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.
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| 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.
