Widower Vladimir Putin Loves "Honey" Song
Widower Vladimir Putin loves this song. . .in my ninth grade year, after we finished singing for our junior high ensemble, this guy from Tennessee, also a member of our ensemble, used to walk me home from my Junior High School. I liked a guy who felt about his woman like the song “Honey” or like how Brent sung his love songs to me, because it made me feel so womanly and beautiful.
When I learned about Loree McBride, it really confused me about Brent. Loree in his life didn’t make sense to me at all. Why would my macho and chivalrous Texan (Brent Spiner) long for such a shallow woman? Brent now seemed so different from the man I’d longed for since my high school days, and from the man who inspired me to write Silver Skies. Brent, no longer my dream man, became my disillusionment.
The songs Brent sang in Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back came from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. The people of other worlds, of worlds with honor, was what I liked to read. I longed for a modern story with the hearts of people who lived a hundred years ago. This is what I would write, because this is what I would like to read.
I didn’t care if all labeled me as a Victorian prude, or if I was the only one who liked my writings. I felt that some of the greatness of another era needed to come back to bring light and hope to the darkness and vulgarities of our lives from day to day, with smog in the air, cars and honks on the roads, crowds that clamor in the streets.
The impurities and vulgarities of our modern lives, had seeped into our literature and cheapened it. I’d write something high and noble, but not preachy; something great, but not pedantic.
I’d create a world of great hearts and minds to let us escape into a world of greatness and heroes, of great women and great men– to replace the mediocrities, the vulgarities, the commonness, the smallness of our vulgar times—and would use these heroic characters to deal with the immoral abyss and confusion of our time-obsessed and scheduled lives.
My characters violated some old fashioned ideas about morals, but clung to the hearts and greatness that had created this moral climate in better times. To me, the vulgarities and impurities of today were not so much in sexual promiscuities as in the loss of dreams and greatness within our souls.
I thought perhaps that only I had these longings and that my work would never sell, but I didn’t care. Because if I was a reader, I’d like to lose myself in a work that had characters who had the hearts of a better era, when people were better, when love was purer, when nobility reigned and where people dreamed of greatness–and so I created my monument Silver Skies, for Brent Spine inspired me to be true to this ideal.
Glimpses of Agnes and Dora from Dickens’s David Copperfield taught me how a great woman became a Brianna in Silver Skies. Glimpses of David Copperfield taught me how a great man could become a Dor in Silver Skies.
Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield inspired me as a writer and as a person, to become who I am today and to become the writer I’ve become.
Perhaps, because of the influence of Dickens in my life, I’ve become a writer who specializes in character, so that I delve into all the aspects and ruminations and longings of all those who tromp through the pages of my memoirs or writings.
My characters have the uniqueness and fascinating crevices and crannies of Dickens’s characters.
Because I identified with and longed to be like Dora or Agnes, perhaps that is why I had a crush on my high school classmate (from Tennessee) who walked me home from school (in junior high) after I heard him sing “Honey” (my tenth grade year). When he sang “Honey” for mid-term exams for my Concert Chorus, I fell in love with him. A man can make me fall in love with him with his music. This is how Brent reached my heart (Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back). I believe that how a person sings reveals their soul. Guys from Tennessee and Texas had some old fashioned ideas about love and romance that fit in with my dreams of purity and honor in love, and Brent revealed his Texas upbringing in Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, and I loved the Texas in him. Loree McBride in Brent’s life did not match the macho Texan that I thought Brent was. I deliberately made Dor in Silver Skies a Texan, to honor Brent.
Copyright © 2010 – 2018 Gail Chord Schuler. All Rights Reserved.