She got a pretty green crêpe dress with a girdle of crimson beads, at a bargain sale, a pair of silk stockings, to match, and a little crinkled green hat with a crimson rose in it. [...]
Valancy put on her green dress when she got home. Then she took it off again. She felt so miserably undressed in its low neck and short sleeves. And that low, crimson girdle around the hips seemed positively indecent. [...] the girdle had given her flat figure an entirely different appearance.
She pulled her green crêpe from its hanger and put it on feverishly. It was nonsense to feel so—so—naked—just because her neck and arms were bare. [...] She flung on her coat and pulled the little, twisty hat over her hair.
I feel that The Green Dress should not be as hard to fancast as I found it to be. I follow @the1920sinpictures (lovely blog, by the way), which regularly posts images of beautiful vintage dresses, and every time one comes up, I look for whether it has TGD Vibes. I don't even need it to actually be green! I'm just looking for shape, style, etc. And I tell you what, I have not had a direct hit so far.
Images under the cut - and I will go ahead and credit posts and reblogs by @the1920sinpictures for most if not all of these; I've lost track of the source for some.
First off, we read that the green dress has "short sleeves", which would appear to knock the archetypal sleeveless 1920s flapper dress out of contention. Of the three designs below, for example (which are a tad later than our time period), we'd be looking at one of the ones on the sides rather than the one in the middle:
Or perhaps a softly draped sleeve like this, which gives me strong Valancy vibes.
Then there's the "low neck", which prompts the question - what would be a high enough neckline for Valancy to actually buy, but a low enough one for her to feel self-conscious about wearing? Women were showing some collarbone even in the previous decade, but the text says that Valancy is feeling naked with only "her neck" bare. Just how covered-up has she been all her life? (Oh, I just now remembered the colds - presumably Valancy's throat has not been allowed to see the light of day in a long time.)
And then there's the "girdle of crimson beads" - when I first read the book, I imagined this as looking like a literal string of beads, but I don't think that makes sense structurally. Is "that low, crimson girdle around the hips" something like this?
Or this, from a bit earlier in the decade?
And then there's the little hat to top everything off. In the end, I think the closest I came on Vibes for the whole outfit (even though individual details might be off) was this:
Or the red outfit on the right here:
So what do we think, bookclubbers? Do any of these even come close to how you envision TGD?
(But not a real green dress, that's cruel)
Vibes 1 (Mistinguette entering car)
Vibes 2 (Ipswich Hosiery, red dress)
I need that teal dress and I need it now
La Robe de Jeunesse
Can't see the whole fit but Agnes Ayres is slaying
Dancing hours of Holiday (left, scalloped hemline)
Dancing hours of Holiday (right, pleated hemline)
I have a different fancast for TGD, which I will share below
Nuance / reserving opinion until I've read further
She's "the wonder girl of the whole Stirling clan, who had everything Valancy had not—beauty, popularity, love."
She's "disgustingly healthy."
She's a good reciter and would like to be a great singer, but she's not a good dancer.
She has a tad more self-awareness than the rest of the clan.
It was quite impossible to deny that she was beautiful and effective and sometimes she was a little intelligent. Her mouth might be a trifle heavy—she might show her fine, white, regular teeth rather too lavishly when she smiled. But when all was said and done, Olive justified Uncle Benjamin’s summing up—“a stunning girl.”
Rich, golden-brown hair, elaborately dressed, with a sparkling bandeau holding its glossy puffs in place; large, brilliant blue eyes and thick silken lashes; face of rose and bare neck of snow, rising above her gown; great pearl bubbles in her ears; the blue-white diamond flame on her long, smooth, waxen finger with its rosy, pointed nail. Arms of marble, gleaming through green chiffon and shadow lace. [...]
Tall. Queenly. Confident. Everything that Valancy was not. Dimples, too, in cheeks and chin. [...]
“And yet,” thought Valancy, summing her up with a new and merciless conclusiveness, “she’s like a dewless morning. There’s something lacking.”
Olive was standing on the steps, Olive, goddess-like in loveliness, looking down with a slight frown on her forehead. Olive, beautiful, insolent. Her full form voluptuous in its swathings of rose silk and lace. Her golden-brown hair curling richly under her big, white-frilled hat. Her colour ripe and melting.
“Beautiful,” thought Valancy coolly, “but”—as if she suddenly saw her cousin through new eyes—“without the slightest touch of distinction.”
(Is it just me or do some of these descriptions almost venture into Jolene territory before Valancy pulls back and judges her?)
