ALICE IN WONDERLAND

A masterpiece. From the freezer Madeleine and I have eaten, unwrapped each from its crude chrysalis of foil, the two little lumps of psilocybin-laced chocolate bought three months ago out the backpack of Jack’s old buddy Jesse from Asheville. A cold, wet gale outside, so Madeleine goes to the snack bar—for tea—while I do a little Charlie Chaplin routine trying to get umbrella, hat, pen, notebook, 3D glasses, dried mangoes, and water bottle balanced on a folding seat that flips up at diabolical intervals. When I look up Mad hands me an improbable cup of chamomile she’s gotten at the upstairs café which has not in the previous months ever once been open. Curioser and curioser…

The three digital signs in the theater hallway read “POWER.” Here portrayed by Helena Bonham-Carter as body-shriveling and head-swelling caprice, a treatment of nature as mere raw material, and a penchant for decapitations. She can’t and won’t be forgiven her holocaust. Her sister the White Queen (Hathaway) is a reconstructed Shakespearian witch. Alice a runaway bride. Trying to hide, she grows to twice her size, and when asked who she is answers “Um.” You know the feeling? Her “muchness” is the issue. Despite her kindness, she’s required to wield a sword that “knows what to do.” A hero is a vessel, and form is real. Dreams are real. Games. Grammar. Protocol is action. Politics are life.

Luckily, chaos. Kids running wild in the back of the theater—3D. The whole place breaks up when Hatter Depp busts his wacky moves. “The dandy ninja,” Mad calls him, the lunatic artist whose spirit turns the wheels. “You’ll forget me, Alice,” he tells her on her brink of home. And don’t we need constant reminding? He keeps “thinking of things that begin with M.” Me, too: Madeleine, Malka, and Malka’s Mama. Dandelions and butterflies and a tea party—FUN!