Day 296…
Rabbit Rabbit
And just like that, it’s a new day and a new year.
A friend of mine posts the words “Rabbit Rabbit” at the beginning of every month. It’s meant to bring you good luck if it is the first thing that you say when you wake up in the morning on the 1st. If I don’t see her post right away, I start to get nervous.
Nobody really seems to know how or why this superstition started. The first time it was ever recorded was in 1909 in Notes and Queries. Notes and Queries, if you remember, was essentially the Victorian-era version of Wikipedia. People would write in with obscure questions, and the answers would get published. The author of this particular entry said that it was something his daughters did.
Apparently, President Franklin Roosevelt used to say it. He also carried a rabbit’s foot around with him. British pilots used to say “white rabbits” every day for luck during World War II. Some people say it three times.
Like most people, I think, I am superstitious about some things, but usually I operate under the. “well, it couldn’t hurt” umbrella.
If I find a penny, I pick it up for luck. I’ll only do that if it’s heads up. If it’s tails up, I flip it and leave it there for somebody else to find. I’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember. In a crowd, it can be a little embarrassing so I’ll pick up the tails-up penny and carry it for a while until I can unobtrusively put it back down heads-up.
Back in high school, when we were driving and went over train tracks, I had a friend who’d say say, “lift your legs or lose your love.” We’d all dutifully lift our feet off the floor until we were over them. We’d always make fun of her for doing it, but we’d always do it with her. I don’t always do it now, but I will say I can still hear her in my head when I drive over tracks.
I have a little pre-flight ritual that I do. While I know intellectually that air travel is far safer than most other forms of travel, it still involves an enormous leap of faith. People you don’t know and can’t see are taking you up into the atmosphere in what is essentially a tin can with wings. You have to trust them to get you back down on the ground again.
When she was young, my sister worked on Good Morning, America. She often found herself at plane crash sites. She learned a lot about what can go wrong during a flight. To this day, I can hear her saying the words, “wind shear” when I’m flying. When I fly, I have to make a conscious decision to give that trust and control over to whomever to be comfortable for the duration of the flight.
We have a lot of famous superstitions in the theatre. As much as we may all scoff, we do tend to take them pretty seriously.
You are never meant to whistle onstage.
This apparently dates back to the early days when sailors were often hired to work up in the flies. On a big sailing ship, sailors would communicate over the roar of the wind up in the rigging by whistling to each other. If you whistled onstage, therefore, that could accidentally signal one of the ex-sailors above you to fly in a set piece or a drop on top of your head.
Green onstage is meant to be unlucky. I had to look this up to find why.
When spotlights were first invented, they worked by using a chemical called quicklime that was burnt. The light they threw was somewhat greenish, so wearing a green costume would wash out the performer rather than highlighting them.
There’s another story about the great French playwright and actor Moliere who died a few hours after a performance while still wearing his costume. The color of the costume? Green. Really, though, nobody looks good in green light. It makes you look ill.
All of the color green in a theatre is meant to be kept in one place. Hence, the common room where a company meets and maybe gets coffee in the theatre is called the green room.
Macbeth is considered an unlucky play. There are endless stories about disasters that have happened in conjunction with various performances of it.
If you say the name of the play backstage, you are supposed to turn around three times, leave the room and wait to be invited back in. I have seen that happen several times over the course of my working career and actually had to go through the ritual once, myself. We made Rosemary Harris do it once on A Delicate Balance when we were all doing a jigsaw puzzle downstairs in the basement and she said it out loud.
It gave me pause just now even writing the title down, but it’s only unlucky if spoken aloud and inside a theatre. There you should refer to it as the Scottish Play. I think I’ll be OK. But I don’t want to jinx it.
Peacock feathers are unlucky.
Before a performance rather than wishing someone luck, you say “break a leg,” instead. There are a million different stories about where this came from. The most likely seems to be that, back in the day when you bowed, you bent your knee which broke the line of your leg.
While there are only 20 days left until President-elect Biden’s inauguration, I am afraid to tempt fate, by making any assumptions.
140 House Republicans have indicated that they intend to challenge the election results when they are due to be ratified on the 6th. It does not appear that there is enough support, even among Republicans, for this to be any real threat. Even the Senate Majority Leader doesn’t support it and called out the idiot who started it on a conference call yesterday. Sadly, said idiot wasn’t actually on the call.
More than anything else, the exercise just appears to be nonsensical grandstanding.
Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas has filed a lawsuit to try and force the Vice President to ignore the electoral votes of several key states during the certification next week. The Vice President has asked a federal judge to reject the suit.
These next weeks are going to be very tricky for a lot of Republicans who are trying to balance their own political futures while the current President continues to crazily try to destroy his. Not wanting to anger his, still formidable base, Republican lawmakers are bending themselves into pretzels by trying to distance themselves from him while at the same time appearing to support him.
The Vice President is no exception. He does not want to be dragged into this so he’s passing the buck. He is maintaining that whatever grievances Gohmert has should be addressed by the House and Senate and not by him.
"Plaintiffs have presented this Court with an emergency motion raising a host of weighty legal issues about the manner in which the electoral votes for President are to be counted. But these plaintiffs' suit is not a proper vehicle for addressing those issues because plaintiffs have sued the wrong defendant."
He, along with a sizeable portion of his colleagues are dancing as fast as they can in the time that they have left. The coals beneath them are getting hotter.
Without the distraction of the holidays, now, what we all have to look forward to are the Georgia Senate run-offs, the election certification process in the House and the Senate and the Inauguration of President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris. After that, we will have to go through the confirmation process for every single cabinet appointee.
All of it is somewhat anxiety-provoking. Some of this is going to go smoothly and some of it is going to be bumpy. There will be delays, cancellations and rescheduling. But it won’t be any different from any other flight that any of us have ever taken so sit back, relax and try to enjoy the trip.
I might do my pre-flight ritual here on the couch before we really take off. I won’t actually describe what that ritual is because then it might not work. I would hate to lose its protection when we start flying again and I’ll need it.
There’s plenty left to watch on my iPad, I think. That’s good because it’s probably going to be a very long flight.
Welcome aboard and please buckle up.
A disconcerting post😙Can you explain the peacock feathers please... I’m concerned now because I’ve had some for years!
💕Thank you! I flying...especially lift off!
🌟💫⭐️