Originally written the week of November 6, 2020, while votes in the Election were still being counted. Published and revised on Thanksgiving Day when I finally finished and polished it for release. I know, I write very, very slowly. Happy Thanksgiving. Let’s talk about pies!
Trigger warning still in effect. For 18+, people, reader discretion is advised, because the movie and musical Waitress both talk about touchy subjects of rape, abuse, and assault.
Beginning of November is normally the worst time of the year for me, the hardest time: Halloween, my favorite dress-up holiday where no one criticizes what you wear, is ruined and flogged by corporations and big businesses screaming their Christmas sales as early as September and won’t leave anyone to shop for costumes, department stores selling Santas and reindeer next to zombies and skeletons, and like my favorite political song by Norah Jones, the looming terror of Election Day, mentioned in “My Dear Country”.
But worst of all, did I ever share with you what day it was that I was officially single again that I refused to ever love again and decided to die alone?
It was this week. “Remember, remember the fifth of November,” goes Guy Fawkes and the man behind a mask in the comic series V for Vendetta, which is about Guy Fawkes Day in England, which is told from a dystopian perspective… in the year 2020. And this year’s politics and scandals happening in the past week have been so bad that the dystopian world came true, and it got me going down a trip down memory lane to last year with the breakup of my ex, dad being in the hospital, mom’s problem visiting dad in the hospital, and losing more than half of my friends I trusted.
And on Guy Fawkes Day, I embarrassed myself in front of my boyfriend’s brother and his friend in the same car. I can tell by the way I’m looking at my Facebook now, they’re rejecting my friend requests.
I can’t make friends anymore.
It makes me believe that I’m either torn between Jenna and Dawn in Waitress, the movie version, in this moment.
I watched that movie again this week. Alexander ended up LOVING it. I knew it right off the bat.
But it put me in a position where I had to delve back into writing about Hamilton again, and this time… show you all the things it didn’t do that Waitress ended up doing BETTER. As a compare and contrast, if you will, especially since Waitress is a feminist story of hope for women who end up being victims of abuse, rape, and domestic violence, no matter what color or sexuality you are.
In fact, some of the videos from the new Sara Bareilles musical surprised me, from the various changes in cast and crew.
Colleen Ballinger is one of them. Though she’s not in the original Broadway cast-
In fact, this is the original actress who plays Dawn, and her name is Kimiko Glenn, who is of Asian descent, born in Phoenix, Arizona to a Japanese mother and a father of Scottish, Irish and German descent.
She has a FINE voice too.
But honestly, Colleen Ballinger is funnier. She just looks sillier, and definitely embodies the late director Adrienne Shelley, who played the same role of Dawn in the movie.
Even Ogie in Colleen’s version is different:
He perfectly matches Dawn’s personality, making them a MARVELOUS COUPLE. They belong together. And him mentioning his cat Sardine in the show is exactly what Sara Bareilles and Adrienne Shelley would have wanted for this show.
And here’s the kicker- it’s the same level of diversity in the cast as HAMILTON!
I- I- I- uhhhh…
That’s pretty much the same level as that musical, but it hits a different note when it comes to domestic abuse and assault. And it’s the scene where Earl Hunterson, the criminal abusive rapey husband, finds the very pregnant Jenna’s hidden stash of money that she was going to use to pay for a lawyer to run away and get a divorce. After Jenna lies to him that she was saving that money to buy a crib and some toys for the baby, she sings this song that breaks your heart in pieces. And it hits a level for me that the heartfelt scenes in Hamilton didn’t reach for me, because I’m a former victim of sexual and verbal assault by boyfriends, and even emotional abuse from my closest friends and an ex boyfriend- I’m not on speaking terms with all of them.
This is Jessie Mueller’s heartfelt performance from the Broadway show:
The first time I saw her preview performance for broadway.com, I cried. Tears were welling in my eyes and it wouldn’t stop at the end of it. Yeah, it got me, hard. The scenes from Hamilton, namely the scene where Philip Hamilton dies (found out the man who played Philip is Anthony Ramos, who’s planning to be the cutest Usnavi I’ve ever seen in the movie adaptation of Lin’s first musical In the Heights in 2021), had to take me more than one watching period to make me cry, I had to run it back and watch it again to get it, it’s complicated. “She Used to Be Mine” from Waitress only took ONCE to make me well up in sadness. That’s the level of poignance it has for women who were victims of abuse and assault. If you remember the scene from the actual Adrienne Shelley movie where Keri Russell is at the bus stop writing a letter to her baby as she’s running away, and Earl pulls up in his car and stops her from leaving- that is the biggest moment of cutthroat abuse you see on screen:
EARL HITS JENNA ACROSS THE FACE. While she’s pregnant. And he almost beats her up when they’re in the car on the way home. He stops hurting her physically when she suddenly screams, “I’M PREGNANT!”
And finally, the car tires screech to a halt.
And Earl forces her against her will to swear an oath to love her husband more than her unborn child, that the husband comes first and baby comes dead last. If she didn’t leave him before the end of the movie, after she finally has a chat with her only friend Old Joe, Earl would have committed a double homicide by murdering his wife and killing her baby too. Earl is a total asshole, cut and dry, two dimensional, perfectly described on paper. It’s enough for her to have a sexy steamy love affair with her GYN doctor, which she actually does, for nine months of her pregnancy. She almost runs away with Dr. Pometter to start a new life with him when her water breaks and she meets his wife while she’s in labor.
