Helen vs. Handel's Messiah

Christmas is a special time for me.  My family has always enjoyed the days around Christmas, especially as my mother loved Christmas music.  Perhaps because of this, or for whatever reason, there are usually interesting episodes surrounding Christmas in almost every story.

My very first story, Helen, begins when Helen is about sixteen, and I stopped writing it when she was about 39, and was a partial amnesiac and Cancer survivor.  There were, in principle, some 23 Christmases I could have written about for Helen.  The first three are lost; they are trapped inside my first computer, which  went on the fritz around 2005.  About the 13th one was when Helen had run away with the two adopted girls, Gena and Alison, met Penny and her daughter Erin, and fled with them to California, where they remained hidden under false names for a year.  The 14th Christmas marks the point where Helen was mightily pregnant with James, and is given refuge at Ferguson School in Minnesota.  James is born in April, and after some adventures, Helen comes to Westfield to teach.

The 15th Christmas is spent at Westfield.  The next two were spent at Woodford, in England (16, 17), the next four in Philadelphia (18, 19, 20, 21).

The episode described in Helen vs. Handel's Messiah takes place after Helen has come to live in Philadelphia for one complete year.  I was writing at a furious rate, and pages and pages practically wrote themselves.  (I know writers often say this about one particular piece of writing or another, but having lived it, I know it really does happen.)  I was angry about something or another---probably about the hostility towards alternate lifestyles some years ago, and how certain conservative elements had a brief period of successfully vilifying gays and lesbians, and trying to 'heal' them by adopting various psychological tactics akin to deprogramming.

I've had difficulties representing Helen as a decent person.  Because she is a fictitious character, it would be easy to write her storyline as being that of a woman with no flaws in her character.  What happens is that I put her in perfectly ordinary situations, quite similar to situations that I have observed myself, and in my mind, I see Helen reacting to them just as I would, quite honestly, but more boldly.  Sometimes I create romantic opportunities for her simply because I'm bored, and then as the situation develops, it does look as if Helen is a lot more promiscuous than an ordinary person should be.  So she oscillates between being ultra-moral and responsible and decent, and a sybaritic slave to her hormones, because my life oscillates, and whatever I can't safely do, I sometimes make Helen do, and she ends up being just a little short of a hopeless slut.  This is why I burdened her with such a number of children, wanting to make her slow down!  But whatever makes her less than perfect has very little to do with her sexual preference. I honestly believe that, if a woman finds herself falling in love with other women, that does not make her a monster.  But certainly, trying to seduce a weaker individual, one who does not have the strength to withstand her emotional attack does make a woman (or a man, for that matter) a monster.  Taking advantage of those who are weak is always despicable.

Once I made Helen meet Maryssa, I tried very hard to make her more restrained.  This episode is the beginning of Helen's fight to feed her artistic soul, as it were, and free it from the manacles imposed by conservative elements.  The production company that stands by her, Galaxy Studios, gets most of her creative energy, but a small fictitious community college is also a channel for her talents as a teacher.  And this Christmas encounter with a TV program based on Handel's Messiah, of all things, is what makes her determination to put herself in artistic hibernation finally snap!  I'm not a religious person, but the pivotal moment is an aria in the Messiah about death and resurrection, which is a strange topic, but a lovely aria.

I hope very much that anyone who reads this will at least read the first quarter or so of the short story Helen vs. Handel's Messiah, because it is one of my favorite episodes, and expresses strong feelings about being the kind of artist Helen is.

K. B.