Fake Charity Nerd Girl

sure Hamilton was cool but did you know Thomas Cromwell was both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Principal Secretary to the King

so, in modern parlance, treasury and state

the Eliza vibes in tolerate it

-

I greet you with a battle hero’s welcome

//

Thank you for all your service

-

While you were out building other worlds, where was I?

//

I don’t pretend to know the challenges you’re facing, the worlds you keep erasing and creating

-

Now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life

//

Let me be a part of the narrative in the story they will write someday

thinking about the shared universe of Worth the Candle and Hamilton, where women exist as narrative devices; as NPCs; as sidekicks and love interests; as keepers of the narrative, all of these always in stories about men

• “let me be a part of the narrative, in the story they will write someday”
  
• “I was never going to be one of your knights of the Square Table. Even if I put my heart and soul into training, I was never going to be able to match the people you would pick up along the way. I’d at best be a wallet for you, or a love interest if I –”
  
• Eliza spending fifty years continuing Hamilton’s work after he dies
• twelve-year-old Raven devoting her life to Uther’s work
• and searching for him when he’s gone, and becoming the Infinite Librarian to look for a story where he comes back
• “I’m known for being Uther’s knight,” said Raven.
  
• Amaryllis, stuck in a doomed timeline, growing old alone, writing a book for Juniper every year
• “I’m burning the letters that might have redeemed you”
  
• removing yourself from the narrative as the only and final option you have

just saw a production of SIX at the ART and it’s interesting how wokeness seems to have pushed American intellectual culture away from, uh, you could call it “nuance” or “sophistication” or you could call it pretension, in favor of accessibility

as a kid I associated the ART with productions of idk, Sophocles, or surrealist plays bordering on conceptual art

even the Diane Paulus revitalization took the form of eg a play that was just a guy reading the entire text of The Great Gatsby aloud for eight hours

whereas SIX would basically work as Schoolhouse Rock, minus the blowjob jokes

(I remember Cornel West releasing a rap album back in 2001; but you got the feeling that even if the denizens of Cambridge would take any chance to criticize Larry Summers they were quietly kinda skeptical of it)

In case it wasn’t obvious, this is the first chapter of a never-finished genderbent OJ Simpson!AU Hamilton fanfic.

Alex Hamilton was standing in the kitchen of her cramped East Village apartment, looking at her reflection in the microwave, trying to comb her unruly hair, and snapping at her sons to stop bickering when the phone rang.

“I need your opinion on a homicide. On the Upper East Side.”

“What? No one gets killed on the Upper East Side.”

“One of the victims is the girlfriend of Levi Weeks.”

“Who?”

“Levi Weeks? You know. Plays for the Giants? Best running back in the NFL?”

“I have no idea who that is. Look, can you get to the point?” Alex continued to hold the phone in one hand while she grabbed Philip and William’s backpacks, handed them to the boys, and pushed them in the direction of the door.”

“Well, we’re at Levi’s apartment, and there’s a trail of blood leading in. There are also two matching bloody gloves, one at the crime scene and one outside his apartment. We want to get a search warrant, and we just wanted to get a prosecutor’s opinion.”

“That sounds like you have enough to arrest him. Go for it.”

***

Alex sat down in her lawyer’s office, her head spinning with all the facts about the Weeks case, coming in too fast for her to process. She so didn’t have time for this shit.

“Eli is challenging the terms of your divorce.”

“Goddammit. I can’t deal with this right now.”

“You filed for divorce on Thursday. You knew what you were getting into.”

“I didn’t know Levi Weeks was going to kill his girlfriend on Sunday!”

***

She and Eli had met at a party … what was it now? Eighteen years ago? She was in law school at Columbia, and he was interning at The New Yorker, having graduated college a few years before and spent the intervening time building houses in Tibet or Angola or wherever. He came from a rich New York family, and she was fascinated by his worldliness, charm, and the calm equanimity with which he seemed to view life. And he was intrigued by the small curly-haired girl from Washington Heights, who never stopped talking quickly and confidently and like she had something to prove. It wasn’t love at first sight, exactly, but she did feel something when she first caught his eye across the room, like she was drowning.

Well, it was all over now: they were getting divorced. After years of suggesting that maybe she could take their kids to the pool one day, or help Philip with his math homework, or at least just come home instead of working half the night and sleeping on the couch at her office, Eli put his foot down. He was right, she was a terrible mother. But how could she take time off when there was so much work to do? The district attorney’s office was perpetually understaffed, and there were always a million things she hadn’t done.

Well, the Weeks case would be a nice distraction from the whole divorce mess, that was for sure.

Burr believed women to be intellectually equal to men, and hung a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft over his mantel.

malefeminists.jpg

so I have these family friends who have kids, a fifteen-year-old and a seven-year-old, and they are both completely obsessed with Hamilton

and the fifteen-year-old was telling me that he posted a video of the seven-year-old doing one of the Cabinet Battle raps on Instagram and tagged Daveed

and Daveed liked the video! and even commented “looking great, sounding great”

and I was like that’s amazing!!

and he sheepishly told me that actually, he had deleted the video from Instagram. because there is a clique in his high school called, literally, the Hamilton Hate Squad. and they wield enough social power that he had to erase all evidence of his liking Hamilton from any social media

But how oddly are all things arranged in this sublunary scene.

–Alexander Hamilton to Angelica Schuyler Church

me: “I hate Congress–I hate the army–I hate the world–I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves. I could almost except you”

–Hamilton to Laurens

@prophecyformula: “Fuck the world and everyone in it except for you, Laurens.”

“That’s not quite what I was hoping you’d do …”