Anyway - a quick reminder that when fancasting, I look for Canadian actors of approximately the right age, because I'm imagining a current, small-budget CBC production. I did feel a little hesitant about trying to fancast Olive, now that the narrative is starting to get so critical even of her beauty (when being beautiful is her whole thing), but what the heck - antagonists are fun for an actor to play, yes?
I honestly didn't think I would find an Olive - and then I came across Kirsten Zien (nee Prout):
I'm not at all familiar with her filmography, but to me she's got the look. Here she is in Olive's natural habitat, i.e., getting married to a tall bland dude:
Uncle Benjamin is back! Let's celebrate Canada Day with a Hey-it's-that-Canadian-actor fancast poll!
How are we all imagining Uncle B? So far, he's sort of been the Michael Scott of the Stirling clan (as one bookclubber has pointed out, he loves getting everyone together to come up with a plan, but his plans don't actually amount to much). For all his presence in the story, though, we don't have a lot to go on by way of physical characteristics.
He's "a wealthy and childless old widower." How old is "old"? We know from Edward Beck that Valancy considers 48 to be "old", but we're not sure of the exact age "old" begins for her (though presumably it's well after 35).
He has pudgy hands: "Uncle Benjamin punished his pudgy left hand fiercely with his pudgy right." Hmm. Is this more of LMM's fatphobia? Or is it establishing Uncle B as one of those clan members who, while being visibly well-provided-for themselves, were constantly judging Valancy for being skinny while never doing anything to help her family in their straitened, penny-pinching circumstances? As a store proprietor, Uncle B was in a good position to at least bring by some bruised produce for the poor widow's household occasionally (and make a big deal out of his generosity in doing so), but we don't ever hear of him doing that.
He's "wheezy":
Uncle Benjamin would ask some of his abominable conundrums, between wheezy chuckles, and answer them himself.
Uncle Benjamin, wheezy, pussy-mouthed. With great pouches under eyes that held nothing in reverence.
For those of you who are tempted to Google "pussy-mouthed," let me just warn you now that that is a Bad Idea. The OED suggests that it could be a corruption of "pursy-mouthed", which most likely means puckered (but coincidentally "pursy" could also mean wheezy or fat). Maybe the folks working on original drafts and translations have a better sense of this one?
He asks the same dreadful riddles over and over, but when he bothers to come up with new material he can actually be funny:
You have asked that riddle at least fifty times in my recollection, Uncle Ben. Why don’t you hunt up some new riddles if riddle you must? It is such a fatal mistake to try to be funny if you don’t succeed.
“It’s a pity you couldn’t have had your premonition a little sooner,” said Uncle Benjamin drily.
And while Uncle James is the clan oracle, Uncle Benjamin does seem to be the self-proclaimed clan organizer ("Let us be calm", "We must be guided by developments", etc.) Does the rest of the clan just go along with it because of his money? Or is his busybody energy just that strong?
All that said, on to fancasting!
I have no idea how Bookclubbers are envisioning Uncle B (or how old everyone thinks "old" means), so I'm going to offer a whole range of possibilities, ordered from youngest to oldest.
Also - because I think it would be hilarious to cast a genuinely talented comic actor to deliver all of Uncle Benjamin's terrible jokes and get called out by Valancy for his lack of success at being funny, that's who I'm focusing on in this poll. (For non-Canadian bookclubbers, comedy is one of Canada's prime exports, so we're spoiled for choice here.)
Finally - while you all probably know by now that I try to keep a hypothetical modest CBC-style production budget in mind when fancasting, I'm aware that some of the "Hey, it's that guy" actors here are pretty deep cuts for bookclubbers who are not Canadian (and even for Canadians who aren't familiar with the generation of comedians who came out of the Toronto Theatresports scene / Second City / The Red Green Show), so I'm throwing in some more famous options here as well.
Seth Rogen (Yes, he's ludicrously busy with multiple projects, but he's apparently going to be rebooting The Littlest Hobo, so maybe he's in an "appreciation for classic Canadian IP" phase - or maybe he would be in the studio next door and could just pop over?)
Ryan Reynolds (Also ludicrously busy, but he has daughters and they might be LMM fans? Enjoys playing a lovable asshole.)
Rick Mercer (Canadian icon. Deeply nice public persona but has also written a darkly satirical miniseries in which he cast himself as a manipulative Richard III-type character, so the man contains multitudes.)
Jason Priestley (Not as much of a comedy-first actor as everyone else here, but can definitely bring the funny. I find his Uncle B vibe surprisingly strong.)
