Week Four

[stagemanagers]

[Last week, Gershwin High School Academy University saw its very first intentional murder! What a milestone! And right after Spongebob's No Murder party, too - that doesn't seem like it bodes very well for anybody's future.

You all wake up this morning with yet another new memory returned to you. You'll also find that the school's external doors have now unlocked. Congratulations! You're free! Unfortunately, you also seem to be entirely in the middle of nowhere. So maybe it's more of a symbolic victory.

Still, you should look around and do some investigation! Maybe you'll find a fun surprise.]

Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

(( Be sure to submit your memory regains and your AC for this week! Hester's office hours and the merch booth also remain available! ))

Comments

[tellthestory]

It wouldn't. If anything, it usually does the opposite. Killing the president just makes him a martyr for whatever causes he might've had - usually his party gets way more done without him.

[It all seems obvious enough to the Balladeer. Even with people who might've had a point somewhere, like Leon "Eat the Rich" Czolgosz, it was just...violence for violence's sake, at the end of the day. Didn't change anything except to make the world a bit worse.]

Heck, Garfield's vice-president hated him, but after he died, the guy turned around and pushed through all of his civil reforms.

[comeandfindme]

He did?

[ This has officially become a history lesson. Much like with Salieri and his music lessons, Peregrine turns her attention to the Balladeer, though she does have to keep watching her deerskin. Is it almost done on this side...? Ah, yeah, time to flip it inside out. ]

Wow. You'd think that'd be a deterrent for like...a single person trying this.

[tellthestory]

[He's still talking as he sews this deer skin to a skirt, though once he finishes he's likely just gonna keep hanging out here.]

You'd think. But those guys...

[He's quiet for a moment, mulling over that last song. It was easier to parse when he was just reading it in a script, in the safety of a dorm with Benjamin and Angus two feet away.]

They feel like the world owes them something. Attention, fame, whatever. They should get what they want - and if they don't, someone's gotta pay for it. [...] I don't really know why the real Lee Harvey Oswald did it, though. I think his scene in the show was a metaphor. Probably about the same thing.

[comeandfindme]

...That one's the Kennedy guy, right? [ Even she knows that one! ] What'd his scene say...?

[ It's weird thinking about. He knows historical figures but...as represented by a play? A musical? Does that mean the historical figures are...fictional versions of them, or somehow...something else? Peregrine never thought she'd have to think about these sort of things outside a movie. ]

[tellthestory]

He was...going to kill himself, and they all went to see him. Booth, Giuseppe, all of them. They gave him the rifle, and said...

[The Balladeer's gaze goes a little unfocused as he recalls it. Though he only read that part once, it's easy to remember the words - maybe because it's still a part of his show, even if he wasn't there.]

"You think you can't connect. Connect to us." [His fingers curl absently in the front of his flannel.] "You think you're powerless. Empower us."

[comeandfindme]

[ Peregrine finishes getting her leather situated just in time to look at him, to watch the way he goes…distant. ]

Uh… Bal?

[tellthestory]

[At first, he doesn't quite seem to hear; he stares off into space for a beat longer, just enough to be a tad unnerving, before - ]

Hm? [He blinks several times, brow furrowing, and lets go of the death grip he'd started to have on the front of his shirt.] Uh - yeah, yeah. Sorry.

[What were they...oh. Right.]

Anyway, uh...obviously it didn't literally happen like that, in real life.

[comeandfindme]

[ Okay. Okay, that's...weird. But, maybe it's like...a narrator thing? Peregrine twitches her lips into the approximation of a momentary reassuring smile. ]

Right. Right, of course. That's something your...playwright, I guess? Uh, took liberties with.

[tellthestory]

Yeah, of course. The whole thing is - the rest is fairly historically accurate from what I know, but sometimes you have to stretch a little to make a good story.

[The Balladeer seems, perhaps, still a little unsettled, but it fades quickly as he keeps talking about something else.]

You know, half the song Charlie sings on his way to the gallows is something the real one wrote to be performed at his execution? They wouldn't do it for him back then.

[comeandfindme]

It's what? [ This is a good distraction! ] Wow, morbid much! You're serious, you're not pulling my leg?

[tellthestory]

I'm totally serious! [He grins, delighted by the reaction!] All the I am going to the Lordyyyy stuff - who would write that in this day and age?

[Yes, he totally did sing that line of it.]

[comeandfindme]

And he- your guy, he just took that, and he put it in the show? No one complained, no one...objected?

[tellthestory]

Stephen Sondheim! He's famous, he wrote - he did the lyrics for West Side Story! You know that one, right? Or Into the Woods?

[honestly Sweeney Todd is probably his most well-known work but ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha]

Anyway...I don't know much about the specific criticisms. But I doubt many people really noticed.

[comeandfindme]

Oh! Oh, it's that guy? Yeah— yeah, I've seen both the movies for those.

[ Shhhhh let's not acknowledge Sweeney Todd out of respect for Benji. ]

I'd think...if people knew it was based on real stuff, they'd do the research after, right? Like...if they liked it?

[ Peregrine just does not understand not being 110% into her hobbies. ]

[tellthestory]

You think people liked it that much?

[The Balladeer seems mildly surprised at the notion, though he's quick to reassure:]

I'm not saying I think it was bad, just - I don't know. I know it was sort of controversial, and I think it isn't one of his better-known works...but I couldn't tell you how I know that, exactly. [He shrugs.] That's all theatre critics anyway. I don't have any idea how regular people felt about it.

[comeandfindme]

I don't know, I've never heard of it!

[ Hm. Maybe that should say something. ]

I guess it makes sense some people didn't like it... It's kinda a weird premise. Still... You don't know anything about how your...audience felt? Can't you like... Isn't that a part of it? The narrator thing?

[tellthestory]

In the moment, a bit. But I only got to see them a couple times. And one of those was Booth's racism song.

[No one feels the same way about Charlie's thing as they do about John's!]

[comeandfindme]

...Racism song...?

[ does she. does she want to know. ]

[tellthestory]

It's John Wilkes Booth. He can dress it up real pretty, but that's a good 99% of his motivation.

[what, he was just real into "state's rights"?]

[comeandfindme]

…Well. Yikes. Fuck that guy.

[tellthestory]

"Ooooh, I'm John Wilkes Booth and I'm still ranting about the South rising again in the twenty-first century."

[He says in a pitch-perfect Southern accent, and also somehow a mocking vampire voice.]

[comeandfindme]

Really yikes!

[tellthestory]

[The Balladeer laughs.]

I'm sorry. It's just nice to be with other people who hate that guy. The rest of them were big fans - first guy to bag a president, y'know, he was sort of their pioneer.

[comeandfindme]

How can you like a racist, isn't that, like, rule number one? Ugh. Uncle Donald would have words for them.

[tellthestory]

They're a pack of white people with guns. I mean, Giuseppe's Italian and Leon's Polish, from a time when that sort of mattered, but...

[He shrugs. It's not as though things like that tend to lead to solidarity amongst those groups, you dig? Also my Italian grandfather was over here being racist towards Polish people like literally two hours ago for some fucking reason, so.]

...I don't know. It's just all about the gun club with them.