Ida Lupino Directs Another Episode of Gilligan's Island

Reports say this gig began as a favor.
They've called on her now to co-direct an episode: "The Producer,"
a/k/a "The Musical Hamlet,"
replete with "To Be or Not" sung to Bizet's "Havanaise."

(And just where did those karaoke LPs come from?
Where does anything come from?)

Some thought of her as the eighth castaway,
one who had sunk.

Still, Ida regards the angles. Ida suggests new lighting.
Ida strides across the set, adjusting the blocking.
There are places, my friends, where you'll stand forever -
where, as in the Land of the China People,
nothing truly changes, ever, but breaks.

* * *

I was always The Professor
on small town afternoons
when we'd play-act our favorite TV show,
and not just because I reveled in Smartshood.
We understood how things went:
how The Professor and Mary Ann made a couple -
how girls-next-door never went
for the old and fat or married man,
let alone the sweet, young bungler -
and I wanted the girl
I didn't want to be.
Mom says I was often suspicious.
Good Mary Ann was anodyne.
Dreams of my invented chorus of Mary Anns
coddled me nightly with song:

Tra-la-la: The world won't hurt you.
Tra-la: Fall into our gentle arms.
Tra-la-la: So what if the world hates you?
Tra-la: You are handsome. Your hands are warm.

This was what women were
good for, I thought. Maybe
I was a boy.

* * *

In 1943, Ida let down her hair for The Boys.
Against her face-grabbing, high-pitched type,
with Olivia de Havilland and George Tobias,
she jitterbugged to "The Dreamer."
Crazy, man!

Still, her eyes were machete, suspicious,
as though any moment, she'd brandish a fist and say,
"This is what makes the world go round."

In 1991, I watched this film.
Could I have been one of the boys?

* * *

In "The Producer," Mary Ann becomes
irrelevant in her red halter and denim shorts.
She is not making coconut crème pies.
She is not even eye-candy in the gang.
She is Not Found

'til the sudden of now,
clad as Laertes in tights, doubl-et cetera.
(Just where did these costumes come from?)
Mary Ann not only shows up but speaks
(though the girl-boy's voice is given only to asides).
Of Polonius: "Oh, I could tell him a few stories!"

Once upon a time, there was a mighty and beautiful woman who said, "I believe women should be struck regularly like a gong." But there was a dragon named Winifred, who was both male and female, who came and tormented her, night after night, simply by repeating those words: "Women should be struck regularly like a gong." Sometimes when Winifred echoed them, the woman would tumble down the stone stairs of her mansion. Sometimes when Winifred echoed them, the woman would smile and say, "But I am not a woman." And to prove it, the woman would place masks on her face, her breasts, her genitals. She would dance otherwise nakedly about with wild power. And this was how she insisted she was nothing but herself. Still, the dragon remained and tormented her. And the story has no ending.

Can anyone tell her story, his story,
tell it and live?

Mary-Laertes shifts her belt with her thumbs and says, "I'll listen, I'll listen."

* * *

When I slicked my hair with brilliantine,
when I stepped into khaki slacks,
when I buttoned the white dress shirt that refused to ignore my breasts,
when I tied the green necktie and slid the knot up to where the shirt met my throat,
when I put on my sturdy yet slender brown boots,

I understood something beyond me,
now neither quite boy nor girl, really,
but something better. More. And right.

* * *

Ida says, "That is your role in life - to be a person...