The Chasing Iamb

Lady in the Dark

Feudal conflict in a turn-of-the-century prep school leads to complications
for young lesbians and their guardians; an estate in litigation and a botched
paternity suit. When a daughter marries her mother's lover the air
fills with hieroglyphs, some you can see, others you can't
unless you're part of a certain clique of emotionally damaged outsiders.
Lucky for me I am and I love the Spanish interiors. What's next?
A musical about psychoanalysis starring Ginger Rogers in a tux and bow tie.
She's an editor who just can't decide (should next month's cover
have a circus theme? No, of course not!). Instead of doing her job
she's dreaming up crazy dance routines in her dead mother's dresses.
It sounds a lot more enjoyable than it actually is but the couch is wild.
I pass the time fantasising about making-over my office
and thinking about the conventions of the Elizabethan stage.
In the case of the boy-heroine the umbrella of fiction was meant to fail.
Apparently Ginger needs a new lay-out and all the help she can get
from a truckload of smoke and mirrors, the spring line of Paris originals,
a deputy who won't roll over (Ray Milland) and a course of supervised 
regression. Is that all? Cured after three sessions... Please! Call that work?
And where was the money changing hands? My mother loved Kitty Foyle
but she doesn't cut it as a mannish woman — or an analysand.
If the analyst had been more alluring — butch or femme or butch-femme,
a provocatively brainy woman of any kind, the whole thing juicier
and dubbed into Spanish, more alert to the complex nuances of the
therapeutic relation... well, I would say that, wouldn't I? 

Kate Lilley