Worse, and this originally wasn’t in the movie, but they point this out in the musical, in the song that Sara Bareilles wrote as “Door Number Three” for her album, but eventually got turned into the pivotal song “What Baking Can Do”: Jenna was not the first woman in her family to be a victim of abuse by a husband. Her mother was first, her sweet and wonderful mom who taught her everything about baking pies and turned her into an expert baker who dreams of opening a pie shop.
It’s so heartbreaking when you see Jenna’s father beating up her mom, that you want to turn your head away, but it’s really off to the side in the shadows where the camera doesn’t capture it in this video. It’s performed as a dumbshow silent ballet as Jessie Mueller sings and beats her dough to bake a perfect pie.
But the good part, my favorite bit, is the part at the end where Jenna goes into labor and gives birth. Thank the lord it’s a baby girl and not a boy. The first time Jenna sees her new baby daughter, she’s lovestruck and head over heels for that baby. She’s crazy in love at first sight about her child that she finally gets the strength to say to her evil delinquent husband, “I don’t love you, Earl. I haven’t loved you for years. I want a divorce. I want you the hell out of my life. You are never to TOUCH me again. If you come within SIX YARDS of me, I will flatten your sorry ass and ENJOY DOING IT!”
Earl gets thrown out by security when he tries attacking his wife again, and Jenna says softly to her baby, “Lulu. That’s your name. Little Lulu. We’re gonna have so much fun, little girl. We’re gonna have so. Much. Fun!”
And eventually, Jenna gets enough money to get a lawyer and sue Earl for everything, she gets a new place to live with her baby daughter Lulu, and because Old Joe had no remaining heirs, I’m pretty sure he named Jenna Hunterson his only next of kin, and he left her with EVERYTHING in his will, including the pie diner itself! She inherits the diner, has it remodeled and refurbished, and calls it Lulu’s Pies, naming it after her daughter.
Now you tell me, IS THAT A HAPPY ENDING OR WHAT??? And Jenna doesn’t need a man in this happy ending! She’s a single mom at the end! She even dumps her doctor when she realizes that he belongs with his wife anyway, and she just leaves him after Lulu is born!
And the look on her face as a single mom at the end credits… is pure JOY. She loves her daughter. Dawn loves her new husband Ogie, and even they start having kids by the end. Becky is happy in her marriage, and her love affair with Cal too, at the diner, and it’s like everything’s back to normal. And just so you know, I have never been to Broadway or any musicals at the Hippodrome in Downtown Baltimore my whole life, but I have total access to the entire soundtrack to the musical, including a YouTube account that doesn’t stop me from accessing the scenes from the musical, and I own the original movie starring Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion on DVD- the musical and the movie are both ALMOST IDENTICAL.
Which brings me to say this:
IF ANY MUSICAL DESERVES A TONY MORE THAN HAMILTON, IT’S WAITRESS AND THERE I STOP!!! Come on, it inspires hope and feminism!
And that’s the happy ending I want for 2020, when we get to 2021, and Biden is sworn in as the new President, Kamala Harris is the new VP (YES! 100 years after the 19th Amendment and a WOMAN is the VICE PRESIDENT! WHOOP WHAAAAAAT!), and EVERYBODY gets a damn vaccine. Sadly, 44 percent of Americans in my hometown of Maryland are not changing their plans for Thanksgiving, and while 65 percent of us Marylanders want the vaccine, 20 percent of Maryland Republicans are against vaccines as opposed to 10 percent of Maryland Democrats, according to WBAL News.
Once again, fuck Maryland. I don’t care whatever it takes, who provides it first, either Mederna, Pfizer, or very recently, Astra Zeneca, I’m getting the Corona Virus vaccine immediately, if it’s the last thing I do on Earth. I don’t care anymore. God bless the pharmaceuticals and scientists who give us vaccines. Bless you and love you all!
Back to Hamilton, though, the story of Alexander Hamilton is super, super depressing. However, Tenth Doctor David Tennant on Doctor Who used to say, “With biographies, you need a good death. Without death, there would only be comedies.” He had a point there, for most biographies are best when somebody dies. The biggest sellers for magazines are the magazines that advertise dead celebrities on the front cover. Imagine the boost of sales when magazines like People came out with their tributes to Robin Williams, Chadwick Boseman, Anthony Bourdain and the incredible Hon. Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And it’s the push of sales magazines make off dead celebrities to make sure people remember them after their deaths, and it’s because history repeats itself, and history is a major part of our culture.
Shit. I’d be insane to start another episode of the Hamilton dissertation right now.
Because honestly, I recently went to the Barnes and Noble some weeks ago, found Ron Chernow’s biography about the Founding Father of the Treasury, picked it up and held it, and DAMN, that motherfucker is huge.
Mr. Miranda, you want to tell me again how you managed to read a BRICK heavy textbook on sale at the bookstores and Amazon over ONE vacation in the Caribbean with your wife??? And you took reading that book in one sitting, in a hammock on the beach, and came home to New York to write one musical in six years, writing a whopping 46 song setlist, and put it on the stage with YOU as the leading role?!?!?!?
I FAIL TO UNDERSTAND! HELP ME FIGURE THIS OUT! GRRRRRRRRR!
All right, that’s it, this dissertation is not done, yet. There will be a part seven.
And there will be a YouTube live video of Midnight Mania coming to you first to introduce episode seven, with ASMR qualities, as I will be crocheting something very pretty…
To be continued.
Playlist selection- the Kelly Clarkson music video that made me cry, and is so poignant and hopeful for people dealing with abuse, neglect, divorce, cancer, mental illness, discrimination, and pain. Believe me, from my wounded heart, all of you are not alone. Please believe me.
The Lady in the Blue Box 