Salvy and Ginger

Why did Salvy puke? Who could say? One discovery: He didn't take well to off-brand kibble. You had to wean him, slowly, off his fancy kibble, or else: More puke. Fatty substances--leftovers, e.g., from Sunday sauce--would also yield puking. Tandoori chicken. Excessive cheese. He would pick up weird bacteria in the public doggy pond--allegedly--and then: puke. You never knew. And then the humping. Salvy had exuberant fits of sexuality. He would hammer away at a girl dog, but also, he'd make himself available to the humping ministrations of others. Sometimes, the girl would seem to hump *him*. And he'd hump Marc--unapologetically, tirelessly. He'd launch himself onto two legs and hump, hump, hump. Marc would become shy. Salvy never humped me, and this was a source of hurt feelings, on my end, though Marc tried to pretend the lack of interest resulted from my superior boundary-setting habits. He said this, and an awkward silence ensued. One old bitch down the road--"Ginger"--would see Salvy and daintily lift one leg, and then Salvy would ream her with his tongue. He would lick and lick and lick her vagina, and many of the affiliated dog-owners would stand in a mildly-pained silence, unsure how to comment. But Ginger's owner was cheerful: "She's such a whore!" said this neighbor. My Catholic upbringing prevented me from offering much more than a nervous laugh. (And why did no one judge *Salvy's* behavior?)

After Salvy's nads came off, the humping stopped, but visits to the vet remained kinky. Anal thermometers, muzzles, steel tables. I spotted Marc forming a gay-sex joke; I actually spotted the drafting happening in his eyes; and I silently willed him to cut it off. And it worked! Outside, a woman sobbed while holding her dead dog in a kind of cradle. Inches away, owners played happily with their charges--"Meatball" and "Cookie." There seemed to be no appropriate facial expression to make--how could you balance the death with the adorable presence of Cookie?--and so I imagined myself in another room; I became blank, and then the visit ended.

***

"Sweeney Todd" is about rage and revenge. A quiet, pained barber has his fill; he decides to ease his pain via mass murder. (Empathy for a mass murderer: A prophetic and daring choice for Sondheim. He has always been drawn to monsters--Momma Rose, the Witch, the assassins of "Assassins," Seurat's mother, Fosca. "Keep it new," he said to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and one way of keeping things new is by taking the perspective of the universally-despised.) "Sweeney Todd" and "Passion" are the only two plot ideas Sondheim ever had; the other musicals grew out of people bringing ideas to Sondheim. One game SS played with himself, in "Sweeney," was to stage a non-murder when you anticipated a murder, and to stage a murder when you anticipated a non-murder. I don't remember the murder he's referring to, but I do remember the non-murder; it's famous. Mrs. Lovett has just given a lecture on the pleasures of waiting. "Don't you know, silly man? Half the fun is to plan the plan. All good things come to those who can wait. Hush, love, hush. Time's so fast; now moves quickly; see? now, it's past. Soon will come. Soon will last. Wait." (I love these lines so much. I love the three-act play via verb-tense- switching: "Time's so fast; now moves quickly; see? now it's past." I love the anthropomorphizing of time. I love, also, the anthropomorphizing of "soon." "Soon will come. Soon will last. Wait." You might think of "Now/Soon/Later," from "A Little Night Music." "Soon! I promise. Soon! I won't shy away. Even now, as we touch, and you're kissing my brow, I don't mind it--too much.") Sondheim inserted the song "Wait" because he wanted to drag things out; he wanted to give the audience an experience of two minutes of music about the pleasures of waiting. This would be more potent than a throwaway bit of dialogue for Mrs. Lovett; "Why don't you wait a bit and savor the anticipation?" Also, the stretched-out meter of the song enacts, for us, the thing that Mrs. Lovett is describing; while talking about the thrills of waiting, Mrs. Lovett literally puts the plot on hold for a full two minutes. This trick continues with Sweeney's song, "Pretty Women." He has chosen to take Lovett's advice. He will toy with the Judge, like a mad scientist with a caged rat. Of course, the content of his small-talk song is painfully at odds with the thoughts running through his mind; while sharpening his blade, Sweeney will pontificate on the subject of "Pretty Women." (This is the only song I know of, in the Sondheim canon, in which a character just makes small talk for two minutes. Maybe I'm forgetting something. So interesting. Contrast this with the "Merrily We Roll Along" songs, where characters seem to want to make big statements about time, compromise, and love, every time they open their mouths to sing.)

What do pretty women do? Well, they sip coffee and dance. They sit in the window or stand on the stair. Sweeney--loveless, with a frozen heart--must push himself to draw frothy conclusions about these behaviors: Pretty women are a wonder! They cheer the air! What else do they do? They glance! They present their silhouettes to the male gaze! They blow out their candles! (I love this bizarre image--a line of pretty women, bending over candlesticks.) They comb out their hair! (The shallowness of the Judge's observations about women--with Sweeney--might make us think of Johanna, locked in the Judge's guest room, totally foreign to the man who thinks he loves her.) A pretty woman remains in the room--via perfume!--even after she has exited. The catalogue of cliches grows: Women in their gardens! Letter-writing! Flower-picking! Weather-watching! (Charming objects! I very much enjoy the parallelism of "flower-picking," "weather-watching.") As Sondheim has indicated, the pattern of this song will be--list of concrete actions, followed by a summative generalization. And the final generalization goes one step further, via a (deliberately cliched) metaphor: "Proof of heaven as you're living--Pretty women!" Form underlines content: Enraptured by the thought of gamines with their coffee and their flowers, the Judge and Sweeney reach a kind of orgasmic pseudo-nonsense chant: "Pretty women! Pretty women! Pretty women!" And the song ends abruptly. (Sondheim wanted to be the first person to show an orgasm-via-masturbation, in a Broadway musical, with one of the Judge's other songs, but Hal Prince cut him off. Sondheim had earlier been the first musical-theater writer to use the phrase "fuck you!" in a song on Broadway. That was in "Gee, Officer Krupke.")

(Hitchcock would approve of Sondheim, and Sondheim's subtle philosophy of suspense.)

I very much enjoy the sinister and misanthropic currents running underneath and through and all over "Sweeney Todd." Big surprise. A joy and a comfort! And here's Johnny Depp with Alan Rickman--

https://www.google.com/search?q=johnny+depp+pretty+women&oq=johnny+depp+pretty+women&aqs=chrome..69i57.3160j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8