And Now, For Something Completely Different
It’s been a rough few weeks, and in my off time I just haven’t felt like putting the words together. That’s how tough it’s been. Instead, I’ve been sewing with my little delight of a machine when I’m not writing.
Or reading. My Brooklyn Public Library card has really paid off.
I’ve also been hyperinvested in getting a few things completed on deadline. 710 is a holiday in stoner world, and several clients needed copy for that, and I’ve been pretty tapped out since.
It’s also hard to emotionally keep rolling on the lab story. It’s just taking big knocks out of me every time now. I finally got the data from the state, and now it’s time to load it up and see what I can see. It used to be around 5 minutes to load up a data file at my old job. I’d turn Informatica on and ZIP it’d load right up. It’s far different now that I’m using freeware on a macintosh, a bit more frustrating. A bit slower. But ultimately, that’s ok.
I’ve been doing a spot of research about the costume for the Wicked Witch of the West. Strangely, it’s hard to get really good images out of the Wizard of Oz for such an endeavor, but I think that this expresses the costume well:
What we’ve got is a Witch Hat, gathered shirt waist with a high collar. Dramatic sleeves with strips / cut out detail. A corset laced swiss waist with tabs, a wee belt pouch, and a bell skirt. All of this is doable. What I really wanted was some more close up imagery just to get a better idea of what the costume looked like.
Befuddingly, it’s not so easy. First, search engines are rapidly getting clogged by people who have no idea what they’re on about talking about stuff. Secondly, the more famous costumes from the Wizard of Oz is the one belonging to Dorothy (recently sold at auction and very high in Google search results).
One some sites, it says it’s not clear where the costume ended up. But then, there are moments like Margaret Hamilton on Mister Rogers Neighborhood in 1975, where it’s claimed she has the original costume.
It was seeing this clip again that made me want to make my own take on the Wicked Witch of the West, which is why I wanted to know as much as I could about if that was the costume or not.
It ends up that she wore a WWW costume again in the ‘lost’ 1976 Sesame Street Episode:
What’s a witch to do?
I thought I’d try and dig up any information in case the costume was reused by using https://recycledmoviecostumes.tumblr.com/search/witch, and I managed to find that it was reused in this stereoscopic movie called “Third Dimensional Murder,” and you can really tell they loved using the 3D tricks.
If I was a costume collector or researcher, I might reach out to Hamilton’s son, who often speaks of his mom. They were close - they even bought an island in Maine to live together on!
I didn’t want to go too long without saying something. It’s getting harder and harder to pay the bills, so I’ve been trying to focus on the projects that have income potential.
So here are the pieces I wrote for Prrl Labs:
https://www.prrllabs.com/a/blog/cannabis-concentrates-101
https://www.prrllabs.com/a/blog/cannabis-concentrates-saucer
The Website for CETCH and the ad that came out.