Packing and Pop Culture References

Busy as a bee here Chez Diana. Gotta get ready for Ireland, send out a whole bunch of mailings that need tending to, do a heap of work, and spend some QT with husband and puppy. It does not help that Sailor Boy didn’t come home until 11 o’clock last night. Wah.

I know you are all curious about the state of Rio. She’s divine. The seroma is completely gone, and she’s back to her happy little puppy self. The incision is almost completely healed. If anything, I think she’s grown since I left. Her face looks very grown up these days. And boy did she like playing in the snow on Monday!

(Yes, this was the best picture. For most of them she’s not even in the frame. Sailor Boy told me she moved too fast. That’s my girl!)

So I spent the weekend doing proofs for Tap & Gown. It’s my last chance to read the book and because of the nature of proofs, I try to read straight through, in one sitting, so that if there are any repetitions of word they jump out at me. For instance, one should probably not employ the word “vamoose” more than once in a book, no matter how cool a word it is. (Fixed.)

And that’s when I realized that the Pop Culture Reference Curse has come back to bite me in the behind. The PCRC is something I first experienced when SSG was published. While writing the book, Britney Spears was a hot young pop star. By the time the book was published, she was enormously pregnant and famous mostly for living on Cheetos and walking around gas station restrooms barefoot. In the ensuing years, with a book on the shelves Britney Spears had another baby, a bad divorce, a nervous breakdown, a comeback — book’s still on the shelves, and depending when people read it, their impression of what I meant when I referenced Britney Spears changed a lot. This has been a source of aggravation for three years.

In Tap & Gown, I am dealing with two sticky pop culture references, thanks to the people they reference being ALL OVER THE NEWS recently, and NOT in a good way. One is kinda a spoiler — but confidentially to Christian Bale, it would help if you chilled out for a bit, yeah? — and the other one involves Joaquin Phoenix. Now, when I was writing the book, Joaquin Phoenix was most famous for playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, that quietly strong dude in The Village, and similar, off-kilter though curiously attractive types. The picture in most people’s heads looked like this:

Gee, what character in Tap & Gown might this dude resemble?

Now, however, the picture in most people’s heads is this one:

Le sigh.

Yeah, so… not really the idea I was going for. I think, given the nature of the reference (specifically discussing Walk the Line), I’m going to be okay, though I don’t know if I can drop his name without conjuring up the above image in everyone’s heads. Too bad, that.

Grrr…. from now on, only pop culture references about people who are dead. Like the one in Rampant about Roman Holiday. You’d never see Gregory Peck showing up in a beard.

Um, nevermind.

(In passing: dude, does he look like Hugh Jackman in this picture or what?)