Late Victorian Shenanigans: A New Play
I went to the bookstore the other day to pick up the next Sookie Stackhouse book, but I couldn't find it on a display table, so I had to go into the mystery section, which is dangerous, because the mystery genre has absolutely no morals, and will employ absolutely any bizarre hook to get you to buy more books then you meant to, just out of sheer curiosity. I suspect this is because a lot of mystery novels start out as just some oddly specific obsession (Knitting, pug dogs, etc.) that someone wants to write about, but which they have to attach to a murder mystery for the sake of having a plot, so then, when someone with the same crazy random obsession sees it, they're like “whoa, this is pertinent to my interests!”. So I picked up one that's about Oscar Wilde solving mysteries with a bunch of other Late Victorian writers, and they get up to all kinds of wacky shenanigans:
Oscar Wilde: A Clue!
Arthur Conan Doyle: Wow, you're so smart, I'm going to write you into my stories as Sherlock Holmes's fatter, older brother.
Oscar Wilde: ...I'm not fat, I'm husky ):
Lewis Carol: Hey Guys, can I help?
All: ....
Bram Stoker: That guy weirds me out.
Then later, George Bernard Shaw throws a bitchin' house party while his parents are out of town and J.M. Barrie falls in the pool, so everybody else jumps in, except for Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper who have, apparently, been making out in the corner the whole time.*
Personally, I have no problem believing that every writer/artist/actor in England would have been on a first name basis with each other back then, since I often get the feeling that that's pretty much how it is now. Just recently I read an article in Newsweek, written by Stephen Fry, who claimed that he was the second person in England to own a Mac, right after Douglas Adams, and that they where constantly running back and forth to each others houses to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego compare notes. (It actually succeeded in kinda making me want an ipad even.)
This, of course, makes 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon ridiculously simple if you get any British Actor: Kevin Bacon was in Sleepers with Minnie Driver, who takes her dog to the same dog run as every other British actor ever. Winner! Me! Two moves!
*All the best writers in England at that time where either Irish, Scottish, or Lesbian.