And now for a hyperventilating evening of lord-can-only-guess

[brigid]

2-16-2023

Mary's dress (jewelry?) has changed and her hair has grown. Just how long has she been trapped here? Hell is truly other people, especially in 9 Chickweed Lane.

A big reason Mary wasn't attracted to Amos when they were in high school is that he was a fairly repellent person. He had poor social skills, poor personal hygiene, talked about the end of the world a lot, was quick to insult her, had a pretty big ego. He matured quite a bit since then, has become a pretty decent adult, but he was pretty gross for the entire time he was pursuing Mary. And I guess she's being punished for not seeing what a diamond in the rough he was.

And the latest person to do the punishing is Hugh Godalming, a man universally considered utterly repellent by everyone in Julliard with him except for his eventual wife Xiulan who fell in love with him because he plays piano so pretty - which is a bog standard feature with McEldowney. It doesn't matter how utterly vile someone is, as long as they Do An Art Well they're redeemed. Edda, and thus Amos and Seth and poor betrayed Mark put up with Hugh for Xiulan's sake but that really seems to be the only reason he has friends: because his wife has friends.

So that's Hugh, a man so disliked that classmates would leave the room when he entered it.

He's managed to Find True Love so let's rub Mary's face in her lack of same, eh?

One wonders who he's going to dance with: his massively pregnant wife? His wife who has quietly given birth to some unspecified number of children of some unspecified gender and is now as slim as she was pre-pregnancy? Someone else? Anyway, he's here to tell Mary all about his beloved wife at length, I'm sure.

The way Mary describes Seth and Fernanda's behavior, by the way, is the way that Edda has described sluts in the past. Only when Edda did it she was in the right to do so; Mary's just being a prude.

It's weird to see this group of friends shuffling on then off stage, by the way. Edda and Amos and Seth and Fernanda and Hugh are all friends... friends who apparently had plans to meet each other? But they aren't actually interacting. Edda and Amos danced and humped and then left. Seth appeared, then his female wife Fernanda, and they hump danced off stage left. Then Hugh came in. And none of them have overlapped with each other, spoken to each other, seen each other. This entire sequence is centered around Mary and how bad she is for not having a One True Destined Love and how they're awesome for having achieved that. They exist as props to demonstrate how Bad Mary is. They aren't even characters, they're props. They're devices.

Props and devices that have a reserved table I guess?