David Hewlett (As any Stargate: Atlantis fans in the club will know, he has the chops to play a deeply annoying and self-absorbed character while still making him vulnerable / lovable. Also, his face journeys are top-notch.)
Dave Foley (Kids in the Hall icon. Can do improv, sketch comedy, situation comedy, drama. Would not be his first time appearing in a production of an LMM novel.)
Patrick McKenna (Second City and Red Green alum; played lovable asshole Marty Stephens on Traders; was diagnosed with ADHD later in life and has given some great talks on this.)
Peter Keleghan (Another Red Green alum. I was about to pull him from the poll because I think he actually has more of an Uncle James vibe - he's great at playing characters who think they're smarter / more competent / more authoritative than they are - but I'll leave him in, in case someone has a different vision.)
Martin Short (Comedy OG. If you're at all interested in the evolution of comedy in Toronto, from the legendary 1972 production of Godspell to Second City to SCTV and the SNL pipeline, read his memoir. Has a cottage in Muskoka, which, as a Bookclubber has pointed out, must mean something.)
Who comes closest to your idea of Uncle Benjamin?
Seth Rogen
Ryan Reynolds
Rick Mercer
Jason Priestley
David Hewlett
Dave Foley
Patrick McKenna
Peter Keleghan
Martin Short
I have a different fancast, which I will explain below
So, when I fancast, I try to keep it somewhat practical, i.e., what Canadian actors could a low-budget CBC miniseries potentially get (and afford) if they were casting tomorrow?
But sometimes you just have to swing for the fences.
Look, I know Pamela Anderson is probably too busy living her best life...but she is Canadian. Maybe she's a Lucy Maud fan? Maybe she would like a great opportunity to chew the scenery?
She's always sporting such a huge smile in photos these days that it's not easy to find a picture of her looking forbidding, but they do exist:
She could absolutely play a woman who would let her husband die rather than light a fire in the fireplace a day early.
Blue Castle Book Club: Chapter 23 (Cissy Reveals Her Tragic Story and Promptly Dies)
Okay, first off, what is going on with the moon in this chapter?
On one of Cissy’s wakeful nights, she told Valancy her poor little story. They were sitting by the open window. Cissy could not get her breath lying down that night. An inglorious gibbous moon was hanging over the wooded hills
Cissy died a few nights after that. [...] In the eastern sky, amid the fires of sunrise, an old moon was hanging—as slender and lovely as a new moon. Valancy had never seen an old, old moon before. She watched it pale and fade until it paled and faded out of sight in the living rose of day.
Is this like Valancy leaving Chidley Corners after 11 pm, then encountering Uncle Wellington and Olive 3+ hours later, at 10 pm? I'm starting to think LMM's Muskoka is a weird Bermuda Triangle where time moves however it likes. Or maybe Valancy's rebellion against the Stirlings has set the world off-kilter or something.
Anyway.
This is the chapter where we find out that meek, quiet, biddable Cissy has an inner core of steel...because the decision she made, to give up the social, financial, and even personal support of an offer of marriage in favour of raising her child alone, out of wedlock, in the 1920s, was harder and more radical than any of the very brave things Valancy chooses to do in TBC.
LMM goes to some lengths to make it clear that this was Cissy's choice: her baby's father offers to marry her, he even presses the point when she first refuses him, but he finally respects her wishes and goes.
Could he have offered her financial support without marrying her? He was a college student still, so it may have been one of those cases where his father was rich, but he himself wasn't yet. It's also possible that he offered and Cissy refused - she's pretty fierce when she says of her baby, "And he was all mine. Nobody else had any claim on him." At any rate, if we judge this rich man's son super-harshly for not drawing on his family's money to try to help Cissy more than he did, then we're going to find ourselves in a very awkward spot at the end of this book.
So, if we start from the premise that Cissy's lover was a decent young man in over his head (and that there are good reasons she loves him still), what was he like? We don't know much about him - just that, "He was a young college student—his father was a rich man in Toronto."
If we think about rich families at the time...here's the Eaton family at their cottage on Lake Rosseau:
This is from 1929, though, which is several years later than our timeline.
If we consider TBC to be set around 1925 or 1926, with Valancy just turned 29 and Cissy three years younger, then Cissy was born around the turn of the century. We're told that Cissy's summer at the Muskoka hotel was 4 years ago, around 1921 or 1922, so her lover would have been in university at that time - maybe at the University of Toronto, or maybe he just grew up in Toronto and studied elsewhere. Let's say U of T, though, since it sounds like he was able to come back to see her fairly promptly after she wrote to him (as opposed to, say, having to travel overseas from Oxford or Cambridge).
