Monday, February 19, 2007

"It was a dark and stormy evening."

Here's the seventh weird thing about me: I played Peppermint Patty in my senior class's production of the musical Snoopy!.* (In case you haven't heard of it, Snoopy! was the sequel to You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown.) There is a scene where Snoopy and Woodstock act out an entire novel-writing session, beginning with "It was a dark and stormy evening."

At the time, I didn't get the reference, but I later learned that a British novelist named Edward George Bulwer-Lytton penned that sentence (well, actually, he wrote "It was a dark and stormy night"). In honor of his painful prose, a California university has an annual contest for the opening sentence of the worst of all possible imaginary novels. Here is a link to this year's winners, including my favorite:

Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.


Can you believe it was merely runner-up in the romance category?



*And if Franklin gets off his heinie and manages to respond to my million or three emails sometime before noon tomorrow, I will post on this blog a vintage photograph of me in costume.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

You were born to play Peppermint Patty. The role of a lifetime--it's you, my love.

Somewhere I have a yellowed Peanuts cartoon with Lucy at her desk with the sign "The editor is in," editing Snoopy's novel and rewriting "It was a dark and stormy night." I'll have to find it. It was given to me by my husband, who often compared me to Lucy.

Lisa said...

I await the Peppermint Patty photo with great anticipation! One day I will do my family's full range of Peanut's dances.

Bridget said...

Wow, who knew you were also a star of the stage??? Such a renaissance woman!

Boy, I hope Franklin pulls through!

Aponia said...

I too played Peppermint Patty in Snoopy, but I was in elementary school and it was entirely in Spanish! I couldn't even tell you what I actually said, or any Spanish words really, except for numbers, a few colors, and hello.

my poor little (natural) mouse colored hair came in handy for something!

Anonymous said...

And now I have the "Snoopy" score running through my head! "It was a dark and stormy evening...It was a dark and stormy night. Night? Right! When suddenly a shot was heard..." Thanks for the nostalgia!

Carol said...

Aw shucks, Franklin hasn't emailed me yet. I'll have to save that oldie but goodie photo for another time. ;)

Kendra, so few people have ever heard of it! My solo was "Poor sweet baby."

Lulu said...

Thats funny - I did the same play in high school, but I was sally.