Hello, friends!
This past week was The Longest Week In The School Year. The week before Christmas or Winter Vacation. A full five days took roughly five months to pass. But here I am on the other side and I have a full two-week break, which is unheard of these days.
Anyway, let’s me get into this week’s update.
Welcome to the 101st installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and how popular culture is there when it’s needed.
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Anyway, let’s go!
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I got to page 416 in Project: Amusement Park. I finished the difficult chapter I’d been working on and went to a different difficult chapter with a character that I don’t love. There’s domestic violence and ugly thoughts including racism and homophobia. Being inside the mind of a character like that isn’t pleasant. I’m also trying to walk a tightwire but making some of these ideas be amplified by the evil supernatural force, but I’m not sure I’m succeeding with that. I guess we’ll see when the beta readers eventually get the book. I am done with the chapter, though, and will be moving on to a more pleasant (though probably no less challenging) chapter. As of Saturday afternoon as I write this, I have about 266 pages left to edit.
My mind has been bringing me to ideas for science fiction and fantasy books this week. The ideas have been bouncing around for about 20 years or more. I’m not sure that I’ll attempt them, but I might.
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Last Sunday, my family and I went to see Hamilton at the Providence Performing Arts Center. It was the first Broadway show I’ve seen. Or any real show. As I sat there watching the show about the Founding Fathers of the United States done in a multiracial cast in hip hop, it was not lost on me that one month prior, the United States voted to give the keys to an oligarch.
The performance was amazing. I wasn’t sure what to expect since it was a traveling show but I was foolish to even consider it’d be anything less than stellar. I sat with tears in my eyes at several points. The most important time, though, was during “One Last Time.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Hamilton, “One Last Time” is a performance where George Washington is telling Alexander Hamilton that he’s not running for President and that he’s going to end his term. He sings:
If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on
It outlives me when I’m gone
Like the scripture says:
“Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid.”
They’ll be safe in the nation we’ve made
I wanna sit under my own vine and fig tree
A moment alone in the shade
At home in this nation we’ve made
One last time
A President who begins the process of saying goodbye, unlike the monarchs of England and other countries. It his home because I remembered a promise T—p made to voters in Florida that if they voted for him and he won this election they’d “never have to vote again.”
The whole musical is about the ideals of the country. It acknowledges the crazy history but it also glorifies the ideals, the idea of what America ought to be. “Immigrants, we get the job done,” always gets a cheer, I suspect. As it should.
Watching a modern musical version of the founding of the United States as we’re about to enter what could very well be the end of the country moved me. Yet, it also made me hopeful. Here were people who rose to the occasion and created something that had never been done. Maybe there’ll be enough people who people in the ideal that we could fix it. We’ll see.
But it also got me thinking about how these things come at times when they’re needed. When Hamilton opened on Broadway, I’m sure most people seeing it expected that Hilary Clinton would clinch the Presidency. When that didn’t happen, the show likely gave hope to those who needed it when they needed it. It was the very kind of thing that T—p supporters wouldn’t like and didn’t like, a cast of people of different colors, different sexual identities, performing roles that they’d never have been cast in beforehand. It was needed then just as it is needed now.
I remember after the 2016 election, two movies came out that I saw in theaters that made me happy they existed when they did. Moana was the first. A powerful young woman who bucks the patriarchy and goes on an adventure to save her people, who doesn’t have a love interest, and who shows that through heart and caring that the day can be saved. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was another one. Showing a multiracial team led by a woman going against the evil Galactic Empire to bring a leader of the Rebel Alliance, another young woman, plans to a weapon that could destroy any hope was powerful. The fact that the movie ends with Princess Leia Organa saying that what she was delivered was, “Hope,” is powerful.
Now here I am in 2024 with the unimaginable having happened, and Hamilton is touring and a part of my life. Moana is back at the movies in a new adventure. Wicked is leading the box office. And then the trailer for James Gunns Superman comes and brings an icon of American culture back to the big screen with all the hope and idealism that the character represents.
These pop culture stories and characters are important because they energize us. They make us realize that there is hope. They give us good people to strive to be.
As a parent, a teacher, and a creator, this is important. Stories have a way of moving people to act. If hope and resilience is what’s needed, it’s good to have stories and characters that illustrate this.
It’s more than good, it’s essential.
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Well, it’s time for me to go. I have other things to write like I’m running out of time (IYKYK). I hope you have a great holiday season, one filled with love and hope. Thank you for reading and for your support!
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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