So, finding a plausible fancast for Cissy's lover - an early 1920s U of T grad who was born around 1900, grew up in Toronto, and came from a well-off family - that's a thing that's both normal to want and possible to achieve, yes?
I mean, it's just a matter of scrolling through notable alumni until you find one who fits the parameters. (And in the process, having an inner monologue of, "Could it be you, Lester Pearson? Hmm, no, your father was just a Methodist Minister" or "Okay, J Tuzo Wilson, you're off the hook because you were too young.")
In the end, I think I'm going with Dana Porter. The timeline for his studies is maybe a year or two early, but close enough (Wiki):
Porter was born January 14, 1901, in Toronto. His father, Dr. George Porter, was the director of health services at the University of Toronto and his brother was hockey player John Porter, who went on to serve as executive vice-president at Simpsons.
After graduating from the University of Toronto Schools, Porter earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto in 1921. He continued his studies in England at Balliol College, Oxford from which he graduated with a master's degree in 1923. He returned to Toronto where he earned a law degree from Osgoode Hall. After being called to the bar he joined the firm of Fennel, Porter & Davis.
Porter entered politics in 1943 winning a seat in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario representing the downtown Toronto riding of St. George in the 1943 provincial election. First serving as parliamentary assistant to then Premier George A. Drew, Porter went on to be named Minister of Planning and Development. During his fifteen-year career in the legislature, he was elected five times, never once losing an election.
In 1958, Porter left politics to accept an appointment as Chief Justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal. He made a notable ruling in 1964, lifting a ban on the book Fanny Hill.
Porter was the first chancellor of the University of Waterloo, serving from 1960 to 1966. The university's arts library was named the Dana Porter Arts Library following Porter's death in 1967.
Porter married his wife Dorothy (née Parker) in 1929. Together they had two sons - Dana Jr. and Julian. in his spare time he enjoyed gardening, painting and reading, and had an extensive knowledge of Shakespeare.
Sounds like a guy who could sweep a girl off her feet. I like the detail about him lifting the ban on Fanny Hill later in his career, and also the irony of his father being director of health services at U of T - they could have helped Fanny and the baby if she would have accepted help.
Based on this photo from 1948, he also could have been quite a looker in the early 20s:
Does it go without saying that this is all in fun? This is all in fun - just a thought experiment to try to get a better understanding of the class division between Cissy and her rich college student, and what would have been on her mind when she says, "what was I that he should keep on loving me?" They really would have been unsuited to each other and she saw that clearly.
So, Barney Snaith entered the chat this week, and apparently he is "an individual that could not be ignored." Are we fancasting yet?
I've said before that I think CBC missed an opportunity in the 90s with Callum Keith Rennie, and I think they may be missing another one right now with Noah Reid.
"But Oatmeal," you may say, "While it's true that as Schitt's Creek's Patrick Brewer, he proved that he can play the ultimate supportive love interest, Patrick was a business major who wore straight-leg, mid-range denim - how can Noah Reid play disreputable, rakish Barney Snaith?"
Exhibit A: "a little, whimsical grin that gave him the look of an amused gnome"
Exhibit B: "Every one knew that he was an escaped convict and a defaulting bank clerk and a murderer in hiding and an infidel"
Exhibit C: "But he still retained something a little grim about the jaw."
(Spoilery exhibits under the cut.)
Exhibit D: This is a youth who is bullied at McGill and about to have his heart broken.
Exhibit E: (I wasn't sure about including these, because they're from his real-life wedding, but they appeared in a published photo shoot, so I figure it's fair game.) "They didn’t spend all their days on the island. They spent more than half of them wandering at will through the enchanted Muskoka country."
So we've come from the "harsh, unsoftened side-light" of the first chapter showing Valancy this:
Valancy saw straight black hair, short and thin, always lustreless despite the fact that she gave it one hundred strokes of the brush, neither more nor less, every night of her life and faithfully rubbed Redfern’s Hair Vigor into the roots, more lustreless than ever in its morning roughness; fine, straight, black brows; a nose she had always felt was much too small even for her small, three-cornered, white face; a small, pale mouth that always fell open a trifle over little, pointed white teeth; a figure thin and flat-breasted, rather below the average height. She had somehow escaped the family high cheek-bones, and her dark-brown eyes, too soft and shadowy to be black, had a slant that was almost Oriental. Apart from her eyes she was neither pretty nor ugly—just insignificant-looking, she concluded bitterly.
