The yearning desert in the country of your skin

Thanks a lot, May. No sooner do I praise the weather than it relapses into March, the grey end of winter and raining. I've been running errands all day with a sweater and gloves on. I don't think spring in New England knows what to do with itself anymore.

The good news is, it could have been snowing and I would still have had a lovely time in Providence with greygirlbeast and Spooky. The main event, as it were, was a matinée of Shapeshifter at the Trinity Repertory Company; now that I have seen the play, I can say confidently that I would have kicked myself for years if I had missed it. It got a mixed review in the Boston Globe, but I think the reviewer may not have understood what she was looking at. It's a play of refractions, three shapes of the same folktale playing out on a small Orkney island: the man who loves the woman who must lose a part of herself in order to live in his world; how the fire still runs beneath the skin or the sea still calls. There is a dragon, a selkie, a swan. There is a fierce young girl and her grieving father, a hunter become obsessed with his prey, a dreamer who one day brings a black-eyed woman home from the storm, and his aging parents, a broken storyteller and his sharp-spoken wife. There was a song I wanted credited in the program, because I couldn't tell its language and I'm hoping it was Norn. I would have had one of the strands end differently, but that's me; there's a reason I write "The Salt House." All together, I liked it very, very much. (My ears would have liked it better without the cataclysmic bang in the last act, but I don't see how it could have been done without.) It was deeply folkloric, not simplistic, building itself out of words and names and tellings. I want a copy of the script.

The night before, we watched a double bill of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ("Once More, With Feeling") and Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), which I had missed last year. I wish I'd seen it in theaters—I am tempted to describe it as Rigoletto crossbred with The Revenger's Tragedy under the auspices of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but the shorthand would not actually do it justice. We are talking Grand Opera, with a premise worthy of Philip K. Dick and a dénouement worthy of Webster and all kinds of decadent chaos in between; Anthony Stewart Head is magnificent, I hadn't known Alexa Vega could sing and Terrance Zdunich is now on my list to watch for, and it's hard to hate any movie where Paris Hilton's face falls off. (Much more disturbingly, Repo! succeeds in putting Paris Hilton into a musical context I would classify as sexy. If I think about this too hard, my brain is going to melt.) There's crazily black satire and complicated protagonists; the not too distant future of the production design invokes the nineteenth century without turning into steampunk; there are maybe five spoken lines in the entire show. In many ways, it's the film I was hoping Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd would be. If it doesn't become a cult movie with midnight showings and audiences dressed to the gothic nines, there is no justice in this world.

And otherwise we had Indian food and birthday cake and stayed up late talking and Caitlín had an interview with readingthedark at the Providence Athenaeum, so I curled up downstairs and read an Imagist journal from 1915 and an anthology of war poetry from 1945; literally, its shelves look like the libraries I dream about. I came home to contributor's copies of Sybil's Garage #6 and "Postscripts from the Red Sea." We didn't get to the sea, but one of the cats slept briefly beside me and the other tried to eat my ice cream. My cellphone now displays a blue screen of death, which I hadn't known they did. It was all very good.