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5:42 AM Royal Journal
I've mailed this this python ad, and this love note to Royal Journal. They do not top the Plaid Hippo. They do not even come close to The Thumbs Up Guy.
Friday, August 02, 2002
11:15 AM Hootchie-Kootchie
Sally Bucher's concept of the nonmusical never gained the respect it deserved. Sally, like most people bent on deconstruction, loved what she set out to tear apart. She thought up the nonmusical not because she felt that the American musical movie needed to be done away with, but because she felt that having a movie set up as a musical, but with no musical numbers, could work. That yearning for a song and a dance could produce an equivalent, if different elation from the one felt when presented with a song or a dance.
Sally's obsession took root after watching Meet Me in St. Louis for a whole night. She rewound the tape and played it the minute it ended. Vincent Minelli did many things right in the movie, but what did it for Sally were the moments were you'd hear a cue for a song, wait for the number to begin, and instead have the scene play out with the song bursting in later, unexpected.
She wrote letters to Sally Benson's estate, thinking that the original New Yorker articles would make the perfect nonmusical. It was already one of the finest musicals around. It would be the first nonmusical. You'd have all the cues, even some from the original. But you'd have no songs. You'd have people about to break into dance. They'd lean into a step that would turn, with balletic precision, into an ordinary, earthbound motion.
Bucher's letters received an unexpected warm response. Bucher, alas, had been deep into the film, had in fact gone so deep that she convinced herself that the response to her letter was written by Sally Benson herself, and she also believed that she (Sally Bucher, Sally B.) was Sally Benson reincarnated. Benson wrote a flurry of letters back -- some dealt with the nonmusical in question, and some with the basic filmic groundings for the nonmusical, but most spilled out Sally B.'s life in tragic and effluent detail. Her handwriting betrayed her desperation, her anger, and her delusion. Sally B. killed her creation with her derangement. The nonmusical was not to be.
What happened to Sally? I don't know. I don't know anyone who knows. The letters remain in the archives. The person who wrote them has vanished.
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