The other day I was looking at a score, came upon a blank page, and wondered “Who’s this Page, Blanche chick?” I am, after all, the person who thought there was a French business dynasty named Cie who had a family member as a junior partner in nearly every enterprise. I am also she who signed up for what she thought was the Music Librarians’ Association Listserv and then wondered for weeks why we never seemed to hear from anyone who wasn’t from Mississippi.
To those of us who are accustomed to writer’s block Blanche Page is something between an enemy and a bewitchingly beautiful creature who is always just out of our reach, like the White Stag in the Narnia books. Nothing I write on that blank page will ever be as good as the things I imagine myself writing. An empty notebook is full of thrilling tales and perfect verse; a full one has erasures and coffee spills and stanzas with only three and a half lines filled in because you can’t think of an appropriate rhyme for “longueur”.
The platform I have been on is either dying or on its way back to becoming a pleasant online backwater where friends share cat pictures and funny things their children said. We are two weeks into an end-of-the-world party, and though the liner has not yet begun to sink the band is running out of things to play. We had a good if tumultuous voyage up until now, but I am filling my pockets with snacks and making sure my lifejacket is inflated, just in case. And whom should I see over the railings but Blanche Page, waving enticingly to me from a lonely and leaky boat.
So here we are, though the blank page be an electronic one. Though Blanche remains enchanting and I remain stolid, awkward, and ill-equipped (now I am thinking of one of those Kipling stories about men who get a crush on the wrong woman who has made it clear she isn’t interested in them) we are embarking together.
(Inspired by this.)
It contains one or more of the following: a Technicolor fashion show sequence, an ugly-duckling-into-swan transformation, a rise-to-fame montage, a time-lapse scene of people fixing up a house or garden.
In one scene, a woman goes to her opponent’s house for a confrontation. The opponent responds in an unexpected way, and soon the two are leveling with each other over drinks.
Much of the action takes place at a country house, on board an ocean liner, or in a gleaming Art Deco hotel.
Any people earning a living as servants are fully-developed characters with their own agenda.
At least one character is affiliated with an ancient and noble seat of learning.
Someone goes for a ride on a library ladder.
A cruel-tongued old baggage, who’d be a real pain in the neck if you knew her in life, refuses to hold back about the other characters.
Someone hastily gets married, in her mother’s old wedding dress.
A sudden storm forces two people to take shelter in a gazebo, where they dance; a church, where they embrace; or a disused cottage, where they light candles and fix up an impossibly good meal of tea, crackers and sardines.
A house contains a dusty room that’s a shrine to someone long gone.
One of the characters proves her goodness by giving a deprived child a wonderful gift.
Two characters who have had a somewhat fraught relationship are travelling by train. They fall asleep on the journey and when they wake up they are leaning companionably on each other.
Typewriter and Gramophone 