
And nobody told me what choices to make.
The choice was clear.

Running the numbers--Equal pay for equal work

One of the candidates for President does not believe that  it's a problem that women don't make as much as men in the workplace.
A lot of people believe that the same candidate's wife, who chose to be a stay-at-home mom, said this about equal pay for women:  "Why should women be paid equal to men? Men have been in the working world a lot longer and deserve to be paid at a higher rate."  It's a great little soundbite, the perfect kind of quote to generate outrage but Ann Romney never said it.  For info on who created and propagated the bogus quote, check out this post on About.com's Urban Legend's channel.
So maybe people should quit damning Mrs. Romney for things she didn't say.
Her husband, though, has said a lot of things on the subject and he just will not be pinned down by pesky reporters who keep asking him for his opinion on equal pay for women.
What is known is that he opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
(Who is Lilly Ledbetter you might ask.   She's a woman who sued her employer, Goodyear, claiming she'd been paid significantly less than her male counterparts. 
Here's a thought to take with you into the polling booth--Women college graduates make, on average, $8000 less a year than their male peers.  Don't take my word for it, check out this article.

Halloween Movie Marathon: Tales from the Darkside

I never saw the television series Tales from the Darkside, but I really liked this anthology film. Like Stephen King's Cat's Eye or the Twilight Zone Movie, it was a collection of three tales, bookended by a riff on Hansel and Gretl with Deborah Harry of Blondie fame playing the witch figure.
The three segments were "Lot 249," based on a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story and starring Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, and Christian Slater; "Lover's Vow" starring James Remar and Rae Dawn Chong; and "Cat From Hell," based on a Stephen King story, starring the supremely creepy William Hickey (remember him from Prizzi's Honor?) and David (Buster Poindexter) Johansen.
Oddly, I have almost no memory of the "Cat From Hell" segment, which was adapted by George Romero from King's short story. Romero and director John Harrison are long-time friends and colleagues--you can see Harrison play Pellinore in Romero's entertaining Knightriders. If you're an Ed Harris fan, you should really check the movie out. It's about a troupe of Ren Faire biker/jousters. Stephen King makes a cameo appearance as an obnoxious audience member (and if memory serves, his wife Tabitha King is also in there.) Harrison and Romero also collaborated on Diary of the Dead.
"Lot 249" was a very creepy mummy story.  Buscemi had mostly been doing television series work up to them (he'd be in Miller's Crossing a couple of years later). Slater had just had a Lindsay Lohan-style problem with his car and some alcohol but didn't let it affect his work.
"Lover's Vow" was possibly the strongest of the stories and had some really good special effects for a horror movie made for a price. The chemistry between Remar (of Dexter) and Chong was hot.
This is a movie where you can dip in and out of the stories as the night goes on. Pair it with something like the Romero/King collaboration Creepshow.

Halloween Movie Marathon: Pet Sematary

I have read nearly all of Stephen King's books, some of them twice, and Pet Sematary scared me the most because the wish fulfillment at work is so incredibly basic. Who wouldn't want a beloved pet to return, or a beloved relative?
I liked this movie although I never saw either the sequel or the remake. The tagline from the movie, "Sometimes dead is better" is kind of my policy on remakes--sometimes you just need to let a movie die. Seriously. Now that we have Blu-Ray and VOD and streaming and netflix and hulu and whatever, you really don't need to remake a movie for a new audience because each generation of audience can see the original for themselves.
But I digress.
I liked the casting in this movie. Dale Midkiff was fine as the father who can't resist the oportunity to bring his son back. This movie is King's version of The Monkey's Paw and audiences were screaming "Don't do it" when I first saw it.
Denise Crosby's role as his wife was probably the best role she ever had on the big screen.
The person I really liked, though, was Fred Gwynne, who played the neighbor who holds the secret of the Pet Sematary.  Three years later he played the long-suffering judge on My Cousin Vinny and he was a hoot. Here he is utterly convincing as a man who talks about having a heart like stony ground, but who can't help but interfere when he sees his neighbor suffering.
Stephen King has a cameo in the film as a minister, and he's better than M. Night Shyamalan in his cameos, but not by much. He's about on a par with Peter Benchley, who made a brief appearance in Jaws.
The movie was directed by Mary Lambert, who also directed the sequel. Lambert's film career never really got any traction, although she has directed a number of genre films (and has one in production) and a lot of music videos for Sting and Lionel Ritchie and similar superstar talents.
There are some genuine frights in this movie, and the idea itself is just damn creepy. The book is even creepier, so you might want to read it first just to get the full effect.

It's not that hard to get it right!

Sigh. The four most lucrative times of the year for me are the annual film festivals--Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, and the American Film Market, which is due to open in little over a week. I read between 30 and 100 movie scripts in the weeks running up to the markets, and sometimes I have to subcontract the work in order to get it all done.
I've gotten used to certain errors I see over and over and over again in scripts ("Vile" of cocaine"; "His breaks failed"), but I'm starting to get a little nuts about the mistakes my subcontractors routinely make.
The most common error is mistaking ITS and IT'S.  Seriously.  It is not that hard to keep them straight. Ditto for WHOSE and WHO'S. My contractors are smart people, good writers, educated. But somewhere along the way, they just missed a couple of things.
My best friend mocks me when I go off on this stuff and calls me a "word snoot."
And it's not like I don't have weaknesses.  I can't spell graffiti to save my life. I always want to put in one F and two Ts.  I'm not really clear on THAT and WHICH.
But I know IT'S and ITS.
I actually blame Spellcheck. Have you ever noticed that Spellcheck will challenge your every use of ITS and IT'S? If you're not rock solid on the rule, it would be VERY easy to get it wrong. 
I try to remember that as I go through the work I get back.
I fear I am becoming the grammar equivalent of the cranky old person who tells kids to get off his lawn.