Troubled Waters

Threads of Connection

It is interesting how threads are woven through a set of seemingly unconnected events, with our perception of things becoming the glue between them. I confess I am given to a kind of apophenia, forever spotting strange connections, though that word does not quite capture what I mean.

Here, I was drawn to a headline about cannibalism: a daughter had ingested flakes of her mother's ashes. Why she would announce or publish that information escapes me, at least until we put names to the dramatis personae. The daughter was Rachael Stirling, and the mother the late Dame Diana Rigg. [The Guardian: ‘I didn’t expect to be portrayed as a cannibal’]

Perhaps eating a parent's ashes is a way of reconnecting with them in death; but how an urn became a spice shaker is never going to find a convincing explanation beyond the bizarre. I will resist the temptation to ask whether it was a ready peppercorn grinder, though the thought is beneath me and I confess I had it anyway. Each to their own, I suppose.

Remembering Diana Rigg

I should say actresses, or actors now, since the gender classification for that profession seems to have been lost to modern parlance.

We know Diana Rigg, of course, from "The Avengers", where she played an emancipated female spy and partner to John Steed, portrayed by Patrick Macnee. In the first series she was paid £150 a week, and it was for the second series that she held out for the increase, demanding £450. [Meaww: Diana Rigg was a 'lone voice in the wilderness' when she demanded equal pay back in the '60s as Emma Peel]

What strikes me as equally interesting is that the money was there to pay her properly all along; she had discovered she was being paid less than the cameraman. Yet until she made the case for why she was worth that much more, no one thought to pay her adequately. [BBC: Dame Diana Rigg: How the actress battled TV's gender pay gap]

A Sunday with Columbo

My Sundays revolve around a standing date with "Columbo", the detective series endlessly on replay for as long as I can remember. I could watch the episodes over and over without ever feeling exhausted by knowing the plot, or by trying to fill in the gaps from memory.

Now, guess who is the guest actor in the episode playing from 9:00 pm this Sunday night? Patrick Macnee, cast as Captain Gibbon of a luxury cruise ship. The episode is "Troubled Waters", in which Hayden Danziger, played by Robert Vaughn, murders his mistress aboard the ship.

His wife, Sylvia Danziger, played by Jane Greer, is the older and wealthier partner in the marriage, and she holds a quiet, dominant sway over her husband. She shares a wonderfully sharp exchange with Lieutenant Columbo, played by Peter Falk, in which she lets slip just how firmly she keeps the reins, hinting that Hayden would come to rue the day were she ever to catch him straying.

Troubling Convention

It occurs to me that each of these women is quietly, or not so quietly, troubling the waters of convention: one defending her mourning, one her wage, one her marriage.

An AI-generated infographic on the blog content. (Click to enlarge.)

It is remarkable how things link up in almost incomprehensible ways: amidst the troubled waters of people revealing what is best kept to themselves, of people claiming what is rightfully theirs by standing up to a system set against them, and an episode on a cruise liner where the murderer believed himself far too clever to be caught.