A Skerrick of Thought

The Woodsman is... well, Off-Broadway it was categorized as a play, and the official site calls it "An American Dramatico-Musical," but even that doesn't really cover it. It's mostly wordless, with just a spoken prologue and some lyrics. The characters communicate through movement, sound, and breath, accompanied almost constantly by an onstage violinist.

The show tells the story of Nick, a woodsman, and Nimmie, slave of the Wicked Witch of the East, and how their romance and the Witch's anger led to Nick's transformation into tin. It's a more adult take on Oz, but not in an edgy way. And while it doesn't match up perfectly with the Tin Woodman's backstory as told in either The Wizard of Oz or The Tin Woodman of Oz, those two don't match up perfectly with each other anyway, so I'm okay with a bit of artistic license. Especially when the result is so, so beautiful. Here's a trailer!

And another trailer specifically for the filmed version, because yes it was filmed and you can watch it now!

It's on BroadwayHD/Amazon, aaaand someone put a screen recording on YouTube:

There's also an album of music from the show, though sadly without the singing.

the t conductor announces the next stop. it is a discordant screech filled with snarls. people sigh, gather their bags.

no one on the street will meet your eyes. no one has met your eyes for weeks. you’re lonely.

you walk over the thin dark grate above the subway tunnels. it shakes and roars and the wind from it stinks. it is 3:30 in the morning and the trains are no longer running.

there are old churches everywhere, hunched between skyscrapers, anchoring the corners of blocks. no don’t look around. there are churches everywhere.

no one parks their car in harvard yard. no one can get in to harvard yard. the heavy iron gates are shut. the ivy is getting thicker.

you walk into dunkies and the person behind the counter greets you by name and knows your usual order. you have never been in this store before.

you are late getting back to your hotel on newbury street. it’s dark, the stores are closed. the mannequins in pinkyotto watch you hurry down the sidewalk. the glass of the window fogs in front of their muzzles. down by the hems of their dresses their claws flex.

“yep, almost as bad as ‘78.” says the old man. his eyes are frozen shut, you are wearing three shirts under two jackets. it’s august.

you’re walking along the charles at night, the staggered pyramid of the hyatt reflects off clean water. you remember how it used to be multicolored and scummed with oil and fish kills. it’s okay now. something flickers through those bright squares of light, one, two, all. the muddy water churns. it’s okay now. we cleaned it, we cleaned it, it’s fixed.

It's a 30-foot prop designed by Wally Veevers for director Billy Wilder's film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).

The prop sunk while being towed by a boat, and was left to sleep with the fishes. It was eventually found during a 2016 underwater robot survey.

It remains there to this day, with no one brave enough to try to get footage of its current state.

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.

Courtship was something that happened semi-publicly, in large part because women tended to live with family until they married. A man would come to pay a call and sit in the parlor with the woman he was courting ... and usually members of her family, like her parents or siblings (or uncles/aunts and cousins, if she was living with more extended relations). It was about pleasing all of them, and proving to all of them that he intended to marry her.

In the late 19th century, young working-class women started to move out of the family home for work, and not just to the other side of town — to cities across the state where they didn't know anybody. They usually stayed in boarding houses, where the landlady wasn't interested in hosting chaperoned evenings of courtship in front of the fire. As a result, they spent time with men in dance halls and bars, something akin to modern dating. On the positive side, this gave women the independence to make romantic and sexual choices away from their parents' influence. On the negative side, the women taken on dates (disparagingly called "charity girls") were frequently pressured to have sex in exchange for the money spent on them, money they were unable to spend on themselves due to their low wages.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

Johnson's Dictionary Online (thanks @yellowbelliedtoad!) – 1755 and 1773

Green's Dictionary of Slang – 1300s to today

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – 1788