Our Gothic Rock Opera

After sitting in a heap of papers to be filed, hubs and I decided that we will find our rock opera, rewrite it and we shall overcome and tackle it after we file all of our paperwork. Raven's Drunk Ghost gets trapped after a drinking match (inspired by the Poe story and Little Shop of Horrors), and mine is banished by sorcery, but that could be used a later turning point or thrown out all together. I don't see why we can't graft our stories together. We are doing this asap. He has five songs, and now that I am tinkling on the piano, I want to write the others. I figured out how to play Patapan by ear a few days ago!!

"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years." — Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

We are newly inspired. We know talented musicians, seamstresses, costume designers, and makeup artists, and there are a lot of cool theaters here. This simply must be realized. In three years I moved to a new city I'd never visited, not knowing a soul, and accomplished several things I've wanted to d=for decades. I started taking photographs, co-created a festival, organized two gallery shows with performances, became a talk show DJ, was found by a literary agent who made me a contributing writer in a Llewellyn book on Spiritual Pregnancy, started learning piano and even learned some editing skills when I edited my little cable access show. After I finish this latest version of my book proposal, there's no reason why I shouldn't add a musical to my Cape Cod adventures. My first love was Shakespeare.

“Never trust a ghost who drunk dials.” That'd be a good tag line, huh?

"Thank God for this century. My out-of-body penmanship is nearly inscrutable," says the cramped Drunk Ghost typing on a broken typewriter before he tosses it to the side and presses his forehead up to the brick wall, concentrating. He shoves his face in through the bricks. From the other side of the wall, we see a screaming skull fixture over the firplace and a rotary phone RINGS inside the apartment. Flashback to: Drunk Ghost attempting to mount a confused horse in the stealth of the night. A bewildered horse trots down an empty country lane as Drunk Ghost slides off him repeatedly. A subsequent attempt to dictate a love letter through a cross and reluctant medium seated at a wooden desk, candle burning. Resistant to the words emerging from her quill, she unwittingly scrawls: "I'm madly in love with your body. Can I borrow it sometime? Like, now.” "Aaa!" Indignantly, she crumples up the paper into her fist and dashes it into the fireplace, watching it explode in flames.

The medium is a governess who can speak with those who have crossed over. This creates a lot of tension, as she tries to appear normal to her employers as she becomes a target of the inebriated apparition seeking a new body. At some point she seeks the help of the newly formed Theosophical Society to communicate with the Drunk Ghost, after which she is referred to a alcohol abstinence educator (temperance movement leader) from the Salvation Army who privately practices sorcery she learned from her Old World grandmother. She banishes Drunk Ghost to living inside the a wall in a New York manor for eternity. However, hidden inside the wall he blithely discovers a stash of absinth and sugar cubes. Lonely, and bodiless, decades pass until one day he discovers he can make the phone ring. By this time the mansion has been subdivided into apartment units. This becomes his game for generations as he attempts to coerce someone into freeing him and giving him their body. This will make a fun gothic rock opera for Cape Cod audiences, I am sure.