(no subject)
She liked pretty things. Fancy gowns and perfumes and such cost money, of course, but it was no more than she deserved after all she’d been through. Nellie Lovett had, after all, been an excellent wife to a man whose best quality was his inheritance (which had turned out to be far less than she’d hoped), and after his death had slaved in the kitchen in order to survive. Surely after all that the good lord wouldn’t deny her a few trinkets?
And it was such a lovely little purse. It suited her more than it had suited that Italian.
2. Milneburg Joys (Dr. John)
“You do love me, just a little?”
“Yes” he’d answered.
It wasn’t a complete lie. He loved her the way a wealthy man might love a mistress, with her whorish makeup and bobbed hair. He loved the way she was utterly without shame or morals, needing no personal tragedy to come around to his way of thinking. Not the way he loved Lucy, but sometimes she wasn’t a bad substitute.
By the sea…that fantasy always made him scoff. She’d never live anywhere but in a pie shop or brothel. And sometimes, just a little bit, he loved her for it.
3. Relax (The Who)
Wait, she’d told him. As far as she was concerned, he could bloody well wait until Judgment Day. She’d done it, hadn’t she?
She’d learned to wait for him to come back from Australia, and she’d learned to wait for him to join her bed when he did. Relax, that was the key. Mrs. Lovett had found her relaxation in the arms of a select few sailors who’d dropped into London for the day while she waited for Benjamin.
Of course, if he tried relaxing that way she’d heave her frying pan at him, but the principle was the same.
4. The Ballad of Booth (Assassins Revival Cast)
Toby confounded the asylum doctors with one simple fact: he could get the other inmates pay attention. When he sang, asking everyone to attend to his story, they’d stop their screaming and begin to hum his tune.
It was a dangerous quality, one that had perhaps served him well when peddling pies but had no place in a madhouse. It was with great reluctance that the doctors agreed to let the inmates enact his play, and its success only made things worse.
What was the moral of his story- killing was wrong? Then why had he ended up in there?
5. Weill: What Keeps Mankind Alive? (Tom Waits)
Anthony was the last with clean hands, and Johanna sometimes wondered at it. She couldn’t have known the scope of the drama in which she played a role, but if she had, the knowledge that her lover was the only one to neither kill nor be killed wouldn’t surprise her. After everything he’d seen and been through, he still thought the world was a place where good triumphed over evil.
But not Johanna. She’d killed Fogg and didn’t regret it- it had let her escape with her love. In a world like that, how long could Anthony’s hands stay clean?