"Well kiss my physics!" as read by Alan Rickman

Following a conversation with sovay about formative mermaid media, spent the evening re-reading The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler - a 2003 middle-grade novel about a girl who discovers she can turn into a mermaid - to see how it holds up as a recommendation for a young reader 20+ years (oof) later. Emily's mermaid adventures include but are not limited to befriending another tweenage mermaid, exploring a sunken ship, and discovering that her long-lost father is a merman and sneaking into the underwater prison (!) where he's been languishing for the past 12 years (!!) for breaking the law against fraternization with humans (!!!). (Also, that her mom's memory of their relationship was wiped (!!!!) and their family friend the creepy lighthouse keeper has been an agent for the anti-human-fraternization king of the merfolk the whole time. (!!!!!)) So, yeah, the plot is kind of bananas, but it's charming and, most importantly, the descriptions of how cool it would be to swim in the ocean as a mermaid and explore kelp forests and sunken ships, etc., are great. Verdict: it holds up! I don't think I'd noticed as a kid how many of the throwaway minor (human) characters had punny or otherwise nautical names like "Sandra Castle" and "Mrs. Brig"; I definitely had never realized that the author is British and therefore the book presumably takes place in England rather than, like, Florida (as I'd pictured as a kid) or Maine (as I imagined it this time).

Made some progress in the Dune audiobook over the weekend; I'm through Book One (of three). Unfortunately, so far Book Two has mostly involved Paul being rude about his mom not being able to follow along with whatever Space Jesus logic-connections-as-revelation thing he has going on, which I'm finding less interesting than the Space Medici politics and backstabbing of the first third.

I managed to swing a last-minute day trip to NYC to see Dead Outlaw yesterday after it was suddenly announced (last weekend) that the show was closing early (this weekend), making this the second time in six months I've caught one of the last performances of an unfairly short-lived folk-rock musical at the Longacre Theater that's more or less based off of a real event involving weird things happening to a corpse. (The other was Swept Away; seriously, is the Longacre cursed or something?!) (ETA: ...apparently yes??)

Dead Outlaw is based on the weirder-than-fiction true story of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber killed in a 1911 shootout whose preserved corpse ended up being displayed as part of various carnival sideshows and movie sets throughout the 1920s-40s, until eventually rediscovered in the funhouse of a California amusement park in the 1970s. (Yes, really.) The musical spends approximately equal time on McCurdy's life - a childhood unmoored by a family revelation, a teenage descent into hooliganism and attempt to restart out west, a near-engagement to a nice girl until he self-sabotages, a short and wildly unsuccessful career as an outlaw - and afterlife, which the musical fills with sort of one-song vignettes: the Oklahoma coroner and subsequent series of carnies who displayed McCurdy's body to make a quick buck; the Cherokee runner Andy Payne, who won the 1928 Trans-America Footrace at which McCurdy was displayed as part of the sideshow (only a tenuous connection, but such a cool story I see why they included it); the daughter of a movie director who purchased McCurdy as a film prop, who treats him as a sort of confidant; the 1970s Los Angeles County coroner with a star-studded "client" list.

This show slapped unbelievably hard, as the kids say. I loved the format! There was a live band on stage, and the band's frontman narrated McCurdy's life story (and posthumous adventures) while the action/narrative scenes played out around and occasionally on top of the main set piece, a sort of movable, patio-style stage where the band played; a friend who saw the show before I did described it as "feeling like you were watching a podcast." Some - most? - of the characters' songs are staged... diegetically, as it were, but sometimes they'd join the band "on stage"(-within-a-stage) and take over the frontman's microphone, such as Elmer McCurdy's rock-star-tantrum crash-out ("Killed A Man in Maine", which the narrator informed us afterwards is probably not even true), or more poignantly, as McCurdy's girlfriend's song ("A Stranger") shifts from the in-story action/conversation - identifying his body - to imagining the future they could have had together when she steps up to the microphone alongside the band. Other than Andrew Durand as Elmer McCurdy - whose athleticism in the first half of the show and ability to remain disconcertingly corpse-still in the second half were equally impressive - everyone in the cast played a bunch of different characters; even the narrator doubled as the outlaw who recruited McCurdy, thinking that he was an explosives expert. (He was not.) The music was actually not as consistently folk-rock as I had expected from the couple of songs I'd heard beforehand— particularly in the second half, with its rotating cast of one-off characters, the styles ranged from more typical Broadway numbers to barbershop quartet vibes (the carnival promoters who buy McCurdy's body off the first coroner, claiming to be his brothers) to nightclub-crooner jazz (the LA coroner). It was also SO clever and SO funny— the set-up and payoff of the humor was just brilliant. (In particular, utilizing the under-tapped comedic power of letting the audience stew for a bit: at one point, the narrator is like "and then Elmer was stuck in a closet for 20 years", followed by a solid minute or two of just... a completely dark stage except for a spotlight on Andrew Durand's motionless face, the audience stifling giggles like elementary schoolers told to behave at an assembly.) Very glad I saw this!!