To the moonlight of 3am 10pm showing Olive this:
Olive stared. In the moonlight Valancy’s eyes—Valancy’s smile—what had happened to Valancy! She looked—not pretty—Doss couldn’t be pretty—but provocative, fascinating—yes, abominably so.
To Barney describing Valancy as belonging in moonlight, twilight, and the dim, dappled light of the woods:
“Moonlight and blue twilight—that is what you look like in that dress. I like it. It belongs to you. You aren’t exactly pretty, but you have some adorable beauty-spots. Your eyes. And that little kissable dent just between your collar bones. You have the wrist and ankle of an aristocrat. That little head of yours is beautifully shaped. And when you look backward over your shoulder you’re maddening—especially in twilight or moonlight. An elf maiden. A wood sprite. You belong to the woods, Moonlight—you should never be out of them. In spite of your ancestry, there is something wild and remote and untamed about you.
To Allan Tierney seeing Valancy in the pale light of the woods in spring:
Valancy had heard so much about him that she couldn’t help turning her head back over her shoulder for another shy, curious look at him. A shaft of pale spring sunlight fell through a great pine athwart her bare black head and her slanted eyes. She wore a pale green sweater and had bound a fillet of linnæa vine about her hair. The feathery fountain of trailing spruce overflowed her arms and fell around her. Allan Tierney’s eyes lighted up.
So - fancasting!
As y'all know by now, when I fancast, I imagine I'm casting for a relatively low-budget CBC production, so I look for not-too-famous Canadian actors of approximately the right age. And for me, Valancy's eyes and her overall elfin vibe are key.
When I was looking up actors for Valancy (and Olive), I expected to be combing through lots of alumnae of the Degrassi reboot; what I didn't expect (not having seen the Twilight movies) is that there's a surprising number of Canadian actors of the right age who appeared in those.
Including Jodelle Ferland, who I've decided is my Valancy fancast. Apparently she started acting when she was two, so she has quite the filmography, most of which I haven't seen - but what I have seen her in, she's been great in. I can see her doing Valancy's whole journey, from downtrodden, to finally telling off the Stirlings, to happily blooming:
So Roaring Abel gets properly introduced this week, and he seems to have made quite an impression on the Maudience!
Old Abel Gay, in spite of his seventy years, was handsome still, in a stately, patriarchal manner. His tremendous beard, falling down over his blue flannel shirt, was still a flaming, untouched red, though his shock of hair was white as snow, and his eyes were a fiery, youthful blue. His enormous, reddish-white eyebrows were more like moustaches than eyebrows. Perhaps this was why he always kept his upper lip scrupulously shaved. His cheeks were red and his nose ought to have been, but wasn’t. It was a fine, upstanding, aquiline nose, such as the noblest Roman of them all might have rejoiced in. Abel was six feet two in his stockings, broad-shouldered, lean-hipped. In his youth he had been a famous lover, finding all women too charming to bind himself to one. His years had been a wild, colourful panorama of follies and adventures, gallantries, fortunes and misfortunes. He had been forty-five before he married—a pretty slip of a girl whom his goings-on killed in a few years. Abel was piously drunk at her funeral and insisted on repeating the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah—Abel knew most of the Bible and all the Psalms by heart—while the minister, whom he disliked, prayed or tried to pray.
Okay, no pressure fancasting this one.
(Note: when fancasting, I tend to assume a modest-budget CBC production that in reality would probably be better off going with total unknowns a la Heated Rivalry...but for fancasting purposes, can just afford a cast of established Canadian Hey-It's-That-Guys, with perhaps one or two genuinely famous-in-Canada actors that they happen to get by sheer luck.)
Okay, so with that out of the way...I was fully prepared to do a pretty deep dive into Canadian actors of the right age, with a lot of imagining what they might look like with a truly magnificent beard, when I came across these recent pictures of Roy Dupuis:
Yes, the beard isn't red. I don't care. Look at those blue eyes:
If you've never seen him in his 30s as Michael in La Femme Nikita, may I invite you to enter a YouTube rabbithole of approximately 4078 fanvids, all of terrible quality because the show is from the 90s - but if we focus on Roaring Abel's marrying age of 45, this is what Roy looked like:
So, bookclubbers, do we agree?
Is Roy Dupuis Roaring Abel?
YES! Abel at 45 could get it. Totally worth risking death.
NO! No way that man is a Presbyterian.
NO! I have a different fancast, which I will explain in tags.
Nuance / I'm reserving opinion until I read further.
