#63

in Impossible Task

This is my 63rd muppoem. Six... three... huh.

& O k u airhead, so, I had a moment re-watching The Red Shoes where my life existence didn’t feel like it was made up of atoms anymore, but rather just a force of energy which held only one desire, and that was to experience the emotion of happiness. Of course emotions are chemically tied to our brains, so I tried to put my thoughts to words. Strangely, I experienced so many synchronistic events in real time around the moment, they organically found their way into the poem. I started with the title— “K-hole,” getting a kick out of the fact it spun out of The Muppet Show episode featuring the infamous, Danny Kaye.

& With all the guest stars of The Muppet Show, to some degree or another, I study and investigate his or her biography and immerse myself in that star's work. Well, I thought I’d seen queer cinema before, but Danny Kaye’s movies have to be one of the gayest things I have ever seen in my entire life. Mixed with the 50^s White-American Hollywood-Sudio mentality, some of these pictures are downright painful to sit through. Luckily, I’m able to use lenses to maintain a sense of humor while still finding things to admire.

& The more I learned about Kaye, the more I fell in love with this episode, but I was never really particularly mad about it in the past. Something used to always feel off to me. The closing number is a song Kaye made famous called “Inchworm,” but I knew the song already because Charles Aznavour performed it in Season One, and in my opinion, did it better. Of course, I knew absolutely nothing about Kaye back then, and I remember reading when I was young that The Muppet Show crew would never admit if any guest star was a problem to work with or not. Just like any other homosexual that grew up watching the E! channel, the gossip girl in me used to suspect Danny Kaye as being one of the "difficult" ones. It was just harmless speculation, but he seems to have an attitude, and I felt like the Muppeteers might have had strain dealing with his energy.

& Reading about Kaye, I found out that he actually did have a lot of mood swings. Kaye was married to a woman, but everything about him screams flaming homosexual. He was the embodiment of “the dandy” stereotype. He has zero chemistry with any of his leading ladies, in fact, he seems to be absolutely terrified of them, and this is actually used as one of his gags. However, there is often always a toxic male bully in his pictures, and Kaye always stands up for women and children. However, things get blurry in Hans Christian Anderson, where he plays the famous author of fairy tales. There's nothing I can't stand more than people in today's day and age perpetuating the stereotype that men can not be nurturing and/or playful with children, and even worse, equating homosexuals with pedophiles, but intellectuals might see a Death of Venice vibe in the film. Then, in The Five Pennies, he co-stars with Louis Armstrong, portraying Red Nichols, and one can see a reason why Armstrong got pushback back when it was released since the entire film borders on explicitly being a minstrel show.

& Another connection here is Nichols’ band was “His Five Pennies” and Armstrong’s was “His Hot Five.”

& Now, for this muppoem, I originally wanted to write about Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, but then realized since it is part of Red-Hot Popcorn's Red Fire (vol. 3), it had to be about Anderson’s The Red Shoes. The fairy tale mystifies and horrifies me, and I always adored the film version. Ariel ended up making her way into the poem anyway, of course, because of her desire to wear shoes, and it works out well because the Disney animated movie portrays her with vibrant red hair. Also, when I finally got through the film Hans Christian Anderson, I was surprised to see Kaye’s Hans as a red-headed shoe cobbler!

& Normally I only use references that have a direct connection with the episode or the guest star, but this time, there were so many weird coincidences in my real time during this writing period, I decided to keep following the white rabbit down the hole. If something connected, it found its way into the poem.

& With that being said, one obscure reference here is to A Wrinkle in Time. I’ve always been a big Oprah fan, and when the film, A Wrinkle in Time was released, I couldn’t wait to see it. However, I talked with a friend in LA, and she said she wished she could see it with me, so I promised I wouldn’t watch it until we were together again. I had never read the book before and obviously wanted to do so first, so when my dear friend tells me she is coming to visit me in NYC in March, I quickly picked up the book and started reading it... about the same time I was going down my Kaye-hole.

& In the beginning of Hans Christian Anderson, Kaye is flying a red kite, and it reminded me of the French film, The Red Balloon. I first saw the movie in grade school, in IMAGE. I hadn’t really thought of it again until this moment, and I decided to watch it, once again. Sure enough, I found the theme almost the same as The Red Shoes. After watching the movie, I said oK, I’m going to go to sleep now, but before I do, I’m going to read one more chapter of A Wrinkle in Time... and there was this quote: “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. French. Pascal.” Already in the poem I had used the words “Heart of Fire” from The Red Shoes, so it already connected, but then I thought, Pascal...Pascal, I’ve heard that name before. Yes, that’s it, Pascal is the name of the boy in The Red Balloon, I had just watched only minutes before reading that. I should have put this line in quotes...

It didn’t stop there. The Tempest is then referenced in the novel, and I had already used the characters of Caliban & Ariel, so when I got to the chapter called, “The Man with Red Eyes,” I thought, I’m going to be able to use this. Sure enough I was, because that character starts using multiplication tables as a way of hypnotizing the children, which is just way too weird, because a hypnotic tempo is exactly what is used to set the melody to “Inchworm” in Hans Christian Anderson. THEN, the characters in the book started moving their atoms around... which was kind of what I had experienced before.

& It must have been three days after watching The Red Balloon that I went to bartend at the Phoenix in NYC on Valentine’s Day. This guy I had had a crush on came in with his (ugh) boyfriend, but also with a girlfriend, and the girl was carrying a red balloon which, after ordering drinks, she ended up giving to me! I told her how funny it was her doing so because I literally just watched The Red Balloon the other night and have you seen it? She said she hadn’t, so I start explaining it to her, and she quickly interrupted, I’m from Paris! She was just visiting NYC for the week. She tells me I must come and visit, and when they all leave the bar, the man I had crush on says how serendipitous to run into me again, and I thought, hardly! After closing, I made a wish and let my red balloon go fly up the night sky.

& I'm ashamed to say that when I wrote this piece, I was only familiar with Kate Bush's "Babooshka" and "Cloudbusting." When I discovered her "The Red Shoes" after, it kind of became this poem's theme song. When I discovered her following album is entitled, Ariel, my mind was officially blown. ...Life long fan from here on out.

& This poem was written in the Age of Pisces, and it was published in the Age of Aquarius (Age of Air).